Shortening Links – Which Service To Use?
October 22nd, 2009 3 comments
Link shortening has been extremely popular for some time now and new shortening providers seem to appear like worms after a rainy day. So how to choose?
Recently I needed to use link shortening for one of my clients and I had to start looking for the best service. And so I decided to make an article about it for maybe helping others.
So onto the list!
Tiny.cc
Currently this service has 3,107,937 links in its database and been running since 2006. They provide you with a simple bookmarklet for Firefox or Safari. With it you can just click on it for shortening the URL in your address bar. Quite a simple thing but it makes shortening a bit easier.
Metamark
With 19,382,049 links this service has been up since 2003. You can login to see detailed statistics about your links. Like many others they also provide you with a bookmarklet for easier usage. Your links would look like http://xrl.us/earth.
bit.ly
Very popular at the moment with real-time link tracking, complete history and saved preferences. They also offer many useful tools Here is a small list of them:
- Standard bookmarklet.
- Sidebar with traffic, conversations and history.
- Preview plugin for Firefox. Expand bit.ly links (and many other short links) on any web page to see page titles and links to bit.ly Info pages before clicking.
They also have some other useful tools. Check out the full list here
br.st
Definitely one of the best layouts in my opinion. You don’t even have to register to receive stats for your links. Just check out this example: http://br.st/0Ja+. Just add + to the end of your shortened URL to get full stats about it. A preview for users of the destination link so that visitors can see it is a valid link (example: http://br.st/0Ja-). Just add – to the end of your shortened URL. Destination links are checked against Google Safebrowsing every 30 minutes. They even promote Google Analytics Integration to come out soon.
Just for the record we ended up using this service for our link shortening.
Here is a small list of other services you can choose from for link shortening:
I would like to suggest http://www.clickmeter.com
A free link tracking service.
Same features and easy-to-use as a link shortner but focused on professional analysis of clicks.
Dedicated to web-marketing experts to track up to millions of click per every user. Advanced features as Time-Frame filter, export, detailed IP analysis, Click-Fraud detection.
Thank you for your suggestion David. Seems to be a good service with a detailed analysis part.
I’d like to point out that the free version has some limitations.
Hey there everyone i was just introduceing myself here im a first time visitor who hopes to become a daily reader!