6 Things You Need to Know Before You Use Owly

Nobody likes long URLs – they appear old-fashioned, unappealing, even a bit spammy. If you’ve ever had to copy and paste a link that was so long that it spanned multiple lines, then you’ll easily learn to appreciate a URL shortener like Owly. But is it the best and the safest solution?

1. What are URL Shorteners?

That’s why most people prefer seeing neat, simple, and straightforward URLs. A URL shortener is a service used to convert regular URLs into a somewhat more condensed format.

leadquizzes long short url

While some URL shorteners simply do just what their name promises, others are packed with additional features, such as analytics (enabling you to track the number of clicks you receive on each shortened link) or bookmarking.

Contrary to popular belief, shortened URLs are not used just on Twitter (although they certainly do come in handy when trying to avoid exceeding the 140-character limit). They can be used on any social network, on your website, or basically any online post.

URL shortener twitter

Most URL shorteners that are embedded in social networks (like Twitter’s t.co) will automatically shorten only URLs that are 19 characters or longer. If you’re using your own shortener, however, you can manually choose to shorten a URL that is, for example, only 10 characters long.

What does it mean in practice? Well, instead of a long URL like this one:

https://www.leadquizzes.com/blog/ubersuggest-find-profitable-keywords-with-neil-patels-free-seo-tool

You can use a much shorter version, such as this one:

http://ow.ly/d9AV30jRJWJ

Or, if you have access to a more advanced URL shortener (such as Ow.ly or Owly Pro), you can customize it to reflect your own company or brand (we’re going to show you how Moz does this on their own Twitter account a bit later in the text). But first, a few words about one of the most popular URL shorteners out there – Hootsuite’s Ow.ly or Owly.

2. What is Owly?

Ow.ly (hereinafter referred to as Owly) is a tool that enables you to shorten links and track the traffic that comes from those links. With that in mind, it’s more than just a simple URL shortener – it can be used to measure your social ROI (return of investment) as well.

owly

Owly is essentially a free-to-use online tool, though you need to have a Hootsuite account (also free) in order to use it. In the past, it was available with no registration or login. Now, the Owly URL shortener is part of the Hootsuite dashboard, which is meant to increase security for their users. Anyway, the registration is pretty basic and straightforward and you’ll gain access to this great tool in no time.

Some of the main benefits of using Owly are:

  • SEO-friendly – All Owly-shortened URLs are indexable and fully-redirectable, in accordance with the best SEO practices
  • Control – Control who can shorten URLs by assigning access to chosen team members only
  • Portability – Track clicks on short URLs from Facebook, newsletters, comments, and micro-sites
  • Security – All links are checked against Google’s Safe Browsing blacklist to prevent malware and phishing attacks

Although the free version of Hootsuite gives you unlimited access to Owly, you’ll have to upgrade to a paid plan if you want access to more advanced features.

3. How Does Owly Pro Work?

As a part of their premium plans, HootSuite offers advanced custom URL shortening services through the Owly tool.

Owly Pro is available for an additional charge to clients subscribed to the Enterprise plan, which offers custom solutions. Some of the exclusive Owly Pro features include:

  • Custom branded URL shortening
  • Access to detailed analytics (click-through rates, date ranges, regions, etc.)
  • CSV and PDF reports
  • Custom URL parameters enabling you to track campaigns via Google
Owly dashboard
Owly dashboard

Maybe the greatest thing about Owly Pro is that you can use it to create memorable, custom, short domain links that reflect your own brand. Something similar to what Moz does on their own Twitter account. If you’ve ever visited their feed, you might’ve noticed that they’re using their own custom short URL – mz.cm.

This basically means that people at Moz take a link like this one:

https://moz.com/blog/efficient-link-reclamation?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_content=efficient_link_reclamation&utm_campaign=blog_post

And use one of the URL shortener tools to shorten it to look like this:

https://mz.cm/2rdhE7J

Much sleeker, right?

4. How Does Owly Work?

You don’t really have to be a tech expert to figure it out as it’s all pretty straightforward. First of all, you’ll have to register your own Hootsuite account or sign in if you already have one. If we tell you that this is actually the most difficult part of the process, you get the idea of how simple it is to shorten an URL. It involves just three steps any nine-year-old could do on their own:

  1. Copy any URL
  2. Paste it in HootSuite
  3. Click on the ‘Shrink’ button and watch that URL as it loses its length
owly url shortener

Voila! Your shortened URL is ready to use.

Hootsuite

As Owly is only one of its features, what else does Hootsuite have to offer? As you’re sort of forced to register at Hootsuite in order to use Owly, we’re going to have a word or two about the platform itself.

Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media management platforms, which lets you manage all your social accounts in one place. Here you can also track important conversations, schedule tweets in advance, and, as already mentioned, use the URL link shortener.

hootsuite logo

Numerous big names, such as Visa, WWF, Allianz, PennMutual, etc., rely on Hootsuite to manage their social media. It offers a limited Free plan that includes 3 social profiles and 30 scheduled messages for 1 user. If you want to take your social media management to a higher level, you’ll need to cash out for one of the paid plans, be it the Professional, Team, Business, or Enterprise plan.

5. What Are Owly Alternatives?

If you want to use URL shortener without signing up for a full Hootsuite pack, here are some alternatives to Owly.

Goo.gl

Goo.gl is one of the most established players in the world of URL shorteners, but Google has recently announced that this service will shut down on 30 March 2019. Not only that, from 13 April 2018, only the existing users have been able to use the service to create shortened links.

goo-gl url shortenerLuckily for all the short URL enthusiasts out there, there are plenty of quality alternatives to the Google’s tool (Owly being just one of those).

Bit.ly

Bit.ly is one of the oldest and most-used URL shorteners around. The basic tool is free and works similar to Owly. However, companies and established brands might want to use the paid version, as it offers a wide range of additional features, from analytics to custom branded short URLs and APIs for linking into mobile applications.

 bitly logo

 

You’ll often find Bit.ly integrated with other services and third-party applications such as TwitterFeed or TweetDeck.

Tinyurl.com

Although its simplistic and a bit outdated interface may deter some users, many people prefer Tiny URL to other URL shorteners like Owly, simply because it doesn’t ‘force’ you to register or log in so that you can start generating links.

TinyURL logo

All you have to do is go to tinyurl.com, paste your long link into the box, click the ‘Make TinyURL!’ button, and your super-short link will be ready in no time. It even allows you to create custom short URLs for free (as long as nobody has already used them).

Buff.ly

A similar recipe to the one Hootsuite used with Owly was applied by Buffer as well. Just like Hootsuite, Buffer is one of the most popular social media management tools. And just like Hootsuite, it has its own URL shortener – Buff.ly. So, whenever you copy and paste a link into Buffer, it will automatically get it shortened for you.

Buff.ly

You can also use Buffer to track your analytics and measure the clicks for each individual shortened URL. If you want to learn more about Buffer’s features and how they compare to Opwly and Hootsuite, click here.

Rebrandly

Rebrandly is also a URL shortener, but what is unique with this tool is that they believe that every link that is created and shared online should be branded. Using branded links over generic links will enhance brand visibility and trust, and can increase click-through rates by up to 39%.

rebrandly

This tool also provides in-depth analytics so that their users can understand how their links perform. They offer a free plan, as well as more advanced ones depending on your needs.

6. The Dark Side of URL Shortening

Some studies have shown that the convenience of not having to copy and paste those long, ugly URLs may come with a cost to your security (in addition to being used by spammy marketers to smuggle affiliate links under the veil of a shortened URL).

A study by two Cornell Tech researchers has examined the shortened URLs created by two major services: Google Maps and Microsoft OneDrive. Since the shortened links contained a small number of characters, the researchers were able to find shortened URLs linked to actual documents, using a brute force attack.

URL shortener security issues
Source: Cornell Tech

They examined 100M shortened URLs by randomly choosing 6-character tokens (like “1xdY6HZ”). As it turned out, 42% of the tokens actually led to full URLs, almost 19,500 of which were OneDrive documents. The research has shown that shortened URLs could be abused to gain access to somebody’s documents or even entire accounts.

Conclusion

However, there have been serious efforts to prevent these things from happening, which is one of the main reasons why Hootsuite integrated Owly into their own dashboard. So, if you want to shorten those URLs as securely as possible, Owly might be the best choice for you.

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Comments (5)

  • On January 18, 2020 at 5:16 am wrote:

    Saved as a favorite, I really like your blog!

    • Jeremy Ellens
      On January 27, 2020 at 4:04 pm wrote:

      Thank you 🙂

  • On January 29, 2020 at 8:18 pm wrote:

    Good post! We will be linkig to this particularly great content on our site.
    Keep up the good writing.

  • Bob Green
    On February 4, 2020 at 8:53 pm wrote:

    Nice. Now there are a significant number of services for shortening links. I wonder what they’ll come up with next.

  • Ebrima jaiteh
    On October 19, 2020 at 9:02 am wrote:

    Ok that is very interested

Comments are closed.