How do you make tiny urls

Source: Tiny. Do is another simple and sweet option that has all you need: the ability to customize, traffic stats, and even an automatic QR code generator. At a glance, you can monitor broken links and latency, find the visitors yielding the best conversion rates, track views and clicks, and more.

Source: ClickMeter. Data is valuable for your insights, right? Well, third-party companies are often interested in that information, too, which is why a cottage industry has popped up of businesses that actually pay you to shorten your links with them. For example, Shorte. Source: Shorte. Ly, or even to customize the URL, but an account will get you access to real-time analytics, including click-throughs and social media referrals.

Ly also has a free custom URL shortener button you can add to your browser toolbar, so shortening your link just takes one click. Source: Cuttly. Plus, Clkim offers retargeting based on custom lists of people who have clicked on your shortlist. Source: Clkim. Try a few, try them all—just make sure to keep it short and sweet. Drive more traffic to your website and save time with Hootsuite. From a single dashboard you can manage all your social media profiles, shorten links in one click, measure success, and more.

Try it for free. Get Started. We could have SWORN you were someone who wanted to blow your competition out of the water on social media. Tiny links are easier to paste into chats or emails and fit onto social media posts that limit characters. Link shorteners , online sites that compress long links into tiny URLs, are a dime a dozen nowadays.

Do you need to quickly turn a long, confusing URL into a tiny link for a customer? Or are you are looking to make your own custom links to advertise your brand?

All link shorteners have a box on their site where you can paste the long link that you want to shorten. For some sites, this box is on their front page, while others require you to sign up and log in before you can access the shortener. Remember: this tiny link will act as a redirect, which means it will direct anyone who clicks on it to the same site as the original long web address.

Once the link shortener has finished creating your tiny URL, you have a number of options for sharing it. You can copy and paste it, share it directly to social media , or even turn it into a QR code on some websites!

Once again, before choosing your link shortener, make sure that you research which sharing options it supports. To help you find the best URL shortener services, we tested over 30 different options. Here are our favorites. Looking to shorten Google Drive or Google Docs links? Our tutorial shows you how to do this automatically, using Zapier. Bitly for the best all-round URL shortener. Rebrandly for creating branded links. INK for small business owners.

URL Shortener by Zapier for automatically creating short links. Shorby for Instagram users. Sniply for adding a CTA to the links you share. At its most basic, a URL shortener takes some long, unwieldy link and turns it into a shorter, easy-to-share one. This enables you to provide a memorable, typable link on a business card, print ad, podcast interview, or any other situation where someone can't click on a hyperlink.

URL shorteners can also be useful for shortening longer links to fit character limits on social media and messaging apps, although a lot of platforms take care of that for you.

Twitter, for example, automatically shortens any shared links with its t. If you're just sending things to your friends, you only really need to worry about URL shortening if you're using SMS. Another thing most good URL shorteners offer is some kind of analytics and click tracking. If you share someone else's website address with your audience, you don't necessarily know who clicks through.

If you use a URL shortener, however, you'll be able to collect data like the number of clicks the link gets, where they're coming from, and what devices people are using. Generally speaking, the more detailed and powerful these analytics, the higher the cost of the service. Free services tend to have basic click tracking, while premium marketing services will collect as much data as possible—and even allow you to serve different URLs to people in different places or using different devices.

This means you can use different links in multiple ads or social media posts to compare click-through rates. There are lots of different URL shortening options out there, and we limited our search to easy-to-set-up, standalone services. There are self-hosted versions, like Polr and Yourls , that, while free and powerful, require too much technical knowledge to easily recommend.

There are also URL shorteners built into other apps that we didn't consider. For example, Ow. It's not that these services aren't good, but they go far beyond what most people need a URL shortener to do. Interested in doing even more with your URL shorteners? Check out our tips for how to use automation to track them, send them, and stay on top of performance.

Bitly is a full-service, business-grade URL shortener. If you only need to shorten the occasional link, you can use it without creating an account. Just paste your long URL into the box on the homepage, click Shorten , and be on your way. But Bitly really stands out for its business offering.

Part of the appeal is that Bitly is so simple and easy to use. It has a comprehensive dashboard where you can track over 20 real-time data points, including the location of your visitors, organic shares, and more. Tools for tracking campaigns are easy to use as well. With Bitly's free limited account, you can customize the back-half of 50 shortened URLs per month, and track click rates and information about your top referrers for 1, links per month.

It's a generous free plan and could very well be adequate for some small businesses. Scroll to learn more. Help it stand out with branded links that drive more clicks. Inspire trust With more clicks comes increased brand recognition and consumer trust in your communications—which in turn inspires even more engagement with your links. Boost results On top of better deliverability and click-through, rich link-level data gives you crucial insight into your link engagement so your team can make smarter decisions around its content and communications.

The most recognized brands in the world love Bitly. Frequently asked questions. What is a URL Shortener? Make your URLs stand out with our easy to use free link shortener above. Benefits of a Short URL How many people can even remember a long web address, especially if it has tons of characters and symbols?