matthewwoodward.co.uk http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/tutorials/best-paid-link-shortners/

Increase Your Websites Profits With This Secret Income Source

Did you know that anytime you share your link, or link to a piece of content – you are leaving money on the table ifyou ignore this post.

Paid link shorteners are overlooked by many but I’m going to show you how I use them to make extra money withmy sites and put them all to the test once and for all.

What You Will Learn

What link shorteners are and why to use them

How paid shorteners work

Which shortener is the most profitable

And how much money you can make

Most websites make money through things like selling ad space, affiliate products or their own digital products andso on.

Some monetization methods are more or less passive, some require ongoing work, some seem to suit a particularwebsite well, others not so much.

Creative website owners can combine a variety of methods and use them simultaneously. You have to test acombination of strategies to see what works best for you.

But today I’m going to explain a new layer with paid link shorteners and the results of my own tests – theshorteners that are the most profitable.

So read on if you would like to add another great weapon of choice to your website monetization arsenal!

An Introduction to Link Shorteners

For those that don’t know, a Link Shortener is a website or application that turns long links into short ones, thatredirect to the long link-

Here is an example of a long URL which points to the Amazon store-

http://www.amazon.com/Star-Wars-Signature-Lightsaber-Removable/dp/B003I86C8U/ref=sr_1_1?s=toys-and-games&ie=UTF8&qid=1430138565&sr=1-1

and here is its short version:

http://amzn.to/1OvdSOz

The short version just redirects you to the long version – which makes for easier sharing especially on socialnetworks like Twitter.

Using a link shortener is very easy. Just paste in the URL you want to shorten, click go and you are done-

That’s all there is to it!

Why Use A Link Shortener?

Save space and “beautify” links. Short links look better and are more user friendly. For some types ofcommunications like text messages or Twitter posting it’s crucial to keep links short to leave room for amessage (as you probably know a tweet is 140 characters long)

Tracking & statistics. Some shorteners give statistics about clicks, impressions and a range of othertrackable data.

Hide a target URL. When you see a shortened URL, you don’t know where you will land after you click it.So, some people use this to disguise the target URL.

and finally, Ladies and Gentlemen:

Making money. You can earn money each time a short link is clicked! Ayeuhayueuhayueuh!

Show Me the Money – Paid Link Shorteners

Now you have general idea of how link shorteners work, let’s turn our attention on how to use them to make extramoney!

Not all shorteners let you earn money. So we will focus entirely Paid Link Shorteners that give you all theadvantages of a normal shorteners but with the added ability to make money.

I’m going to put all of the best ones to the test in this article!

How Paid Shorteners Work

If you add an advertising layer to a classic shortener, you get paid link shortener.

The layer is added between a shortened URL and destination page and this is how money comes into play.

How it works in practice:

1. Visitor clicks a shortened link (shortened URL)

2. Ad is displayed on an intermediate page – you earn money.

3. The visitor is redirected from the intermediate page to the destination page (long URL)

This method of earning money has some interesting advantages.

What I like most is that it doesn’t consume real estate space of your websites that are better put to use forincreasing email subscribers.

Secondly, you transform leaving visitors into profit and last but not least, short links can be used everywhere, e.g.on facebook pages, twitter, emails etc.

Choosing The Best Paid Link Shortener

When I discovered paid link shorteners, they appeared to be a great additional stream of revenue for two of mywebsites, so I decided to give them a try.

The problem was I couldn’t find any credible information about the performance of the different companies (thereare a few) and there were many contrary opinions among users.

Not to mention that I’ve seen a lot of new players entering the market like rock-stars (offering extremely highCPMs) and vanishing like ghosts after a month or two.

As I trust numbers and stats more than opinions of casual users, I decided to conduct my own tests and comparethe results.

Now I’m much wiser and I’d like to share this knowledge with you.

Choosing Paid Shorteners For Testing

I started with Google and did some research to pick up brands to test.

Finally, I selected four brands:

Adf.ly

Shorte.st

LinkShrink

Ouo.io (decided to add this later, in the 2nd test phase)

Adf.ly and Shorte.st seem to be the biggest players on the market: quite good reputation, decent payout rates anda long time in business.

LinkShrink and Ouo.io (how do they even pronounce this name?!) are relatively smaller services and new inbusiness comparing to the other two.

I included them in the test because of good payout rates and my curiosity about their performance as they fightwith two strong players and want to earn themselves the biggest possible slice of this cake.

Building My Landing Page and Driving Traffic

For benchmark purposes I quickly built a landing-page with movie trailers.

When a visitor clicked a movie cover, a shortener displayed an ad and then the visitor was redirected to adesired page to see a movie trailer.

To setup a quick test I launched a paid campaign (PPV) with a run of the mill pop-under ad to drive traffic.

