you have a general idea of how link shortcuts work, now let's see how to use them to make money!
Not all shorteners allow you to earn money.
So we'll focus entirely on paid link shortcuts that give you all the benefits of a normal shortcut but with the added ability to earn money.
I'm going to put the best of them to the test in this article!
How paid shortcuts work
If you add an advertising layer to a conventional shortcut, you get a paid link shortener.
The layer is added between a shortened URL and the landing page and that's where the money comes in.
The visitor clicks on a shortened link (shortened URL).
The advertisement is displayed on an intermediate page - you earn money.
The visitor is redirected from the middle page to the landing page (long URL).
There are interesting advantages to this method of making money.
What I appreciate most is that it does not consume the real estate space of your websites, which could be better used to improve email conversion
<<Choosing the best-paid link shortener>>
When I discovered the paid link shortcuts, it seemed to me that they were an excellent source of additional revenue for two of my websites, so I decided to try them.
The problem was that I could not find any credible information about the performance of the different companies and that there were many opinions to the contrary among users.
Not to mention that I've seen a lot of new actors enter the market as rock stars (offering extremely high CPM) and disappear like ghosts after a month or two.
Because I trust numbers and statistics more than casual users, I decided to conduct my own tests to find the highest-paid URL shortener.
Now I am much wiser and I would like to share this knowledge with you.
Choosing paid shortcuts for testing
I started with Google and did some research to choose which brands to test.
Finally, I selected four brands:
>>exe. io
seem to be the biggest players in the market: good reputation, decent payout rates, and long-term activity.
I included them in the test because of their good payout rates and my curiosity about their performance, because they are fighting with two powerful players and want to carve out the biggest possible piece of the pie.
Create my home page and generate traffic
For evaluation purposes, I quickly built a homepage with movie trailers.
When a visitor clicks on the cover of a movie, a shortener displays an ad, and then the visitor is redirected to the desired page to see the movie trailer.
To do a quick test, I launched a paid campaign (PPV) with an ordinary pop-under ad to generate traffic.
<<I generated traffic to paid shortcuts for a total of 4 days>>
Day 1 - April 13 - U.S.-only traffic
3 days ahead - April 21, 22, and 23 - mixed traffic: US - other countries
Other countries included:
- United States (US)
- Spain (ES)
- Indonesia (ID)
- Saudi Arabia (SA)
- Poland (PL)
- Mexico (MX)
- Brazil (BR)
<<How I collected and analyzed the data>>
To analyze the performance of each shortener, I collected the following data:
+Unique clicks: How many unique visitor clicks have been generated. This was the most important information for me, because the performance of my websites (and most websites that use paid link shortcuts) is based on unique visitors. I used the unique clicks (visitors) to calculate the eCPM.
Income: How much money I earned with each shortener during the test.
And additional data that could be useful in comparing shortener performance:
+Links clicks: How many times my landing page has been clicked.
+Numbered views (by shortener): How many views (from the middle ad page) were counted by a shortener.
+Visitors counted (by shortener): How many unique visitors were counted.
The data comes from:
Clicks on the unique links and clicks I've followed on my landing page with Google Analytics.
+Revenues: number of views and number of visitors are shown in each shortener's dashboard.
<<Data from the dashboards of paid shortcuts>>
I created a few links and sent them traffic, one link by country.
Knowing this, I was able to observe the number of views generated by each country and correlate this data with the statistics of the shorteners.
Like what:
+1962 unique visitors (Unique Clicks) were sent from Saudi Arabia (SA)
+$1.09 earned
As I knew how many unique visitors I had sent to each shortener (my Google Analytics data) and how much money I earned with this traffic, I was able to calculate the performance of each shortener.
The performance of each shortener is calculated by the eCPM.
The eCPM is calculated by dividing the total gains by the total number of impressions into thousands.
<<Final video tutorial about shorting links>>
Comments
Post a Comment