What is the BEST URL shortener?
The most asked question among publishers! Well, I will be honest with you, there is no BEST one for all publishers. That’s right, as all publishers have different kind of traffic, so are the shorteners – different. It depends on your traffic, which countries is it coming from, what is the website it comes from etc.
Payout rates!
You may argue the rates is what makes a shortener THE BEST, but that’s not true! From personal experience I can tell you that a shortener may have hell of a rates and yet cheat you as f**k. You may get twice bigger CPM, but only half of your visitors are counted, so basically you will still earn the same as you work with shortener which counts 100% of your visitors and have twice lower rates. You can’t know that without testing first. I always advise my followers to test the shorteners with some traffic and see what is their earnings – NOT CPM, or counted visitors, at the end of the day the cash you earned is the most important. So don’t look at the rates too much – test for an hour and check the earned money compare to other shorteners you work with. Always check new shorteners and work with those with which you earn most. Don’t use a shortener for too long, as they start manipulating your personal CPM in their advantage little by little.
Payment schedule!
How often the admin clear the payment requests, this is what you must care about at 100%. Definitely the BEST shortener pays daily! Forget about monthly payments, in most cases those shorteners will scam you. After all, why should you use an intermediary like the URL shortener if it doesn’t take the risk of the monthly payments. Remember, each shortener work with bigger ad network companies, which work directly with the advertisers. Those ad networks pays to the shortener monthly. That is why some shorteners pay monthly too. But why should you use them, why not use directly the ad networks? Yes, because the shortener will 100% pay you faster, that’s it, that’s the standard and you should not make any compromises with that.
Counted visitors!
Use a shortener which counts at least 65% of your traffic. The average is 70%, anything above that makes the shortener one of the best in terms of counting the visitors. If you wonder why the shorteners don’t count 100% of your traffic, you should read the article “How the URL Shorteners cheat their publishers?” How to find out what is the %, use a statistic page before the shortener and after the shortener and install stat’s codes which counts the number of unique visitors.
Ads!
Absolutely important for you is the impact of the shortener’s ad pages on your visitors. If there are thousands of popup ads and redirects you will lose big fat % of your traffic, which won’t be counted and will not reach the destination page you send them to. Use shorteners with user friendly ad pages, nowadays the average number of popup ads are 2x per page. There was some golden years, which shorteners use only adsense for their income and not even a single pop up ad, but that’s over now. However, avoid shorteners with redirects and too many popup ads, because you will lose huge number of visitors without being counted or reaching your destination websites.
Other things you must look after!
Last but not least, you should look after shorteners, which use SSL encryption between your visitors and their servers. Also use shorteners which have reliable and fast servers without downtimes, because you will lose money when their websites are offline due to overloading and shorteners with fast support! All the components in this article are important and together, makes an URL shortener the BEST in the business. If you can’t find a shortener with all these advantages, at least try to use such which have some of those components.
Hope this information was useful to you! Wish you all a lot of visitors and $$$!