7 Reasons why you need to create Vanity URLs
Holding your own domain is important in strengthening your brand’s presence. And, as you build your business’ online presence; you may hear a lot about the importance of Vanity URLs.
The word ‘Vanity URL’ might sound fancy and technical, but it’s a simple method that brings intense effect on your company’s online presence.
It provides a wonderful opportunity to fiery social involvement, amplify and extend reach for links, and build traffic and discoverability around a marketing campaign.
“A vanity URL can increase a marketing campaign’s success rate by up to 35%.”
What are Vanity URLs?
A vanity URL is a unique web address that is branded for marketing purposes.
A customized, shortened, descriptive URL/domain name that points to a related item indicated within the URL. It is easy to remember and to share URL used to promote a product or services.
It converts a traditional regular URL into a more shortened format. They are frequently used on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn, which limit the number of characters you can use in an update.
When Should Vanity URLs be used?
If you have planned out your site’s IA (Information Architecture) properly and designed your site with keeping SEO in mind, you should not need to use vanity URLs.
However, this is not always the case and there are times when you may need to use vanity URLs.
- Online Promotion — Where the desired landing page URLs that you instruct your audience to go to are not easily translated into the promotional material (Flyers, Press Releases etc.)
- Direct users to your products — A vanity URL lures better user engagement and will encourage users to bookmark and remember your pages.
- Launching a new product or service — Especially when your CMS causes issues with URL naming and creates a non-user friendly URL. Preferably when you create your pages, they should be created with search engine sociability in mind.
- For most applicable landing page -As contrary to sending them to your homepage.
Why You Need Vanity URLs?
There are many reasons to use a vanity URLs when creating your social media platforms, the main one being for the benefit of search engine optimization (SEO).
As studies have shown, descriptive URLs for products and services deliver a higher click-through rate. With vanity URLs, you can describe a product or service using the words people automatically associate with the topic or product, encouraging them to click more.
How to Create Your Own Short Vanity URL
- Choose a short vanity URL
- Buy the vanity URL
- Shorten your custom domain with Bit.ly
- Create a DNS record for your new short domain
- Verify your tracking domain
- Share your custom vanity short links!
Here are 7 reasons why you should use vanity URLs for best performance:
#1 Builds trust and awareness
Adding a vanity URL allows your brand to build both trust and awareness. It’s more pleasing to the eye, also builds more trust. The consumers are more likely to click on a brand name link they see online than absurd URLs.
#2 Easier to Share
Using a shortened version of a brand name rather than random letters and numbers means it’s easier to remember and, subsequently, share. URL shorteners make your content & videos more appealing, and focus on the article itself.
Just a small improving change like this can have a huge impact on your marketing efforts.
#3 Improves Offline Sharing
We all know there are lots of offline ways people find websites and online social channels. As they look better and are easier to remember, vanity URLs are much better at encouraging activity online as a result of offline media and promotional resources.
#4 Keeps Audience Focused On Your Message
The purpose of landing pages & microsites is to add focus to the digital user experience, to make it easier for visitors to speedily find and do what you want them to find and do.
That’s why separate microsites and landing pages with vanity URLs are so great, they allow you to engage and interact with users in a focused setting without any outside interruptions to ruin the conversation.
#5 Make links more manageable
Traditional long URLs do have some advantage when it comes to keywords and SEO. However, the long format URLs are often lengthy and are not easy to share on emails, web pages, and especially social media services like Facebook and Twitter. Vanity URLs help to make links more manageable to share.
In the example above, Kissmetrics, TrafficCafe, SearchMarketingExpo have their own “kiss.ly”, “tgcafe” and “smxpo” vanity URLs respectively.
#6 Track the Success of the Campaign
Today’s marketer needs to show ROI when spending in any campaign. And since almost all SMBs are marketing on a tight budget, it’s severe for them to know exactly what is making value and what isn’t.
Campaigns that drive to a microsite or landing page vanity URL take your audience directly where you want them to go, instead of taking them to a company home page with multiple messages.
It also makes sure that all the traffic, data, and conversions that come from the campaign can be tied back to your specific program instead of your parent brand.
It is much easier to measure exactly how many visitors you have, what those visitors did and didn’t do when your traffic is being engaged to a campaign specific vanity URL.
#7 Lead Your SERP with Vanity URL SEO
When users are looking for a brand, Google put social networks on the search engine results page. This is due to the exact keyword match that you’ve customized in the URL.
By having the vanity URL to your brand on many web resources, you become able to lead your SERP with your own marketing message.
