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Do you use link shortening services?

gdamalena

New Member
affiliate
Hi!
what are your thoughts on shortening services? Do you like it, or is it too spamy for you?
And where do you use it? On facebook, blogs?
I've been using shorte.st on my blog for a few weeks now and I’m really happy with it.
If I have to chose between a banner and a pass-through ad, I definitely prefer the second one.
Thanks to that I don't have to worry about ads cluttering my blog.
Your thoughts?
 
I have read (somewhere, couple of years ago) that shortening/cloaking means they may not track accurately. I've no idea if it's true or not, plus if memory serves, Clickbank was the target of discussion.
 
That's the first I've heard about this problem... Care to elaborate?

It was so long ago, I had to go looking....and, guess what? I either remembered wrong or it changed. I'm betting that I remembered it wrong. My apologies, I should've looked before I typed, my very bad.
 
I used to cloak my affiliate link with tinyurl when I promoted clickbank products on youtube. Though i got very few sales but the tracking worked perfectly and the tid was paased onto my clickbank analytics. :)
 
I wouldn't trust url shortening services for a long term business nor do I see much value in them anyways. I own specific domains to use for redirects. Gotta have full control, ya'know.
 
I use url shorteners mostly for simple tracking on sites where I don't want to bother installing any analytics and I use it for testing demographics of some low quality traffic sources.
I don't like to use it for cloaking because I'm more comfortable when I use my own domains with redirect or iframe scripts.
 
Hi!
what are your thoughts on shortening services? Do you like it, or is it too spamy for you?
And where do you use it? On facebook, blogs?
I've been using shorte.st on my blog for a few weeks now and I’m really happy with it.
If I have to chose between a banner and a pass-through ad, I definitely prefer the second one.
Thanks to that I don't have to worry about ads cluttering my blog.
Your thoughts?

Hi gdamalena.

As others have mentioned, it's best to install YOUR OWN url shortener on your server that way you have full control of the hops. If that's not an option for you, It all depends where the shortened URL is going to be used. I found that on social media, bitly URLs are highly clicked, and twitter has it's own automatic URL shortening service too.
All the best,
Lyndon Davis.
 
I use a couple of custom made url shorteners, to cloak my affiliate links. By having custom shorteners I feel more safe.
 
Bit.ly is the most popular URL shortner. Never tried custom url, Thanks for sharing the YOURLS.

In my experience people tend not to trust nor click bit.ly links - i'd always go prosper or YOURLS!
 
I use link shortening services all the time. The links track fine as long as your tracking is set up correctly prior. I haven't had a problem yet with it. I do like to use short links that have more of a description on where it is coming from though. bit.ly doesn't give much description. I would however use custom extensions to make them more descriptive
 
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