Shortened Hyperlinks

Insert a hyperlink, or URL, into a text message marketing message. Learn more about this SMS marketing feature from Tatango.

Judd Bobin avatar
Written by Judd Bobin
Updated over a week ago

Instructions

  1. When creating a scheduled message to either all of your subscribers at the same time, or just to new subscribers after they've opted-in, click on the chain icon, which can be found just below where you enter your message.

  2. Copy and paste the hyperlink you'd like to use in your message into the blank field. Before going forward, make sure you have at least 14 available characters in your message, as we're going to need that many characters to insert the shortened version of your hyperlink.

  3. Click the orange Shrink button, and watch as we automagically insert a shortened version of that link into your message (powered by Bitly).

  4. That's it, finish your message as you normally would, then send/schedule/save.

Additional Notes

  • If you do not use our bit.ly shortener we will not be able to track the clicks, even if the link you do use is a bit.ly link.

  • To view how many people clicked on your shortened link, you'll want to visit the sent message report for the message you put your shortened link in. More information here.

  • It is important to note, if you shrink a URL and it turns into anything other than a version of bit.ly (for example facebook.com turns to on.fb.me/TXzEf0) then the Tatango system will NOT be able to track it. To allow for tracking, when Tatango gives you a version of a bit.ly link that doesn't start bit.ly, you'll need to follow these instructions. 1) Take your un-shortened link here https://goo.gl/ and create a short link. It will look something like http://goo.gl/8c6Q1u. Take that shortened link, and use it in Tatango's link shortener, which should produce a link that looks something like bit.ly/something. If you follow those steps, Tatango will be able to track how many of your subscribers click on that link.

  • If you're linking to the same webpage in different messages, you'll notice that the short URL links created by Tatango are the same. It's because of this that we're unable to track which of your messages generated the clicks. To fix this issue, add a query string to the URL you're shortening, so change tatango.com to tatango.com/?m-v1, where the query string is "?m=v1"

  • Bitly reports on total clicks, not unique clicks. This means that if one person clicks on your shortened URL 100 times in a text message, Tatango will report that the link received 100 clicks.

  • Just like any link on the web, links received in a text message may be shared with others. If your link receives a significantly higher click-through rate than normal, or receives more clicks that subscribers you sent it to, this most likely is because the link was shared outside of your subscriber database.

Search Tags

  • URL, link, links, bitly, bit.ly, link shortener, www, shorten, shortened

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