Rock U - Content Management - Short Links

Transcribed Video Content

Long messy URLs are hard to share and even harder to remember and they just look bad in general. Rock has some really powerful links that you can create called short links. That means you can turn a dirty URL into one that is clean and clear. You can even get it to change its content depending on the time. You can easily create QR codes and a lot more. This is a super powerful feature in Rock. So let's unpack how it works and how to create short links right now. So you probably already know how powerful short links are. I'm gonna show you how easy it is to add them from anywhere and some special things we can do even after it's created. So first of all, to add short link, if you have administrative access at the bottom of any page, you can take your mouse, then you can click add short link, And immediately, it's gonna populate a bunch of really helpful info here. So we're gonna start tailoring this link by picking the shortening link site we wanna use. Then I'm gonna pick a token. And that changes what's appended to the end of this short link. And don't worry, people won't have to type in all caps for this. You can type lowercase giving history, It will do the same thing, but you can easily copy the short link we've just created. We can pick a category, but we will pick finance here. You can pick whether the short link is pinned. I'll show you what that means later. Also, if you want the short link to stop working after a certain amount of time, say the link isn't relevant, it was for a temporary event, you can do that here. Let's just say that this expires in ten days, though we don't really need to do that. Then advanced settings. There's some really special stuff we can do here. If you use Google Analytics, specifically with search, you can start to track exactly where essentially this traffic is coming from. So say we're gonna put this short link out on Google somewhere, then we can pick Google as the UTM source. Or if we want to pick the medium that this is being sent through, say we send out an email with this link in it, We can even create different short links for different pieces of content. So you could pick whether this short link will be clicked through a button or somewhere else. And these are really all just some defined values behind the hood that are being saved, and they will be added as parameters on the end of your short link. And you can use them so that after people click on your links, you can find exactly where they click them from and you can get analytics on that. So I'm gonna remove these UTM things right here, but we're gonna save this and I'll show you what it looks after we save. Now I'm back at the internal homepage. And to find your short links, you'll go to the briefcase or admin tools icon, then over to short links. Click on that. And here we go. Here are our shortened links, and this is the one we just created. First of all, you can see that it's pinned, meaning it's gonna be towards the top. And if you have dozens, hundreds, or thousands of short links, this will help you keep track of the most important ones. You can also quickly copy the URL, and you can also filter which short links you want to show up here. Lots of other ways to filter and sort as well on these columns, but we're gonna click on what we just made. And something super helpful is, again, you can quickly copy the link, but you can also immediately get a QR code for this short link, and you can download it as a PNG or SVG in your browser. And this makes links just more accessible and something that would have taken an extra tool now happens within Rock for you. Then usage analytics. This is something I'll show you an actual example of on another short link so you can see what it looks , but there have been no clicks here yet. You would see clicks listed here. But let's go back to a short link we've already had some action on. In here, you can see we'll go look at our last year. And here we had a little spike. This is when we sent out the short link. We got some clicks from Alicia Marble all three times. So not not a bunch of wide traction here, but good example. You can see the client type they use, what operating system they were on, what their browser and version was, and then the UTM source because we set that up earlier. So we can see that Alicia Marble clicked on this link from Google. Then this analytics chart here is really helpful because you can pick the interval you wanna use, then you can pick how you wanna partition the data. So if we wanna see different mediums that these clicks came from, we have here one of our emails was clicked on or one of our links was clicked on through email and two were through social. So if you're doing advanced tracking, you can get really specific data on where people access to this link from. Now something really special here, I'm gonna click edit to show you something that we didn't enable earlier, and you can enable when you add a short link from the short links page, but you can enable scheduled redirects, and this is a super powerful feature. So clicking here, you can see we can either use a named schedule that we've created before or we can pick a custom schedule. Let's just say starting today for ten hours, we have a scheduled redirect, or we could do a recurring scheduled redirect. And what this is going to do is pick a period of time where the short link you created under the hood is gonna route people to an actual different link. So we've created our schedule and say, instead, we want people to go to justrocksolidchurchdemo.com, maybe the link where rerouting from is down or it's no longer relevant, or we just wanna point people's attention somewhere different. And you can even change the tracking settings here. So say you have a QR code set up on your seats at your church or you have a link that you use all the time that people are familiar with, rather than having to reprint all those QR codes or go through a bunch of work, you can simply change where the link is directing people. So that is a super powerful thing, And here's what it looks . Now we'll save, and this is the power of short links. Great. Now your short link is live and it's updating correctly. Get to creating a few more and get in the habit of whenever you have one of those long messy links, turn it into a short link and there's so many benefits. Now thanks for watching this video and have a great day.