Vanity URLs are an excellent way of establishing a social connection with the customer and generating links.
The Takeaway
Vanity URLs are becoming increasingly important for content sharing on social media as leading to more shares, more views, and more clicks than the bulky traditional long URLs.
About DSIM:
Delhi School of Internet Marketing is India’s Premier Digital Marketing Training Institute delivering training to professionals, entrepreneurs and job-seekers, The institute offers an all-in-one advanced digital marketing course in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Delhi, Pune all over India. making individuals learn how to do marketing online.
Vanity URL: What It Is and Why You Need One
Despite the name, there’s nothing vain about them—vanity URLs are a popular way to increase a company’s digital presence and focus its branding.
These short, portable links can be used in marketing campaigns, marketing materials, email campaigns, social media posts, and anywhere else a brand might use links.
Below you’ll learn everything you need to know about vanity URLs—and how your brand can leverage them to improve your marketing efforts.
In this article:
What is a vanity URL?
A vanity link, also known as a custom short URL, takes a long, descriptive URL and turns it into a shorter, customized URL that is still descriptive of the related page but smaller in size. Vanity URLs usually include a brand name.
A vanity URL is used to help people easily remember a specific web address. These URLs often redirect to another longer URL that contains tracking information.
Custom URL vs. vanity URL
Vanity URLs and custom URLs are more or less the same thing. Technically, you could create a custom URL for some other (non-vanity) purpose. But the vast majority of the custom short links we see created through Bitly are for marketing purposes. They’re essentially functioning like a vanity plate—hence the term “vanity URL.”
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Vanity URL examples
Vanity URLs are easier to understand once you see them in action, so let’s look at a few examples, starting with ourselves.
At Bitly, we often promote our Enterprise product. But the URLs can become quite long once we add tracking information, so we created a vanity URL that can help users easily remember (and type) the URL.
Here is an example of a vanity URL that we use to promote Bitly Enterprise: bitly.com/enterprise.
Now we can use this vanity site on marketing materials both offline and online. Users can easily remember the URL, and we can add whatever tracking or redirects we need on the back end.
It’s much easier to remember our vanity URL than something like this long URL:
https://bitly.com/pages/landing/get-enterprise?utm_content=site-enterprise-button&utm_source=bitly-blog&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=blog-vanity-url
A vanity URL or branded URL is a chance to get creative with your brand. Think about it—your brand shares links in nearly every customer communication, whether it’s via email, on social media, on your website, or elsewhere.
So every time you share a link, there’s an opportunity to place your brand front and center in your digital communications.
What is a vanity domain name?
To start sharing vanity URLs, you need a vanity domain. A vanity domain name is a similar concept as a vanity website, except its focus is on the front part of the URL. The domain name is the bitly.com part of this URL: https://bitly.com/.
You can use a vanity domain name as an alternative to your default domain to help promote your brand via social media, mobile devices, and offline materials.
At Bitly, we call these domains “custom domains.”
When you are considering creating a vanity domain name or custom branded domain, you’ll want to ask yourself:
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How does the domain name look aesthetically? Is it concise enough, while still easy to read?
How do you make your own vanity URL using Bitly?
Creating your own vanity URL and custom domain with Bitly is easy! Just follow the steps below and you’ll be up and running with your own vanity URL in no time.
Set up your custom domain
The first thing you’ll want to do is decide what custom domain you want to use—if you don’t already have one. There are many different domain endings to consider, such as:
For example, our marketing team at Bitly uses “bitly.is” as our custom domain. Depending on what your business is all about, you might choose a custom domain name like sliceo.pizza, sneakr.life or delivr.today.
To set up your custom domain in Bitly, log into Bitly using an admin account and follow these steps:
1. Select Settings in the sidebar along the left side of the screen.
2. Select Custom domains, which appears under Account settings menu.
3. Select Add a Domain.
4. Choose I want to use my own domain.
5. Enter the custom domain you’d like to use.
6. Choose whether or not this is an unused domain, or if it will be a subdomain.
7. Select the group(s) where you plan to use this domain to shorten links.
8. Click Next and get ready to configure your DNS settings.
Configure your DNS settings
Now that you’ve purchased your domain and added your custom domain to Bitly, the setup is nearly complete. The last step you need to take is to configure your DNS for your Bitly account.
The way you’ll do this varies depending on who your domain registrar is and whether you’re setting up your DNS settings for an entire domain or just a subdomain.
The process generally looks like this, though you may need to modify some steps based on your domain registrar’s instructions.
