{"id":1944,"date":"2013-09-24T20:55:21","date_gmt":"2013-09-25T01:55:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.powrsurg.com\/blog\/?p=1944"},"modified":"2013-09-24T20:55:21","modified_gmt":"2013-09-25T01:55:21","slug":"url-shortener-services","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.powrsurg.com\/blog\/2013\/09\/24\/url-shortener-services\/","title":{"rendered":"URL Shortener Services"},"content":{"rendered":"

URL Shortener services are services that take a long web address and create a shorter address that is easier to share with others.<\/p>\n

Why use a URL Shortener?<\/h2>\n

There are two primary business reasons to use a URL Shortener service. The first reason is to simplify your sharing. Twitter and text messaging are notorious for the limited number of characters that you can send in a message. By using a URL Shortener you can share a long web address and still have room for your message.<\/p>\n

The other business reason is to gather analytics on your shares. In the past I have talked about campaign tracking with Google Analytics<\/a>. At the time I showed how you can track campaigns on the different social media networks. This is great, but you cannot use Google Analytics to track when you share a non-web page (e.g. a JPG or a PDF). You also cannot use Google Analytics to track when you’re sharing someone else’s website. Most URL Shortener services offer some form of analytics.<\/p>\n

There are many URL Shortener services out there. They all have similar features, but slightly different interfaces. There is no one best<\/em> service. Try out a couple and find what fits you best. I will cover two services in this article.<\/p>\n

URL Shortener: Goo.gl<\/h2>\n

Goo.gl<\/a> is Google’s URL Shortener. While Google has become notorious for killing non-services lately, I believe this one will survive. My primary reason for believing this is that Google uses this themselves. Companies that eat their own dog food<\/a> tend to believe in a service and want to make it better. Killing this service would create a great deal of work for themselves. True, they could just kill the ability to add new links, but that wouldn’t make life easier for them.<\/p>\n

Goo.gl offers their own analytics. These analytics are publicly available<\/a> to all users. Simply add “.info” to the end of any Goo.gl URL to get access to the analytics. The analytics for the Goo.gl URL include:<\/p>\n