Why do short links matter? Why do people who make content today need them?
These days a URL does more than tell people where a website is. It's the first thing they see before they decide to click, and it's where all the data in a campaign starts.
As marketing gets more precise about measuring results, the links we use pick up long parameters on the end: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, plus tracking IDs from several other platforms. An ordinary link ends up three or four lines long.
A lot of people think shortening a link is just about tidying it up, so it doesn't look messy on artwork or a poster. But if you work in content or marketing, short links affect how trustworthy your link looks, how many people click it (CTR) and how accurate your reporting is, more than most people expect.
Annoyances you may have run into
I copied a Thai link and pasted it. Why did it turn into a long string of code that looks like spam?
Browsers convert Thai characters into percent-encoding (such as
%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%B1...), so a one-line link gets very long. Readers often suspect phishing or malware. It looks unsafe, so they don't click, and visits drop off a cliff.I just want to know how many people clicked. Why do I have to wait for Google Analytics?
Sometimes you've just posted something, or sent a link to a client in chat, and you only want to know whether anyone has opened it. Logging in to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to set up an event, or waiting a day for the data to come through, is far too much effort. What you want is one page that shows the click count as soon as you open it.I want to put a link in my bio or send it by SMS, but there aren't enough characters
An Instagram or TikTok bio has a character limit. One long link can eat more than half of it, leaving almost no room to tell people why they should click. SMS is even worse: a Thai-language message holds about 70 characters. If the link is even slightly too long, the message is split in two and you pay twice.I shared a link on social media and the preview image didn't show up
A common example is a Google Form for job applications, or a file in the cloud. Post it on Facebook or send it in LINE and there's no cover image, just an empty grey box or a system icon that has nothing to do with the content. Most people decide whether to click from the preview, so a post without one usually gets scrolled past.
The brochures are printed, but the destination page has changed
The worst case: you've printed a URL on slides, business cards or brochures, hundreds or thousands of them, and one day IT announces a new site structure and the old URL stops working. Everything you printed is wasted, money and time alike. With a short link from the start, you could change the destination any day, and the links already in print would keep working.Clicks are in the thousands, but the site is silent and nobody gets in touch. Who is clicking?
This one catches people out. You share a link in a LINE group or post it on social media, and the click count in your link shortener shoots up so fast you think the campaign is flying. But orders don't move and nobody gets in touch, because a lot of those clicks didn't come from people. They came from crawlers, and from each platform's systems that open the link to read the page.
What can short links help with?
Making a link look nicer doesn't fix any of this on its own. A good short link has to do more:
Long link | Short link |
|---|---|
Full of | Readable, and you choose its name, e.g. |
People aren't sure where it will take them | People can guess what they'll find |
The destination can't be changed | The destination can be changed at any time |
You have to check Google Analytics | You see the click count immediately |
People are more willing to click
A short link with a name people understand at a glance (a custom alias), like yourbrand.com/summer-sale, tells readers in advance what they'll find. They hesitate less, so more of them click.
People can actually type it
When people see a link on a slide or a sign, or hear it on a podcast, nobody can type a three-line link in time. A short link with a good name takes a few seconds. (A QR code helps too, but not when the link is spoken.)
See the numbers right away
A link shortener shows you straight away which content and which channels get the most clicks. You can adjust how you promote from day one, instead of waiting for the end-of-month report.
Change the destination whenever you need to
If the destination page goes down, or you need to send people to a new promotion page, you can switch the destination immediately. No hunting down old posts to delete, no reprinting. A link shortener like shor10.co (which I built myself) also lets you set the preview image and text, which fixes problem 4, the missing preview image, along the way.
The part few people mention: clicks that aren't real
By now you have a good idea of what short links can do. The next question is how far you can trust the numbers in the tool you're using.
Many link shorteners were designed in the early days of the internet. They do two things: turn a long link into a short one, and count every request that comes in.
The trouble is that every time you share a link on Facebook, X, LINE or Slack, the platform sends a bot to open it straight away, to fetch the image and text for the preview card. If the link shortener can't tell a bot from a person, that visit counts as a click. It shouldn't, because nobody actually clicked!
Once ghost clicks are mixed into the numbers, the figures you report can't be trusted, and the conversion rate you work out comes out lower than it really is.
A link shortener should do more than shorten
I think a link shortener today should do at least two things: filter bots out of the click count, and let you set an expiry date that matches the campaign.
Those two points are why I built shor10.co myself. I explain how it works, and why I designed each part the way I did, in this article.