thin.ly Blog
Practical, opinionated writing on how to actually use short links — from UTM tracking and QR codes for print, through link governance and security, to the trade-offs between branded and generic shorteners.
UTM parameters and short links solve different problems. Used together they give you per-campaign attribution that survives copy-paste, redirects, and stripped referrers. Here's how to combine them without breaking your analytics.
Read article →Most printed QR codes are bad — too small, no context, no fallback, and the destination dies the day the campaign ends. Here's what a useful printed QR code looks like, why dynamic QR codes are non-negotiable, and the small craft details that decide whether anybody scans it.
Read article →Click counts, geographic data, devices, referrers — every link service shows them, very few teams know what to do with them. A field guide to the metrics, what they don't tell you, and the questions you should be asking instead.
Read article →Every short link is a request to trust a destination you can't see. URL shorteners earn that trust with threat detection, sandboxing, and policy. Here's the threat model, the categories of attack, and what a serious shortener does about each one.
Read article →A branded short domain isn't just vanity — it changes click-through rates, deliverability, and brand defensibility. But it has real costs too. Here's how to decide between a generic shortener and a branded domain, and what to do if you can't afford the branded option yet.
Read article →Once you have more than ten campaign links, you have a governance problem. A campaign ends, a destination breaks, a partner needs the link redirected — and most teams handle this by emailing each other. Here's the four-verb model that scales: pause, route, expire, audit.
Read article →Pointing your own domain at a URL shortener is the highest-leverage thing you can do for branded campaigns, and it's easier than it looks once you know which DNS records to set. A walkthrough of CNAME vs A records, SSL provisioning, the redirect quirks, and the five mistakes that turn a five-minute setup into a five-day support ticket.
Read article →QR codes and short links solve overlapping problems but are not interchangeable. The choice depends on whether the user will be reading, scanning, typing, or tapping — and a few campaigns benefit from using both at the same time. Here's the decision framework.
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