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Share and collaborate on work with your team in Zapier. Manage multiple teams with advanced administrative controls in Zapier. Of course, as with most things, there's no one right answer: the best URL shortening service for you depends on what you need and want from one. There are simple, fast, and free URL shortening apps; marketing- and analytics- focused ones with dashboards and detailed metrics; and even options where you can add your own call-to-action over the link you share.
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.
All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. 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. 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.
For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog. 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. Bitly is the best URL shortener for large businesses looking to brand and track links, and it's a great choice for small businesses that want to generate short URLs and follow their stats for a modest number of campaigns.
Bitly even integrates with Zapier , so you can do things like automatically generate short links from an RSS feed or Instagram post. While Rebrandly is a great URL shortener like all the other apps on our list, its appeal is unique. Rebrandly believes that brands, whether it's a product or a person, get value out of customizing links to content that references them from all over the web. Their free plan offers five custom domains, the most of any app we considered, so you can customize the whole short URL, and not just the last half of it.
For example, Bob Vila could customize the link to his Wikipedia entry from en. A link to one of his books on Amazon could be BobVila. Vila can use these links on his own site, business cards, or in advertisements. Rebrandly includes tools for tracking the popularity of each link, data about who is clicking on them, and automatic QR code generation, too.
On the free plan, you're limited to total branded links and 5, clicks tracked per month—but that's plenty if you're just starting out. Rebrandly also integrates with Zapier , so you can do things like automatically generate a short, branded link for new WordPress posts or Dropbox files. It's a useful tool for when you're in a hurry and need to create a short link that will never expire.
You can then use that link indefinitely without fear that it will stop working. Although you don't need an account to use TinyURL, if you sign up for one, you can see a history of all your shortened links. You can also subscribe to a paid plan if you want features like tracking and analytics, branded domains, and the ability to edit where each TinyURL goes.
INK is a full-featured URL shortener service that can be used to not only turn long URLs into short ones but also to track the traffic coming from your links. Its dashboard shows trending links and general statistics, while an analytics page lets you dive into traffic by device, location, and referrers.
You can also drill down into clicks by the time of day. Tags, which you can add to your shortened links, let you view your link traffic in new and custom ways and are perfect for tracking and coordinating campaigns. Here is a list of best free bulk URL shortener software for Windows. In some of these software, you need to manually input API keys to make them work.
The use of these link shorteners is pretty simple as you just need to paste and press the Short button after providing long URLs to these freeware.
In the shortened output links, you can notice the presence of the initials of API service that is used to shorten the URL. In addition to that, you also need a web browser to launch the interface of these bulk link shorteners.
Bulk url shortener is my favorite software because it does not need API key or any other hosting software to run. Overall, it is a simple and easy to use bulk URL shortener software. Bulk url shortener is a free bulk URL shortener software for Windows. Using this software, you can easily shrink URLs of multiple websites or web pages at a time.
You need to select at least one of these services in order to shrink URL. All other services are either not working or generate URLs which do not lead to the destined website or webpage.
It is also a portable software that you can carry in portable storage devices and use it on the go without installing it on a system. It is a web-based software that requires a constant internet connection to work. It does not have its own interface and uses default system browser to work.
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