All thanks to the person who first came up with the awesome idea to squeeze long URLs into short ones which makes them neat and clean. As a result, these shortened URLs can then be shared with our friends or co-workers via email or on social networking websites especially Twitter without any much hassle.
For the past few years, TinyURL had been dominating the URL shortening market with billions of URLs being shortened monthly. However, there is no doubt that the leading URL shortening service available on the web got to be Bit.ly. Why? Well, it’s much shorter than TinyURL, hence saving a few precious spaces when it comes to posting a link accompanied by a description on Twitter (140 characters). Another feature that helps the free service to gain popularity is the impressive and useful real-time link tracking. These stats are beneficial for bloggers and Internet marketers who want to gauge the popularity of their links.
Anyway, I’ve compiled a list of “10+ URL Shorteners that Provides Real-Time Link Tracking” and you can check them out!
1. Bit.ly
Bit.ly is one the most popular URL shortening service on the Internet especially on social networking platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Not only does its URL is really short as compared to its rival – TinyURL, what’s more is that it offers real-time statistics which are extremely useful for bloggers or webmasters.
2. Tweetburner
Tweetburner allows you to keep track of what happens to the links in tweets shared with you, by you, by your friends and every other twitterer. Besides providing detailed analytics, it even tells you what’s hot on the social networking platform. While there are a variety of ways of seeing what subjects are getting twittered about, such as Tweetdeck’s keyword tag, Twitterburner shows you on its home page the most popular Twurled links clicked in the past hour and the Twitters they came from.
3. Short.ie
Created in 2008, Short.ie is a website that lets you shorten any URLs, store all them all in one place and track how many clicks they’ve received. You can also share this list with friends too. Its amazing recommendation engine can even suggest new relevent content based on what you’re linking to. Short.ie blends well with your Twitter account as you’re able to connect both accounts together to open up further features like stored tweets.
4. tr.im
tr.im is for quick, easy, full-featured URL shortening with integrated posting to social networks such as Twitter, with a free public API. When it comes to link tracking, it provides users detailed analytics such as when they happened, the visitor’s location, the refering website, and, simply, the number of clicks that it got.
5. notlong
Unlike any other URL shortening services, NotLong shortens URLs in its sub-domain rather than the sub-directory. For example, a TinyURL link would be http://tinyurl.com/123. On the other hand, a shortened NotLong URL would be http://123.notlong.com. The stats provided are basic with Date, Clicks and Unique IPs and are updated hourly instead real-time.
6. Shorl
The main reason why I don’t prefer using Shorl is because it doesn’t really make any difference whether you compressed a long URL into a short one (exaggerating). For example, a Shorl shortened link would be http://shorl.com/stylulyfinino. What’s more is that viewing the stats requires you to remember the custom password which contains many weird characters. For people who have shortened memory just like me, then it isn’t that useful after all. This free URL shortening service offers simple statistics.
7. YOURLS
Yourls is a simple but pretty impressive URL shortening service cum WordPress plugin. Most suitable for bloggers or webmasters who use WordPress as their preferred blogging platform, Yourls is a small set of PHP scripts that will allow you to run your own URL shortening service. You can make it private or public, you can pick custom keyword URLs, it comes with its own API. With this tool, users are able to create short URLs and tweet them automagically as you publish blog posts. It come with a neat AJAXed interface and track click count on your links is supported.
8. YY.VC
YY.VC is yet another URL shortening service that allows users to create short URLs from long ones, share them on social websites and even track them. A YY.VC shortened URL is pretty neat and sweet. For example, http://yy.vc/z5m will brings you to Google.com. It comes with a hit counter that shows you how many visitors have checked out your link. Besides being a URL shortener, this free service also offers free sub-domains which are forwarded to your site instantly and no ads are displayed.
9. Cli.gs
Grabbing a 3% share of the URL shortening market on micro-blogging platform Twitter, Cli.gs gives users a “deep real-time analytics” which includes the geographical location of the visitor, the time, and other stats. Having an account in cli.gs is mandatory since the stats are private. Social media monitoring Cligs keeps track in real time of who tweets your link, who shares it on Friendfeed, who links to it, who blogs about it, who writes a blog comment about it, and more. Not just that, Cligs does that for the destination URL too! All in one handy interface.
10. DwarfURL
To view your stats, you can do so under the “History” tab or enter a password to your dwarfURL link. This is slightly different from Bit.ly as other people aren’t able to see your links’ stats unless you’re using a shared computer or somehow they know your password. DwarfURL comes in a Firefox add-on so that users are able to shortened long URLs with ease.
11. SnipURL
With over 43,856,196 snippings (shortened URLs) being created, SnipURL is another popular URL shortening service. One of the most exciting feature is provides is Multi-Snip. With this, users are able to shortened several long URLs at once without any much hassle. Link tracking is supported too.
12. kl.am
Created by Raven Internet marketing tools, kl.am comes in really handy especially when it comes to traffic statistics. With this URL shortening tool, it benefits bloggers and Internet marketers by giving them graphical statistics such as a line graph and a world map which shows the number of unique visitors in the past 24 hours and the geographical locations of potential readers respectively.
13. BudURL
Shrink it. Spread it. Watch it Grow. This is what BudURL is all about. First you shortened a long URL, share it with your friends or co-workers and view a detailed analytics of your links. It was designed from the start to give small businesses and marketers insight into previously invisible click traffic. You can check out who the referrers are, timestamps and IP addresses.
