When you’re running a campaign online and trying to reach your target audience, you need to take care of every single detail to make it successful. From idea to creation, you’ll be dealing with numerous questions on how to further boost your ads and make them more effective. And, since your competitors are doing the same thing, there’s no room for sloppy mistakes. You have to make every detail perfect.

One of those details is certainly the URL of your ad since you’ll be sharing it on different platforms and in different places online. You may not be aware of it, but the structure of your URL can strongly influence people to either click or don’t click your ad. That’s why you should consider using URL shorteners for your ads.

For those of you not sure how you can benefit from URL shorteners, we’ve created a list of 6 reasons to start using one today. 

1. Full Display of URLs

The first and most obvious reason for using URL shorteners for your ads is to make sure your URL is fully displayed wherever you share it.

Different platforms have different character limits for sharing new posts, information, and content. If your URL is typically long and filled with random numbers and signs, it probably won’t be fully displayed in some of these digital spaces. Instead, it’ll be cut in half with a “read more” sign or just the “…” inviting visitors to expose the full URL.

This can cause problems with:

• aesthetics
• customer trust
• making it clear what the link is about

So, instead of having your links broken down or not fully displayed, shortening your links will solve all these problems.

2. Branding Your URLs

URL shortening is practical and helps you save precious space when sharing it. But, it’s also highly effective for creating new branding opportunities and making URLs recognizable, memorable, and trustworthy.

Branded URLs will help you:

• improve your click-through-rate
• enhance your branding efforts on different channels
• boost your SEO due to keyword insertion

Simply put, using a URL shortener that allows creating branded URLs is a great advertising opportunity. You can do what Forbes does and turn a URL such as

“https://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2021/04/23/highest-paid-oscar-nominees-2021/?sh=1e2a2b976f7f&utm_source=TWITTER&utm_medium=social&utm_content=4758808744&utm_campaign=sprinklrForbesMainTwitter” to “on.forbes.com/6013HfbBc”.

You can even insert keywords and have your URLs look like this:

• your.brand/keyword

You should never miss an opportunity to boost your branding and show you’re a professional and trustworthy brand.

3. Gather Data

When you’re using a proper URL shortener or software that allows you to brand your URLs, you’ll also be able to keep track of important metrics that’ll help you improve your ads.

Keeping track of your URLs performance is crucial since it allows you to:

• learn which keywords, URL formats, or types of branded URLs work best
• count clicks and conversions
• learn about your target audience
• learn about device types used to click your URL
• learn about the time and date of the clicks, etc.

Linda Ferguson, CEO of Subjecto sees URL shortening as a great marketing opportunity: ”Monitoring and keeping track of your ad URLs performance is crucial for your further improvement and allows you to make better URL choices in the future. It can even allow you to run A/B testing on your URLs and see what your audience prefers.”

4. Improve Content Readability

Sharing your ad URLs is important since you want all the right people to see it, click it, and receive the message you’re sending. But, long and ugly URLs can make a piece of content extremely hard to read or simply uninviting.

And, you don’t want people to give up on reading a piece of your content just because it looks complex and hard to read, especially when you’re sharing multiple URLs in the same piece of content. This includes:

• email messages
• blog posts
• e-books
• tutorials

So, use URL shorteners to make each URL significantly shorter and easier to fit the rest of the content. It’ll take up less space and create less visual confusion for your target readers.

This way, you can send URLs without worrying about damaging the presentation of your content.

5. Remove Suspicion

Even though most people today are aware of potentially malicious URLs and links and have their security systems up and running, you should still make an effort to avoid looking suspicious.

Short URLs can help you with that. 

In essence, people might be afraid or reluctant to use URLs containing a bunch of these #?*’?!!64#24/, right? It may seem unprofessional or untrustworthy to them, and they give up on the whole thing.

But if you constantly create and share short URLs that summarize the long version, and still inform them what the ad is about, they’ll be more willing to click. This could also secure more backlinks to your ads, which is a great advertising opportunity. In case you need additional backlinks, adsy.com can help you out.

So, URL shorteners help you:

• remove suspicion
• gain long-term trust
• show consistency in your URLs and make them recognized as safe

This will seriously boost your ads’ click-through rate and make them more effective in every sense.

6. Optimize For Print Ads

To be able to actively grow your business, you shouldn’t share your short URLs just in digital spaces, but also across different print media. If you have any printed materials you’re sharing with your target audience, a short URL will work much better than a long one. 

Why?

It’s simple – people will find it easier to type the URL into their browser when it just a dozen characters, compared to a couple of dozen with long URLs.

Use this for your business cards, print ads, or any other type of physical materials you’re using.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, there are numerous significant benefits to using URL shorteners in your ads. You don’t want to confuse, misguide, or lose your target audience just because a URL is too confusing, ugly, or complex.

Instead, use URL shorteners to improve your ad performance and gain trust with your audience for the long run.

Author’s Bio

Marques Coleman is a digital marketing specialist and a content writer. He mostly blogs about developing and running successful digital marketing campaigns and covers everything from social media marketing to paid ads. His main goal is to provide practical and easy-to-apply tips that marketers of all experience levels will benefit from.