Short URLs vs long URLs: 3 reasons Marketers should care

Does this sound familiar? You’ve created a UTM code to help you keep track of your latest marketing campaign and now you are stuck with the longest URL known to mankind. Perhaps you even wondered whether it is a good idea to plaster the internet with a short URL vs. a long URL.

As a Digital Marketer you understand the importance of creating UTM codes to help you keep track of important details about how people are engaging with your marketing campaigns. Hopefully you’re also using campaigntracker.io to stay organized and get the job done.

Unfortunately, you may have also realized the downside of using UTM codes: while they provide us with important data about our marketing campaigns, they inevitably result in long and totally unsexy URLs.

So, does it matter whether you share a short URL vs. long URL as part of your digital marketing efforts? More importantly, why should you care?

But before we get to that, let’s talk about URL shorteners.

How to shorten a URL?

The simplest way to shorten a URL is by using one of the many URL shorteners available online⁠—including the one built into Campaign Tracker.

Perhaps you’ve heard about URL shortening services like bit.ly and may have even used them in the past.

In case you haven’t, all you need to know is that, at its core, a URL shortener is a tool that generates a shorter URL from a long one.

If you were you expecting a complicated and in-depth description, we are sorry to disappoint! In truth, URL shortening is that simple.

You simply take a long URL, paste it into a URL shortener, and BOOM, at the click of a button your long URL is now short and sexy faster than you can say “URL shortener”.

Now… if you were still on the fence about why you would want to shorten a URL and why using a short URL vs. a long URL matters, let’s talk about that, shall we?

Why would you want to shorten a URL?

A shortened URL makes your links easier to share

Amongst the benefits of using a short URL vs. a long URL, the first one is share-ability.

With a short URL not only do you reduce the amount of characters in a URL, you also make it far easier for others to share it. And while most people won’t have to type your URL, your job as a Marketing professional is to make it easy for others to have access to the content that the URL links to.

For example, what would be easier to type and/or share?

This?

https://campaigntracker.io/blog/short-urls-vs-long-urls?utm_source=blog&utm_campaign=blog%20highlights&utm_medium=website

Or this?

https://ctl.im/lprqlkm

A shortened URL masks the unnecessary jibberish in your URLs

Another benefit of a short URL vs. a long URL is that a shortened URL can mask the unnecessary jibberish of a long URL—URL parameters like numbers, directories, and post titles.

In addition, a URL shortener can help you highlight and focus on a specific aspect of the campaign you are sharing to help your visitors get an idea of what they are clicking on.

To go back to our previous example, the longer URL contains information that looks confusing at best to the untrained eye. This is especially true if the URL contains UTM parameters.

On the other hand, a shortened URL highlighting a specific aspect of the content it links to would give visitors a clear idea of what they are clicking on.

This becomes all the more important when you are sharing links on your social media channels where a long URL will not be displayed properly.

Again, our role as Marketers is to help our customers easily find the content they are looking for. Using a short URL vs. a long URL is one of the many ways we can help our campaigns reach the people who need the products and services we are promoting.

A shortened URL allows you to track engagement

Another benefit of using a short URL vs. a long URL is that of tracking. Like UTM codes, a URL shortener can also provide you with information about how people are engaging with the shortened link you created.

For example, a link created with a URL shortener can give you information about the number of people who used your link as well as the dates on which your link was accessed.

Unfortunately, the data provided by most URL shortening sites is rather limited. If you are a Marketing data nerd like we are over here at Campaign Tracker, then you are going to want more data to obsess over.

Not to mention that having to keep track of multiple shortened URLs and the UTM codes assigned to each link can get messy unless you are using a spreadsheet to keep track of them.

That’s why we created Campaign Tracker to bring the process of link creation and management into one simple platform.

CampaignTracker allows you to easily create, track and organize shortened URLs from UTM codes that are both shareable and clickable. In addition, our reporting feature allows you to visualize campaign performance so that you can define your next steps.

More importantly, however, CampaignTracker can help you stay consistent with your link creation efforts, which results in better attribution analytics and ultimately happier clients or bosses.

Find out for yourself and sign up to CampaignTracker for free. Yes, it’s free for up to 1,000 Monthly Unique Visitors to your links.