First, log in to your domain registrar’s website and select the domain or subdomain you want to modify.
Next, look for the section where your DNS entries are stored. This might be called “DNS Configuration” or “Advanced DNS,” among other phrases.
The next step depends on if you’re configuring an entire domain or just a subdomain.
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If you’re configuring an entire domain, look for the A Records. Set the hostname for any A Records to @, and then set the IP addresses to 67.199.248.12 and 67.199.248.13. Remove any other A Records.
(Tip: if these brief instructions didn’t provide enough context, visit our full support article on how to configure your DNS for your Bitly account.)
Once you’ve completed setup and configured your DNS settings, when you go to shorten a new link, you’ll be able to see your custom domain in the dropdown menu below your link. Here’s what the dropdown in our team’s account looks like:
How to create a vanity URL
With Bitly, making your own vanity URL is simple. When you create a link using Bitly, you can set the custom back-half (that’s the vanity URL portion of your link) at the exact same time. You’ll find it under Ways to share; Custom back-half (optional):
If you want to turn an existing Bitly link into a vanity URL, you can do that, too: just use Bitly to edit the link, and you can customize the back-half right there in Bitly.
Vanity URL: What It Is & Why It’s Important?
Vanity URL can make your different product or service branding business unique among your customers. You just have to know how to use and make the best outcome to run a successful online business. This blog is concentrated on giving you a clear idea about vanity links, get actual definitions, & the importance of using them. And guess what? At the end of this blog, you are going to get an advanced solution by which you can make a huge difference on your custom branding, shortening URL & more. Enjoy reading till the end!
Vanity URL: What It Is & Why It’s Important? 10
Vanity URL stands for customizing your brand URL with a domain name and redirecting your users from one URL to another. It contains information with proper keywords or meaningful words that directly lead customers to what Vanity links consist of. It’s informative, descriptive, relevant, and memorable. Vanity links are also known as branded links or custom short URLs. That helps you feature your brand or can make your business be represented with specific keywords for running successful promotional activities online
Differences Between A Generic Link & Vanity URL
Generic URL can be your real domain link, homepage, or other important page links in your website. That will represent your brand with a direct website link and form direct promotion. Suppose wpdeveloper.net is a generic link that represents WPDeveloper the company itself as a brand.
Vanity URLs is the customized link that redirects your user to the real domain of your product site. You have to use a keyword that represents your business or any particular promotional activity to make your custom URL meaningful.
For instance, ‘https://wpdeveloper.net/blogs’ is the original link of your blog site link that can be converted with a vanity URL to track its performance in advance. And this link is not easily memorized.
So instead if you create a vanity URL for this link, your customers can easily do their searches and find the link. The vanity link could be ‘wpd.blogs’. Which can easily be remembered or can easily redirect your customers to your product page. Or you can entirely change the URL and make it more customized for your audience.
Studies have shown that 39% of Click Through Links Can Be Increased With Branded Links or Vanity URLs.
Why Should You Use Vanity URLs?
Vanity URL should be used for serving your marketing purposes effectively and raise your brand authenticity by creating a memorable link for your consumers. There are a lot more other things you should know. Let’s have a look:
1. Easier To Remember & Use
When you are creating a vanity or custom URL it will help you redirect customers directly into your website or campaign and make it memorable for your business. This URL can carry information about your brand or campaign with related keywords. So that customers can easily remember, search and go through your marketing campaign or other purposes effectively.
2. For Better SEO Results
Vanity URL consists of keywords that whenever your customers search through this link they can easily get converted to your real website page and perform better for your SEO results.
3. Build More Trust Among Audiences
It helps to build trust among your customers for being clear, concise, and real. So focusing on creating a variety of URLs for any of your long or website URLs can make your campaign or website long URL more sensible for your customers to build credibility.
4. Accelerate Online Sharing
You can easily share your brand-specific promotion, campaign, or advertisement through vanity URLs on social media. Because it’s always being encouraged to shorten links on social platforms for better search, boosting, and can easily track the performance of it. And this is true for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or other social networking sites which are hugely used for online promotional activities.
Besides, anyone can easily remember and share your Vanity link on their social profiles, or as a business owner, you can promote it easily by yourself too. It helps you make your paid campaign, social sharing, or dragging customers with a related keyword that can help you on SEO optimization is encouraged.
Best Practices For Using A Vanity URL
There are some best practices before creating a Vanity URL for your business website, page, or posts. You can anytime shorten and customize your brand URL to redirect to your real website addresses and more. So for this, you have to make sure when you can create and use your Vanity Links and more.
