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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.
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.
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):
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.
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.
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Dub is the modern link attribution platform for you to create short links, track conversions, and run affiliate programs.
Let us save you the time and research: whether you're a creator, marketer, or a company looking for a link infrastructure there is no better solution than Dub—trust us, we've tried them all.
Dub is the most modern link shortening/analytics platform. If you've tried to use Bitly's analytic dashboards (or Short's), but they are horrendously kludgy 🙈 So much so, that they cause dread to even go into the back-end.
Dub on the other hand, provides a minimal UI, providing you with the analytics in crystal clear dashboard. With Dub you can easily spin up short links, QR codes, add tags for organization, and even enable things like password protection, expiring links, or geo-targeting.
All of this, AND they have the most generous free tier of all the tools out there to try it out. If you're looking for a new link shortener, Dub is hands down the best on the market.
Bitly was previously the leader in the link shortening/tracking space, but they have fallen far behind newer alternatives, like Dub (which we use). Bitly doesn't have a modern UI interface, their link tracking doesn't update in real time, and their users report that it is unnecessarily complicated to pull meaningful reports.
Not to mention, their paid tiers are incredibly restrictive. For example, to get a year’s worth of history of your tracking analytics (which should be table stakes), their tier starts at $199.
If you're looking for a link shortener, our recommendation is to skip Bitly.
Custom URL link shortener
In trying just about every link shortener on the market, in addition to using my own self-hosted solution (twice), I finally landed on Short, and at the time, it was pretty basic, but a solid-enough solution for what I was looking to achieve with it.
And I couldn't complain, they have a super generous free tier, for which you don't need to pay until you hit 50,000+ link clicks, which would never be hit for most individuals and businesses.
But I didn’t switch to Short.io because it was a great solution – I did it because it was just adequate enough to do the most basic of redirects. Case in point: I never once used it for reporting because it was a complete mess.
Then I learned about Dub, which is modern link shortening platform that actually has a good user experience and totally reasonable pricing...and wow. Our experience is 1000x better. Yes 1000x! We can actually get accurate and helpful link tracking now. You can read our full Dub Review to learn more about why we love it.
We switched and have not looked back to Short, so you're looking for a new link tracking tool, save yourself some time and just use Dub instead.
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