1 Best URL Shortener Software & Tools 2024

What is a URL Shortener?

When people hear the term "URL shortener" and "link shortener", they often think of Bit.ly links, and think nothing of them. As an end-user, they typically just mean a shorter link, which makes complete sense when thinking about character limits in social media like X (formerly Twitter).

Well that's because the largest customer of URL shortener tools are actually businesses and enterprises. And no, the sole value to be had isn't just in turning a long URL into a short url. There's a ton of valuable link analytics behind link tracking which actually allows teams to make better marketing decisions.

Link Analytics

Often short urls are actually used to take a long url (e.g. https://efficient.app/apps/dub) and to turn it into a short link, but first making it significantly longer using UTM parameters.

UTM Parameters

If you've ever seen _{?utm_medium=blog} or anything of the sort at the end of a URL slug, yep, there's helpful data and link analytics in that.

The best way to explain is taking a real world example—take a guest blog post done on a site like Zapier (oh look, wait, we actually did this), okay, so let's take one of the links on their blog post and dissect it.

We have 4 URL parameters (most of which are UTM):

1. _?ref=zapier
2. _{&utm_source=zapier}
3. _{&utm_medium=blog}
4. _{&utm_campaign=productivity+tools}

So what this means is, if someone clicks one of the links on the Zapier blog post, they'll be sent to our site, and we'll know that it was sent from Zapier (utm_source=zapier), and more specifically their blog (utm_medium=blog), and what if we did multiple guest posts? Well that's where where the (utm_campaign=productivity+tools) comes into play, that identifies the specific blog post that sent them over to us.

Attributing Value

We can then take a look at our website analytics (we use Fathom Analytics), to see how much traffic, and to which pages the blog post sent over to us when filtering things down by the UTM parameters:

So what you can see from this is the visits that were sent to the various pages on our site from that specific article.

Now envision having this data, but from more external sources, and then even going a layer deeper, tracking that against actual conversion metrics (e.g. how many people signed up for our newsletter that were sent from these guest blog posts?), now that's a way to easily tie back to if the effort that went into writing the guest blog post was actually worthwhile.