1. Keep You Vanity URL Simple
The more simple, concise, and meaningful keywords you use to make your long website URL be shortened and memorable, the more your customers will drag into this. It will help you get more leads and track them efficiently.
2.Use Where Necessary
This is not necessary to create a vanity URL for each of your website links, you can make it happen for the relevant campaign, posts, or paid advertisement, email redirection, and more. Because the purpose of your Vanity URL is to make it shorten and be more relatable for your business. And if it’s served, you can avoid creating a vanity URL for your brand.
3.Make It Compatible With SEO Strategy
When you are making any Vanity URL if you use relevant keywords that fit your business purpose or product name can be more effective for your website SEO. Then your Vanity Links will be more compatible with SEO to provide your online business a benefit.
Get BetterLinks The Powerful Link Shortening Solution For WordPress
As you have already known about Vanity URL/Custom URL/Branded links. And each name is carrying the same value of shortening with a custom domain. Now to help you create your vanity Links and more, we are here to provide you the perfect solution for WordPress users. You can now shorten, track and redirect your website link, manage your affiliates, and more with this latest all-in-one advanced link-shortening solution BetterLinks.
With BetterLinks you can easily shorten, redirect links, use custom slugs, add categories, tags to your links, and make them meaningful for your online visitors. You can run any paid campaign, encourage social sharing and track the performance of your shortened link with an in-built advanced analytics dashboard.
Even if you want you can A/B test your customized links, create a custom domain or branded links, and analyze the performance with BetterLinks built-in analytics tool of your shortened links to get success. It also has powerful integration with the Google Analytics tool in any case you want to measure both built-in analytics and Google Analytics data.
Moreover, BetterLinks comes with WildCards facility, can disable any bot links, advanced user role management system is also included. Anytime if you face any issue you can refresh your database by clearing cache and make your link management process faster than before.
Besides, you can export or import data to redirect those links directly, make it sorted, or further analyze it. There are many more you will get with this complete link shortening and management solution for WordPress. And if you are worried about migrating your database, you can also easily do that by following its easy migration process. So you will get an all-in-one solution to manage your entire website links with ease.
Now It’s Your Turn To Explore
As we have discussed in detail, all basics that you will need to know before you start creating a Vanity URL or curious about to know what it is. Hope you find this helpful and feel free to share your thoughts with us by commenting below. If you want to read more exciting blogs, visit our blog page, and join our Facebook community to get along with all WordPress experts.
Explore What a Vanity URL Is and How to Use It Properly
Saying it differently, such a personalized unique address or as it is also named “Branded Link,” is a simplified form of long and boring URL. As a result of the transformation, we get a laconic custom-orientated web address.
Every such link includes a name of your domain (your trademark) or some term related to your business. A short original URL such as this attracts the attention of the audience when emerging in social networks and advertisements. How do you get this type of URL? Both users and companies can get such a personalized web address for their profiles on social networks like Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter after having learned these instructions.
How to use Vanity URLs?
As Vanity URLs are used for business promotion, you should grasp the rules of their usage. Never neglect these three simple regulations when using Custom Short URLs, as they are also called, to make them perform their functions.
- Use it to a point. There is no need to exploit such a unique web address to represent every one of your shared links in a “cute way.” A large number of websites have rather short web addresses and they don’t need Vanity URLs to look original. The main target of using the unique web address is to shape some short and recognizable address for the audience to find no difficulties in associating it with the represented trademark and which will also helps customers to memorize it. If your original link performs these functions without any transformation, don’t implement any changes.
- Combine your SEO policy and Vanity URL. Using your Branded Links in synergy with other techniques and strategies will lead to quicker success. Ascertain that your unique web address serves a valuable supplementation to your SEO policy.
- Choose distinctness. Do not confuse your customer by shortened forms and associations in presentation of your trademark – clients will appreciate honesty and crisp writing. By offering them enough information in the link, you describe them a direct route to the place of destination and gain their trust.
What Advantages Can You Get by Using Vanity URLs?
It is amazing how this tiny detail can boost your business. From the first sight, it may seem that a Vanity URL is just a line which is pleasant for the eye, but it has multiple functions which means the game is worth the candle. Get acquainted with the main advantages you can make use of when you have your personalized web address.
- You are more trusted. A Vanity URL means you put the cards on the table when offering the user to activate a link for it is an open invitation. A person looking at it knows where he or she will come. This is a type of guarantee that this link is not a ticket to some fraudulent site which purpose is spamming or phishing. Thus, you illustrate to the audience what content you offer and ascertain that it corresponds to your trademark. If speaking in figures, this method helps to increase the Click Through Rate index by up to 39% in comparison with short or long impersonalized links.
