Get creative with domain extensions & branded domains
Build brand-awareness while tracking data through Bitly branded short domains
In Act 2, Scene 2 of one of the most overhyped plays in literary history, William Shakespeare pondered, ‘What’s in a name?’
As it turns out, if you’re running a small business, a name can matter. A lot.
That no doubt jibes with your real-world experience. Likely, a lot of time and thought went into your business name. NFX (in an article titled ‘Your Company Name Matters… A Lot) writes:
I woke up to the power of company names when we screwed up my startup’s name in 1999. We called it Emode which in hindsight was hard to spell, impossible to remember, and a dated name within 24 months. With coaching, we changed it to Tickle. Traffic shot up 30%, journalists started writing about us, our ad spend became 20% more effective, and no one forgot our name.
A natural extension of that idea is the ‘name’ your business adopts or promotes online — the domain users see when looking at or clicking on your links.
Though other link-shortening tools do exist (until recently, the Google Developers team was building its own internal tool), for the purposes of this article, we’ll be looking specifically at Bitly. Why?
In my experience, their staff are easy to work with, their tools are intuitive and user-friendly and they offer unparalleled data tracking — plus many of the key functionalities can be used with a free account.
Google even recommended Bitly (and Owly) in its press release announcing the discontinuation of goo.gl, which is a pretty strong endorsement.
So first: what is Bitly? Bitly CEO markjosephson — in one of the most fascinating articles I’ve read here on Medium — described the company’s mission and trajectory best in ‘The Rise, Fall and Rise of Bitly’
The link isn’t merely a way to get consumers from Point A to Point B; it’s the common bridge within and between every marketing channel. Marketers around the world were already using Bitly to brand and shorten their links, but the more advanced marketers were using our analytics to help understand their performance across an increasingly large and complex array of channels; SMS to paid acquisition, email marketing to social.
‘Omnichannel’ is a term that gets thrown around a lot in marketing these days. Achieving omnichannel optimization is easier said than done, but the starting place is having a single place to track all the various far-flung tendrils of your marketing channels, and compare apples-to-apples.
I recommend to all of search/local’s clients that they start their omnichannel marketing journey with a free Bitly account.
Bitly’s proprietary documentation describes their link-shortening tool thusly:
Bitly allows you to easily shorten, share, manage, and analyze your favorite links from around the web.
After you sign up for a free account, you will see the option to “Create Bitlink” at the top of the page. Once you shorten a link, you can customize and share your link across social channels, email, SMS, print, or anywhere else you can think to put a link!
In your account you can track total clicks, where they came from, and when so you can know the best ways to use your links!
A free account offers you the ability to shorten your links — and track data from them in one place — and you’ve likely seen or encountered them before. Take a look at a screenshot I pulled from a YouTube video:
How, exactly, Mr. Sunday Movies uses the data from that is anyone’s guess, but it’s a good representation of the first level of branding shortened links. He’s getting data from the use of bitlinks, and presumably using that data to help guide decisions about where to post content and how effective those posts are.
There are other ways to elevate your link-shortening game, though, even within the scope of Bitly’s free functionality.
In the above article, former Bitly staffer Denise Chan tackles the next level of branding your shortened links. In ‘Links are usually an afterthought,’ she asserts (with plenty of data to support her assertion) that branded links can increase clickthrough rates by 34%.
I contend that there are benefits to branded shortened links that are more difficult — or even impossible — to measure precisely. Instead of bit.ly/[whatever], like the above example, which looks somewhat messy, by buying your own domain and linking it with your Bitly account, you can start to generate much more aesthetically-pleasing, brand-building, clickable links.
Choose a domain
Over the last half-decade or so, tons of new generic top-level domains (gTLDs) have been opened up for public and private use. A gTLD is what comes at the end of your domain’s URL, i.e. ‘.com,’ ‘.net,’ ‘.gov,’ and more specialized, niche ones like ‘.catering,’ ‘.agency’ and more.
You can help reinforce your business’ value-add and services by leaning into it with a solid gTLD. Click here for The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) full list of available gTLDs. The thing to keep in mind is that your Bitly branded short domain (BSD) needs to be 15 characters or fewer, including the dot.
The BSD offers two chances to customize: on the domain, itself, and the back half of the link. In the examples above, ‘home’ links to our website’s home page, ‘blog’ links here to the Medium publication and ‘Facebook’ links to our Facebook Page. You can even mouse over the examples in the previous sentence to see the links, themselves. Savvy internet users typically use this functionality to see where, exactly, they’re headed before they click.
Hence: increased clickthrough rates. Branding shortlinks signals to users that your brand is trustworthy, worthwhile and (with creative domain selection) expert in a certain niche or field.
Taking just the list of gTLDs starting with the letter ‘A,’ we can see how various styles of domain could be useful to your small business. Obviously, search/local HTX saw the value in ‘.agency,’ and if you offer B2B services or are branded as some kind of agency — there you go.
If you produce creative content, then you might get value from ‘.author’ or ‘.art.’ If you have a healthy-lifestyle brand, ‘.active’ might tie into your business model and services. Also, if you start to look, you’ll notice trends that you can tap into. For instance, ‘.io’ is popular among tech companies, so if you deal with tech, that might be an advantageous gTLD to leverage.
Also, you can get creative by forming words across the dot using the shorter gTLDs.
‘.ck’ is an extension, so ‘GoodLu.ck’ is a possible domain (though it is listed as unavailable; evidently, I wasn’t the first to have this idea). It’s a guess-and-check process, figuring out what’s available and what would work to help build your brand.
Pay particular attention to those 2- and 3-character extensions, since you’re limited to 15 characters overall, and shorter is better.
This is an example of the results, and of the benefit of tracking links through Bitly. This is a peek at my dashboard and the value of tracking clicks through bitlinks. I’ve honed in on Sunday, Jan 6, when my total clicks (20) came from three sources: Email, SMS & Direct (7), Facebook (11) and ‘Other Websites’ (1).
Thus, you can compare efforts across your various channels or verticals, helping you derive answers to questions like: how effective is paid advertising on Facebook vs. Google? Which social media platform is more likely to convert for your small-business?
Meanwhile, as your propagate your links across those various channels, your carefully-selected, clever BSD will help build awareness of — and trust in — your brand in ways both measurable and immeasurable.
Did you find the perfect BSD or domain extension for your small-business? We’d love to hear about it! Leave a response with your BSD and the reasoning behind it, and we’ll check it out.
