Before you start
Things you need to know:
You can use a branded short URL in your SMS campaigns.
Link shortening and tracking
To make sure you use as few characters as possible and can track engagement with your SMS campaigns, you can turn on link shortening and tracking.
To do this:
Create an SMS campaign.
Select CAMPAIGN OPTIONS, and for Links, select Shorten.
Select SAVE and then create your campaign.
Enabling link shortening inside a campaign controls the setting for that campaign only. If you’d like to enable link shortening as the default for all SMS campaigns, select Account settings in the side panel, then, under Features, select the Enable link shortening for all SMS campaigns checkbox. To confirm, select SAVE SETTINGS at the bottom of the page.
To access Account settings at any other time, expand the User menu and go to Settings > General > Account settings.
Even with link shortening switched on, you can see that links in the editor view stay the same length. The reason for this is because we generate unique shortened links behind the scenes once you send – this is how we track who's clicking.
The character count in the SMS editor displays the number of characters with the shortened link accounted for.
The character count can not account for data field personalisation, so your character count may increase on send depending on the values held in any data fields you include in your message.
Learn more in Why data fields might increase SMS cost.
The campaign preview shows you an example of a how a short link looks in your final message.
The link generated for the campaign preview is just an example. Do not copy this link into a campaign.
Use data fields in shortened links
Before starting, it's essential to understand the different parts that make up a URL. In its simplest form, a URL is made up of three main components:
Scheme
This is the first part of the URL where you specify the protocol you want to use – either
http://orhttps://.
Hostname
The hostname is the main body of the URL, and it's often known as the domain name —for example, www.example.com.
Path
The path component of the URL is everything after the first slash (/) — for example,
/this-is-the-path.
Put together, the scheme, hostname, and path of our example make up the URL: https://www.example.com/this-is-the-path.
You can create a custom URL using the content stored in your contact data fields. To do this, enter the data field tag inline in your URL – after the scheme and hostname:
In this example, @COMP_LINK@ contains a unique path to a web page for the contact.
Don’t forget to include a slash after the hostname, either in your message body or at the start of the data field itself.