You might think Google and a Web Marketing Consultancy specializing in SEO would be on opposite sides of a line dividing an industry. But both companies are partaking in a business strategy that may become prevalent over the next couple years.

What do Goo.gl and umktg.com have in common?

On October 12th we launched UMKTG.com, a URL-shortening service made specifically for use on Untouchable Marketing’s projects. Why?

We noticed when sending client emails that while we may be able to answer a question, or explain a concept in just a few hundred characters, any reference we made to a Google results page took up hundreds of characters. And anyone who’s ever sent a business email knows that if you want your message heard, concision is key.

So being able to take a search string like: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=url+shorteners&aq=f&aqi=g10&oq=&fp=52e8f388e5caca67 and turn it into http://umktg.com/URLShorteners is quite useful.

There’s also a bit of power that comes along with owning a URL shortener. If I gave you the above link, I could see if, when, and how many times you viewed the link.

Google knows this too, so 2 months later, on December 14th, they launched Goo.gl. So far, it’s only for their internal projects and products, but eventually they will launch it as a full public service.

What Else Can You Do With Your Own Shortener?

Make money. If you had a widely-used URL shortener you could sell banners and pop-ups on the page that redirects visitors.

In fact, if you had a good amount of ad-data to query against, you could probably crawl the destination page to determine the topic, and then show a related ad to the visitor. Now, who would have the ability to host a fast URL-shortener, crawl pages to determine their topic, and also have ad-inventory to match against… hmmm…

Want to Try It Yourself?

If you think you’d like your own URL shortener, I can recommend BrokenScript. It’s a very easy to customize script, and as you can see, not too hard to put your own look on it.

Tags: business email, client emails, google results, pop ups, www google com

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 19th, 2009 at 7:24 pm and is filed under Business, Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.