Why do short links matter? Why do content creators today need them, and why can't they do without?
These days a URL does more than tell people "where a website is". It is the first door of the user experience (UX), the thing people see before they click, and the starting point of all the data in a campaign.
As marketing measures results in more detail, the links we use carry long parameters on the end: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign and tracking IDs from several more platforms. An ordinary link ends up stretching across three or four lines.
Many people see shortening a link as just tidying up the text, so it won't look messy on artwork or a promotional poster. But for people who work in content and marketing, short links affect credibility, click-through rate (CTR) and the accuracy of the data you report on far more than you might think.
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?
Web browsers convert Thai characters into percent-encoding (such as
%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%B1...), so a one-line link becomes very long. Readers often suspect it's a phishing or malware link. It looks unsafe, so they don't dare click, and visits drop sharply.I just want to know how many people clicked. Why do I have to wait for Google Analytics?
Sometimes we've just posted something or sent a link to a client in chat, and we only want to know whether anyone has opened it yet. Logging in to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to set up an event, or waiting a day for the data to be processed, is far too much effort. What we want is one page that shows the click count the moment we 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 limits how many characters you can use. One long link can take up more than half of it, leaving almost no room to invite people to click. SMS is even worse: a Thai-language message holds about 70 characters. If the link is even slightly too long, the system splits it into two messages and charges you 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 image, so a post without one usually gets scrolled past.
The brochures are printed, but the destination page has changed
The worst case is printing a URL straight onto slides, business cards or printed material, hundreds or thousands of copies, and then one day IT announces a new site structure and the old URL no longer works. Everything you printed is wasted, money and time alike. If you had used a short link from the start, you could change the destination any day, and the links already in print would still work.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 doing great. But orders don't move and nobody gets in touch, because many of the clicks don't come from people at all. They may come from crawlers, or from each platform's systems that fetch a page's text to read the link.
What Can Short Links Help With?
Making a link look nicer can't solve these problems on its own. A good short link has to help with the following:
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 link that's short and ends in a name people understand at a glance (a custom alias), like yourbrand.com/summer-sale, tells readers in advance what they'll find when they click. It reduces hesitation, and the chance that they'll click goes up.
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 can be typed in a few seconds. (A QR code helps too, but not when the link is spoken.)
See the Numbers Right Away
A link shortener tells 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 move people to a new promotion page, you can switch the destination immediately, without hunting down old posts to delete or reprinting your materials. A link shortener like shor10.co also lets you set the preview image and text, which solves problem 4 (the preview image not showing up on social media) along the way.
The Part Few People Talk About: Clicks That Aren't Real People
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 just two things: turn a long link into a short one, and count every request that comes in.
The problem is that every time we share a link on Facebook, X, LINE or Slack, these platforms immediately send a bot to open it, to fetch the image and text for the preview card. If the link shortener can't tell a bot from a person, that visit is counted as a click straight away. It shouldn't be, because no real person clicked!
Once ghost clicks are mixed into the numbers, the figures you report can't be trusted, and the conversion rate you calculate comes out lower than it really is.
A Link Shortener Should Do More Than Shorten
I think a link shortener today should be able to do at least two things: filter bots out of the click count, and set an expiry date that matches the length of the campaign.
In the next episode I'll review shor10.co, a link shortener designed to solve exactly these problems.