| Link shortening services are quite popular. They take a long, unwieldy URLs and turn them into short, concise links that are more manageable to share on social media platforms and in marketing content. Some services even provide some click analytics. This article will detail how to utilize link shortening.
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Link Shortening Services
While link shortening services shorten long links, there are some drawbacks. The problem with link shorteners, from a marketing and analytics perspective, is that they can provide inaccurate data. Often, the true source of traffic can be lost during the URL redirection done by the link shortening service. This can lead to inaccurate reporting or campaign attribution. If you want to use these services, a good way to ensure that your data remains intact is by adding a UTM code to your link before running it through the shortening service of your choice.
In addition, using shortened links cannot be used to establish tracking. This is due to how those services redirect links behind the scenes. Shortened links can only be used for campaign attribution and can only be used on contact records that already have tracking established on them.
Setting Shortened Links to Campaigns
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To add shortened links to campaigns, do the following:
You can now use this new, shortened link in ad copy for social campaigns. When the lead clicks through to our site from the link, they will be attributed to the proper campaign. However, do not use these shortened links in email links. Not only will it provide unreliable results when used alongside the SharpSpring tracking code that is used in email sends, but it can also hurt your email deliverability. Spammers use link shorteners to mask malicious URLs. As such, link shorteners are often associated with spam. If you need to provide a rather long, unwieldy link in an email, use HTML in the email designer to transform any text or image in the email into that link instead. |
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Note: Bit.ly is one of the most popular shortening services available. This procedure is utilizing the Bit.ly shortening service.
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Note: The full URL string will include the domain of the site you chose for the campaign, along with the UTM code you declared in the Campaign Settings section, separated by a question mark. The full URL should appear similar to bryantobin.com/?utm=bitly_campaign.
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