- The trademark becomes more recognizable. When trying to find your way to the user a Vanity URL serves as a magic wand. By shortening your web address, you will become recognized even when you share content of other trademarks or users.
- It boosts your link operation. A Branded Link gives you complete control over it: redirect the location of URL, include changes in its description, or just remove it – you are free to do whatever you want.
- You make your SEO work for you. To help your trademark just as well as content stand out from the crowd in this concern, you just need to insert your keyword in the URL slug. A pleasant addition is that from now on your brand will be associated with the chosen keyword.
- The brand gets in contact with the user. When using an ordinary generic link, long or short, a person fails to decode the message encrypted in it that creates a sort of barrier between you and your potential client. A person just scans or copy-pastes such a link. When working with Vanity URLs, your presentation is readable as it contains words. Thus, potential customer can easily read the word combination, “decode,” pronounce, and memorize it, which gives you a chance for even better interaction in the future.
- You can share it offline efficiently. To find some useful link most of us will surf the Internet but there exist a great number of other options in this concern. Though the general tendency of expenditures for marketing purposes is showing that advertising in traditional media looses its popularity, to use every bit of leverage is the only correct approach of a successful business. Make use of them to stand out from the crowd. Demonstrate your Vanity URL in varied offline materials to take your chance to contribute to your online performance which others choose to reject. This includes advertisements in shops, newspapers, mailing, distribution of flyers and booklets. One more well-tested addition is souvenir stuff with branded inscriptions like pencils, magnets, calendars, pens, T-shirts, sweaters, coffee cups, bags, water bottles, stickers, USBs, key chains, and so on.
- You get additional options due to UTM Tools and Integrated Retargeting. Vanity URLs enrich your retargeting lists as here you can include users who activated your link – this simple trick can make your top funnel traffic five times as big! Working on your original web address is high time for UTM parameter creation.
SEO promotion and Vanity URLs
As the URL is one of the main heroes in the whole SEO struggle for top ranks, there is an urgent need to devote a separate chapter to how this little tricky thing can contribute to the outcome of the battle.
301 Redirect. This is a command serving to redirect a URL from some determined location to another which refers to the competence of search systems and bots, which thoughts do not influence the link juice. However, from now on a sharable link is at your disposal.
URL containing a keyword. Insert some valuable operative words related to the content on your website into your unique web address. For instance, if the website deals with essay writing help, Writing Help URL is a decent example of a Vanity URL.
Associated Keyword. When you use the combination of one keyword and a keyword related to content on the site or activity you create an association which is further processed by bots as two related issues. As a result, the trademark name is associated with that keyword.
Smart TLD. A Vanity URL helps to find your way to your client due to the brand-associated TLD. If you offer sushi in Toronto, “Toronto.Sushi/best” will serve a worthy personalized link. Thus, your smart web address will attract a person looking for the “Best Sushi in Toronto” to this resource.
How to Get a Vanity URL?
The procedure of creating a Vanity URL is just as short as the branded address itself.
What does a Branded link consist of? There are only three ingredients: the first one is Vanity Domain, the second – URL Slug, the third one – TLD.
Select your Vanity Domain
Choose some reliable service, sign in and select a Domain name corresponding to your business activity to make your Vanity Domain reflect interconnection of your name and content. If you coped with this task, your clients will have no problems with your link identification. The majority of people find this part a tiresome affair but it is worth the efforts. Anyway, if your Muse fails to prompt you some decent example, perform a search of “How to create the best Vanity Domain” and make use of a number of articles with prompts listed by Google.
Now that you know how to make a URL marked “Vanity,” time has come for action. Here you can find a domain corresponding to your needs and learn its price.
Select a TLD
In comparison with the branded Domain name use, this stage offers less complications: just pick out some number of Top Level Domains corresponding to your purposes. Examples of TDL:
Mysite.live – to devote to any live performance, like webinars
Mysite.post – for posts
Mysite.news – to devote to news
Mysite.fun – for funny stuff
Mysite.link – to gather shared material
URL Slug (with a Keyword)
As soon as you’ve made your decision as for Vanity Domain and TDL, move on to the creation your original link. You’ll get the registered domains on your account to help you successfully finish this task.
Nataliya is SEO expert at Sitechecker. She is responsible for blog. Can’t live without creating valuable content about SEO and Digital Marketing.