Videscape Acquires Shrunk.Co URL Shortening Service

We are very pleased to announce that Videscape (the parent company that owns Clickasnap and Videscape) has successfully acquired the URL shortening and tracking service Shrunk.co.

What is URL shortening?

Many services like Twitter and press release companies don’t like long URLs. Sites like Clickasnap, Youtube and Videscape all supply URL’s that have a format similar to this; ‘https://www.clickasnap.com/i/awqj2sughx6cx5a5‘ this link alone consists of 46 characters, which when using a site like twitter with 140 character limit signficantly shortens the amount of spare space available to any content producer. Shrunk.co simplifies this by allowing you to shorten a link from the 48 character link above to a link like this ‘http://shrunk.co/jLRby’ consisting of a mere 23 characters. Now, whilst to most this doesn’t sound overly exciting there are other uses for this sort of software technology:

  • It allows the user to do comparative analysis. Ever seen a Meta post showing ‘X thousand ov views’ and then seen 2 views on your website/picture/video? Link shorteners track direct link clicks
  • Allows you to create a ‘splash’ page, in other words a page the user lands on prior to heading to your link allowing you to set the user into a specific mindset. Eg buy this, sign up here, etc etc
  • Allows simple and effective link click analytics, location, user, incoming site etc

Why have we bought this company?

Several reasons; we currently pay a company called bit.ly £1,000 a month to track our links in our advertising campaign, this purchase instantly saves us this ongoing cost. What this service does is supply a shortened link that can be posted anywhere on the web just like the main website URL. What it actually does though is track, accurately, every click on the link. So, as an example; let’s say you post a link to your Clickasnap photo onto Meta. You go back a couple of hours later and you see the post has been ‘seen’ by 5,000 people, had 200 shares and 1,000 likes, you then go to your photo and find it only has a couple of likes and 100 or so views. First thing you think is; the platform is miss counting or something is broken! So, how do you check this? Well, this is where Shrunk.co comes in, you go to the site, paste in the photo web link and it creates a shortened link for you, you then post this on Meta and again it shows you 1,000’s of likes, shares and comments but again your photo doesn’t show many. This time around you can go to your Shrunk dashboard and it will tell you exactly how many link clicks you have really had, where they are from and many other features!

[showad block=2]

The site is of course free to use in it’s basic form, a paid account ($0.99 a month) gives you access to a huge range of features including:

  • Complete analytics, clicks, where they are from, and geographical location
  • A powerful, easy to use and intuitive dashboard
  • Password protect your links
  • Geo-target your links to get customers to land on specific pages customised for that campaign
  • Bundle your links together for easy access and complete analytics
  • Share your links in one click from the dashboard

Of course the tech can also be used for twitter short links, and easy tracking of any campaigns. So, why not give it a try and add some analytics to your portfolio!

If you have any questions please do comment below or contact me directly at Tom@clickasnap.com

Tom Oswald

CEO

Videscape Limited

Share this post

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Stories

More posts from our blog!

Looking for something?

Search our blog

Search

Blog

Choose from our categories

Categories

Get in Touch