Vanity URL – is a short version of your site domain, that is easy to remember and enter in the browser. This picture from newspaper should explain you pretty well why publishing of usual links in your offline advertise is not a good idea.
Let`s imagine I`m promoting my app – SKAGs Table Creator, which is currently situated on this page: https://serhiipuzyrov.com/skags-table-creator
Now links looks not so bad, but what if we want to track the source, from which people come to this page? To do that – we should use UTM tags in our link. After tagging we will get something like that:
“https://serhiipuzyrov.com/skags-table-creator?utm_source=newspaper&utm_medium=offline&utm_campaign=skags-app”
Definetly we can`t use that link in our promoting materials. I mean ofcourse we can, but I hope You don’t expect that people would write that whole link in browser, right? What we can do, to get a short memorable link and at the same time track traffic, that would come from that link? The answer is – Vanity URL!
Vanity URL is a link, that is short and individual for every advertising channel. First you should do to get a vanity url – is to registrate a short memorable domain for your site. For mine it could be something like “puzyrov.me”. After that, if you want to use your link for tracking different traffic sources, your link should have a url slug, original for every source. For example, i can use “puzyrov.me/skags” for my advertising in journal, and “puzyrov.me/stc” for advertising in newspaper. The idea is to use original slug for every single traffic source. Then every vanity url should redirect your users to appropriate page of your site, but with added UTM tags to original url. So “puzyrov.me/skags” would redirect to
“https://serhiipuzyrov.com/skags-table-creator?utm_source=newspaper&utm_medium=offline&utm_campaign=skags-app”
and “puzyrov.me/stc” to
“https://serhiipuzyrov.com/skags-table-creator?utm_source=journal&utm_medium=offline&utm_campaign=skags-app”.
Now if user will see this kind of link in advertisement and will enter it in browser – it would redirect him to appropriate url with UTM tags. You can host and configure redirection by yourself, or do it with the help of vanity url services.
And at the end some examples of vanity links of worldwide companies:
Amazon – http://amzn.to/
Facebook – http://fb.me/
Pepsi – http://pep.si/
YouTube – http://youtu.be/
Spotify – http://spoti.fi/