Not too long ago, vanity URL’s were really popular for SEO and branding uses. For a nominal fee, snagging a keyword rich or a memorable and branded domain name seemed to be a great way to promote micro and hypersites for both print and online sources. It also gave a marketers more accurate metrics if the URL was unique to a campaign.
However, a couple of days ago while sitting in the waiting room of my auto mechanic, I came across an article in New Hampshire Magazine on mountain climbing gear. The list looked pretty standard: product photo along with details and reviews. But, I noticed that each URL was masked with a Tinyurl for each product. From the product photo alone, I couldn’t tell who the manufacture was. Since the URL was ‘tiny-arized’ I’d have to find some other way of remembering the URL in order to visit their Web site.
I can see some value of using URL shorteners in print since you can count click-through rates without having to create unique landing pages or vanity URLs. However, at the time of this post, Tinyurl doesn’t offer any measurement data like Bit.ly does. In the case of an affliate link, it makes sense that posting the true URL would be a bad thing since you would give away the affliate’s link. However, in the case of print, it seems like NH mag would be better off knowing click-through data to understandard how popular a particular article was.
Don’t get me wrong. I think URL shorterners are useful; especially when you have a 140 character limit. But it makes me wonder what the fate of vanity URLs are as they become more advanced and widely used. Shorterners like, Doiop and Metamark allow you customize your URL, giving users mini vanity URLs. This allows you to customize your URL for different audience types without having to create unique landing pages, for example.
If you don’t care about customizeing your short URL, make sure to pick one with measurement capabilities like Bit.ly or Su.pr and that use 301 redirects (most do) to pass pagerank.
