Best Practices for Vanity URLs

A vanity URL is an incredibly useful tool. Employing one in your advertising campaign can increase results by 35% or more. It’s the perfect way to brand something in bite sizes.

There are many ways you can use a branded short link to your advantage. Consider some of these best practices to get you off to a great start:

Gaining Insight

By far one of the greatest uses for vanity URLs is the ability to gain insight. Vanity URLs turn campaigns into trackable and actionable tools. Most marketers are aware that they can benefit in digital channels, but did you know that they are also stellar for offline campaigns?

Offline marketing is alive and well. It’s a key component to multi-touch integrated promotions. However, many people are still hesitant to put a lot of dollars into offline efforts. That’s because it’s tough to track effectiveness and return on investment. Vanity links bridge that gap.

Short links are just that…short. Therefore, a vanity URL posted on a brochure or flyer is something memorable. Use this to track the behaviors and metrics of your audience. This can then tell you which offline campaigns are the most successful and how you should spend your budget.

Faster Marketing

Brand guides and corporate standards can often slow down the entire marketing process. The bigger the team, the harder it can be to follow rules that ensure your copy is on-brand. Implementing a campaign on a vanity URL circumvents a committee because the link lives outside of the business site. It is away from the stylized corporate homepage.

Since the URL is housed outside the parent domain, you typically do not need corporate marketing or branding teams involved. It’s a smaller, yet more detailed, project that can lead to better insight than larger campaigns. This type of freedom gives more room to breathe for design.

It also drastically reduces the time it takes to market. This, in turn, gives you more time to focus on the analytics and which efforts lead to the greatest success.

Add Focus

Vanity URLs redirect to landing pages or microsites. The point of these domains is to add focus and enhance the digital user experience. It makes it easier for people to quickly find and do exactly what your call-to-action wants them to do. It allows you to engage with an audience in a focused setting, minus any outside distractions.

Consider the alternative. Tying a campaign to the actual brand site means that users have the opportunity to do anything BUT what your CTA asks them to do. This means the entire experience is ruined, as the audience journeys off in a hundred directions. Vanity URLs keep the emphasis exactly where you want it to be. There are less wasted efforts when it comes to directing an audience.

Track the Campaign

It’s important to demonstrate the ROI of your efforts. That’s why Vanity URLs help to track metrics at a deeper level than just the brand itself. You should be following the actual campaign/s you put into action. Since most marketers are producing content on a budget, it’s critical to know which attempts are performing well and which to yank and save money. Like sales commissions, these types of analytics can be job security for a marketer.

Vanity links are valuable, but it’s important to know how to use them. Creating them is only half the battle. How you employ them, the other half. Consider printing short links in offline campaigns. They add another layer of detail and help market content faster. The consumer is the end goal. It’s ultimately about revitalizing the user experience through memorable interaction and brand continuity.