Best URL Shorteners: 8 Best URL Shorteners to Shrink and Track Links

URL shorteners provide URLs that are easy to maintain and distribute. In addition, they enable smaller organizations to monitor marketing and other traffic-generating initiatives. This essay will educate you about URL shorteners and how to choose acceptable applications for them, as well as propose the eight finest URL shorteners for managing your company’s online presence.

What is a URL shortener?

A URL shortener is an internet tool that helps you reduce the length of your URL (Uniform Resource Locator). The objective is to reduce your website’s address into something that is simpler to remember and easier to recollect when required.

Bit.ly, Goog.le, and Tinyurl.com are just a handful of the many URL shorteners accessible on the Internet today. When you use this option to shorten a URL, the connection between the shortened link and the original URL will stay intact. Therefore, everyone who clicks on your unique link will be sent to the URL that was previously used.

What to look for in an application that shortens URLs

Monitor Clicks Analytics

If you choose to share a blog article from another blog with your blog’s readers, the original site will not know how many people saw the item or who clicked through to the source. All the information will be kept in the Google Analytics account belonging to the person in question. If you choose to utilize a URL shortener, you will be given a short URL that is unique. You will be able to monitor the number of clicks on your link, the areas from which they originate, and the kind of devices being used by users.

Like other marketing solutions, the cost of these analytics increases as their precision and scope increase. Premium marketing solutions will collect as much data as possible and may even deliver unique URLs to visitors in various places or using different devices. Premium marketing choices, on the other hand, will gather as much data as possible. Free alternatives often contain just basic click-tracking (although there is normally an expiry date), while premium marketing options will collect as much data as feasible.

The capacity to customize URLs

The finest URL shorteners enable you to customize the abbreviated URLs that you generate. This means that you may modify them to make them more relevant and employ several links in different advertisements and social media postings to evaluate click-through rates. While many simple or free plans for a short link generator just allow you to alter the last portion of the URL (such as https://smallurl.com/best-homes), this allows you to set up a custom domain (so that you will obtain homes.is/best).

Standalone Application

There is a vast variety of URL shortening services available. Our search was restricted to standalone services that were simple to initiate. There are other self-hosted options, such as The Polar and YOURLS, which, although affordable and cost-effective, need a high level of technical expertise to be suggested. Other URL shorteners are included in applications we did not consider.

For instance, Ow.ly is fully integrated with Hootsuite, and most email service providers provide URL shortening and tracking capabilities. On the other hand, we did not include programs such as Shor. that use a single URL that can be modified to avoid the total number of hyperlinks allowed on a social network profile. This is not to say that these applications are not valuable; rather, they go beyond what most people use a URL shortener for in their everyday lives.

Money’s Worth

I was particularly interested in the price tables and functionality offered by different levels of URL shortener generators. If you do not need a substantial amount of data, the free plans may be preferable to the premium plans provided by rival applications. At a minimum, this is the case.

Read: Use SEO to Grow Your Online Website Traffic in Canada

8 Best URL shortener for 2022

1.  Short.io

Using the Short.com tool, you can shorten your URL, make it more personalized, and distribute fully branded ShortURLs to your customers.

Premium-featured plans are available for an extra $15 or $150 per month. Pricing: Free is the main objective.

Custom Domain: Yours for the Taking!

Tracking yes-indicating pixels.

2. FB.me: URL Shortener for Facebook

You may manually do this by substituting “facebook.com” with “FB.me” in-page URLs. For instance, Facebook.com/nextweb would be redirected to fb.me/nextweb. Facebook automatically accomplishes this for its URLs, but you can also do it manually for pages.

3. Bitly

Bitly is a reputable and well-known URL shortening service that you may use.

This free option allows you to build shorter links using the name of your Bit.ly domain, as opposed to the premium service which allows you to use your environment’s name.

Upgrade to the premium edition of Bitly to have access to features such as link retargeting. In addition, you may monitor specific links and analyse data pertaining to those connections through your Dashboard. In addition, it tracks the performance of your marketing efforts in a particular location.

4. Rebrandly

Rebrandly is the most reliable link management software since it enables users to detect, monitor, and share URLs through shortened URLs. This free URL shortener includes extra capabilities such as onboarding, account management, deep linking, link retargeting, and custom statistics.

Free as well as expensive premium plans

Custom Domain: Yours for the Taking!

No to AB Testing

Pixel Tracking: Not Currently

5. TinyURL

TinyURL is the most efficient and anonymous URL shortening tool available. You may modify the URL string that appears in your shortened URL.

As an alternative to a random URL such as https://smallurl.com/y3xvrfpg, you may create https://smallurl.com/fitness.

TinyURL does not save personally identifiable information, and account creation is not necessary to utilise the site. In contrast, it lacks sophisticated features, such as analytics and other tools, which is a big disadvantage.

6. Adf.ly

There are both benefits and drawbacks to using the Adf.ly service. The greatest aspect is that you get compensation each time someone clicks on your shortened URL. Once your account balance hits $5, you will begin receiving payments by Alertpay and PayPal. This has the drawback that a five-second advertisement must be watched before the URL may be forwarded to its main page. After five minutes, you will be given the choice to “Skip add” and the main page will be shown. The four additional URL shorteners are preferable if you want to avoid five-second advertisements.

7. ClickMeter

With ClickMeter, you can track the performance of all of your marketing links in an one location and compare and optimise them for a greater conversion rate. It aids in guiding website visitors in the path that will result in the best conversion rates possible. In addition, it enables the identification of blocklists and broken connections. In addition, it may help you identify click fraud, blocklists, and latency.

8. Goo.gl

Google, the most popular search engine in the world, operates Goo.gl, the greatest URL shortening service available. Simply input the URL you want to shorten, and the abbreviated URL will be presented to you in a couple of seconds. The URL will be generated automatically when you sign into the account connected with your Google account. You will then have the option of maintaining a record of your short URLs. The website Goo.gl may provide information about short URLs. This information comprises the number of times the URL was seen, the user’s profile, the referrer, and other statistics.

How to use URL shorteners in marketing campaigns?

• Include a shortened version of your video’s URL.
• Use a customized short domain to create links that people will remember.
• Observe the evolution of clicks over time by keeping a log of every click made.
• Create a customized link by clicking on this link.