I drove traffic to the paid shorteners for 4 days altogether:

1st day – 13th of April – only US traffic

3 following days – 21, 22 and 23 of April – mixed traffic: US + other countries

Other countries included:

United States (US)

Spain (ES)

Indonesia (ID)

Saudi Arabia (SA)

Poland (PL)

Mexico (MX)

Brasil (BR)

How I Collected and Analyzed Data

To analyze the performance of each shortener I collected:

Unique Clicks: How many unique visitor Link Clicks were generated. This was the most importantinformation for me, as performance of my websites (and most websites which use paid link shorteners)base on unique visitors. I used Unique Clicks (visitors) to calculate eCPM.

Revenue: How much money I earned with each shortener during the test.

and additional data which could be useful to compare shorteners’ performance:

Link Clicks: How many times my landing-page was clicked.

Counted Views (by shortener): How many views (of the intermediate ad page) were counted by ashortener.

Counted Visitors (by shortener): How many unique visitors were counted.

The data comes from:

Link Clicks and Unique Clicks I tracked on my landing-page with Google Analytics.

Revenue, Counted Views and Counted Visitors is shown in Dashboard of each shortener.

Tracking Traffic with Google Analytics

I took advantage of Google Analytics events to track all of my traffic.

This can be broken down as

Event Category (traffic divided by country. E.g. shortest/MX is a link clicked by visitors from Mexico)

Unique Events (Unique Clicks)

Total Events (Link Clicks)

Data from Paid Shortener Dashboards

I created a few links and sent them traffic, one link per country.

Knowing that, I could observe how many views were generated from each country and correlate this data withshorteners’ stats.

For example:

1962 unique visitors (Unique Clicks) were sent from Saudi Arabia (SA)

$ 1.09 earned

Money and eCPM

As I knew how many Unique Visitors I’d sent to each shortener (my Google Analytics data) and how much moneyI earned from this traffic I was able to calculate performance of each shortener.

Performance of each shortener is defined by eCPM.

eCPM is calculated by dividing total earnings by total number of impressions in thousands.

Data Analysis: US Traffic

On the first day of testing I decided to send traffic to shorteners exclusively from the US.

In the screens below I present the number of Unique Clicks (how many unique visitors were diplayed an ad) andhow much money I earned from those uniqe visitors.

ADF.LY

SHORTE.ST

LINKSHRINK

RESULT AFTER FIRST DAY OF TESTING (eCPM)

Taking all data into consideration-

Shorte.st is a winner when it comes to eCPM and earnings. For each 1000 users I earned 4.04 USD.

Adf.ly got the 2nd position and there is a small difference in earings comparing to number one – Shorte.st

LinkShrink’s earnings look like a joke

(Please note, that there are no stats for Ouo.io at 13th of April. I decided to try this shortener later.)

Data Analysis: Mixed Traffic

At that time, for the next three days, I sent mixed traffic from different countries (including US).

Please note that I included countries with extremely low rates so eCPM in the end is much lower than we wouldlike to see.

OUO.IO

ADF.LY

SHORTE.ST

LINKSHRINK

RESULTS FOR MIXED TRAFFIC (eCPM)

Again Shorte.st is the winner and Adf.ly is very close. LinkShrink again is a joke and Ouo.io looks very poor.

If you studied the data carefully, you probably noticed one thing:

My revenue from Adf.ly with US traffic was only $0.02. I wrote to Adf.ly customer service asking why theycounted almost no traffic! I got an answer which pointed me to their FAQ:

For us to be able to pay you for your traffic, the following criteria must be met:

Must have JavaScript enabledMust have Flash enabledMust have Cookies enabledMust view the advert for at least 5 secondsMust not being using a proxy server (unless we have advertisers wanting this traffic)Must not have viewed more than 5 links already that dayMust be an advertiser willing to pay for traffic from their country

Well… I checked in Google Analytics and my traffic looked good enough. Java and flash were enabled almosteverywhere, other technical requirements were met.

I thought that the result was very strange because I’d sent exactly the same traffic to Adf.ly as to other shorteners.

It appears (and it’s a bit scary) that with Adf.ly you can’t earn any money even if you send good quality traffic andthere is no clear reason for that.

Really confusing…

Final Thoughts

There are two leading paid link shorteners on the market: Shorte.st and Adf.ly.

Shorte.st performs slightly better when it comes to earnings and I didn’t have any surprises like with Adf.ly (whenmy traffic for US stopped to be monetized without any reason).

Other tested shorteners – LinkShrink and Ouo.io – are not so good.

They claim high eCPM rates, and as my test showed, this is not true. Actually they converted really, really bad.

Wrapping It Up

Ads served by paid shorteners are not usually of high quality and that’s the reason why they’re not for everyone.Most website owners prefer AdSense because of ad quality and conversion.

However, not every website can be accepted by Google and some of them are even banned after a while becauseof their content.

As a result many choose to make money online with link shorteners.

So if you struggle with Google or your website is similar to the above ones, you may consider trying out a paidshortener and I hope that my benchmark will be useful for you.