Bottom line: a short link is a redirect you control. The value is not the shortness; it is that you can count clicks, see where they came from, and change the destination after the link is already in the wild. Measure clicks per channel and ignore almost everything else.
Why own your links
The classic reason to shorten a link was character limits. The better reason is control. If a flyer, a podcast mention or a LinkedIn post points at yourdomain/l/spring, you can fix a typo in the destination, swap a landing page, or retire the offer without touching any of the places the link lives.
A short link is also the only way to know whether a channel works. Your website analytics will tell you a visitor came from "direct". A short link used only on the flyer tells you the flyer brought them.
The two metrics that matter
Tiny Links records every click and shows a 30-day chart and the top referrers. From that, pay attention to:
- Clicks per link, by day. Did the post land? Did the email get opened? A spike on the day you sent it and a long tail afterwards is normal.
- Referrer. Where the click came from. Clicks with no referrer are usually from print, SMS, email clients or QR scans.
Ignore vanity totals. A thousand clicks from a tweet that converted nobody is worse than twenty from a referral partner.
One link per channel
The trick that makes the data useful: never reuse a short link across channels. Create spring-fb, spring-email, spring-flyer, all pointing at the same page. The destination is identical; the slug tells you the source.
Custom slugs can be up to 40 characters of lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens. If you don't care, leave the slug blank and we generate a six-character one with no ambiguous letters.
Print and QR
Tiny Links renders a QR code for every link as an SVG you can download and drop into a design tool. Because the QR encodes the short link rather than the destination, scans are counted and the destination stays editable after printing. That means you can print once and run three different campaigns through the same code.
What we deliberately don't track
We log the referrer and the browser type, nothing else. No IP addresses, no cookies, no fingerprinting. The 30-day chart tells you enough to make decisions, and your visitors are not a product.
Turning a link off
Paused links show a polite "this link has been turned off" page instead of redirecting. Deleting a link removes its history. If an offer has ended, pause it; the clicks will tell you how long people kept finding the old flyer.