Url Shorteners are quite common and handy ways to transform long and ugly links into nice, memorable, and manageable short URLs. There are many URL shortener services available these days like Bitly, TinyURL, Rebrandly BL.INK and so on. Some of the common use cases to use shortened URL involves a link on a business card, in an advertisement, or in another situation where hyperlinking isn’t ideal or there are concerns like space issue or character length like SMS.

We were working on a SMS campaign for one of our clients using Adobe Campaign where client wants to send a URL as part of SMS content.

Challenges:

1. URL was quite long and would eat up much of the content of SMS length and won’t look nice.
2. Adobe campaign is not providing URL shortener as an out-of-box feature
3. The client hasn’t got any account and integration available with any of URL Shortner service providers.
4. Even if they go for some basic/free account with any of the service providers, normally they won’t be providing the branded Url, until and unless client is on the Professional package.

So, looks like we met a road block here.

To handle this scenario, we did a small POC and wohoo….. that really worked.

Here is what we did that leads to the solution:

We implemented a generic 301 rule on the client’s web server, which was indeed hosting a website on the client’s branded domain, and redirected traffic from a web server to Adobe Campaign environment.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} =example.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^/ac/(.*) http://<adobe-campaign-domain>/customerInfo?id=$1 [L,R,NE,QSA]

So what it does, it redirects the traffic on sub-folder “/ac/” to adobe campaign environment passing subsequent string in url as a query string parameter.

Thus,

http://example.com/ac/das2e1dsa redirects to  http://[adobe-campaign-domain]/customerInfo/id=das2e1dsa

http://example.com/ac/fdfer4fw redirects to http://[adobe-campaign-domain]/customerInfo/id=fdfer4fw

Benefits using this approach include:

1. Successfully send an SMS campaign with shortened URLs using Adobe Campaign.
2. The solution can be enhanced to send personalized Url.
3. We have no further dependency on the web server as only single redirect rule would handle all shortened URL requests.
4. Shortened URLs are branded since there are pointing to the brand’s website only.
5. Getaway with URL shortening without spending time, money, and effort with URL shortener services and integration.

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