URL shorteners are great for shortening URLs, but they’re also great for tracking.

Let me give you an example.

Let’s say I want to promote my YouTube channel, and I want to promote it through Twitter, Facebook, and an email campaign. If I link everybody through this URL, I have no way of knowing which campaign was more successful. By using a URL shortener such as Google or Bitly, I can create multiple URL codes.

As an example, I have one, two, three, four, five, and you’ll see each one has its own unique short URL. If I use this one for Facebook, this one for Twitter, and this one for my email campaign, I can come back a week later and check and see how many clicks actually went through for each one of those different campaigns, thus giving me a better idea which campaign worked better.