If you use a URL shortener, however, you'll have a unique short URL, so you'll also be able to see how many clicks the link gets, where they're coming from, and what devices people are using.

If you share a link to someone else's blog post with your audience, for example, you won't know much about how many people-and who-click through all that data will be in the other person's analytics account. In addition to that basic capability, here are the features I was looking for in a link shortener:Īnalytics and click tracking. If you're just sending things to your friends, you only really need to worry about URL shortening if you're exclusively using SMS. Twitter, for example, automatically shortens any shared links with its t.co shortening service ( at least when it works), while iMessage obscures any links behind a preview card. While URL shorteners used to be useful for shortening longer links to fit character limits on social media and messaging apps, a lot of platforms take care of that for you. And it's not just for ads for roommates URL shorteners allow you to provide a typable link on a business card, print ad, podcast interview, or any other situation where someone can't just click on a nice hyperlink. This shortened link means whoever sees your ad has an easy-to-type URL to visit, rather than having to type some long, unintelligible string of text where they're almost guaranteed to make a mistake. For example, if you're making an ad for a roommate, you can take something like, and turn it into. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog.Īt its most basic, a URL shortener takes some long, unwieldy link and turns it into a shorter link, one that's easy to share. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site-we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review.

We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software.

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