SMS: Link shortening
UpdatedWhen you enable SMS and turn on the setting Shorten links, we shorten links in your SMS and Whatsapp message bodies. This page explains how link shortening works.
How it works
In Workspace settings > SMS, you’ll see a toggle for Shorten links. When this is enabled, we automatically shorten links in your SMS/MMS messages. Shortened links use the format https://a.cust.io/lnk.abc123 (or https://e.cust.io/lnk.abc123 if you’re in our EU region) and consume between 28 and 38 characters (out of 160):
- 8 for the
https://prefix. - 9 for the domain (
a.cust.ioore.cust.io). - 11-16 characters for the path (the slash and random characters
/lnk.abc123). We start with a 10 character path and increase the length until we find a path that isn’t in use. - Shortened links expire after 90 days.
When someone clicks a shortened link, the link directs them to Customer.io, where we’ll resolve the link and then send your audience to the ultimate destination.
Shortened links are especially helpful with link tracking. By default, we track the links that people click in your SMS or WhatsApp messages, but tracked links won’t reliably fit inside a 160 character SMS message; shortened links fix that!
We filter short links for profanities
We filter short link paths to ensure the randomly generated characters don’t contain profanities. If you see something inappropriate in a link path, please let us know.
Enable or disable link shortening
If you don’t want to shorten links, you can disable link shortening. But if you don’t shorten links, keep in mind that you probably won’t want to track links in your messages because tracked links consume significant space in your messages.
Go to your > workspace settings > SMS.
Turn Link shortening on or off.
Track link-clicks in your messages
By default, we track the links that people click in your SMS and WhatsApp messages. To do this, Customer.io appends tracking code to your URLs, which makes them much longer than the original link. These long URLs can easily push your message over the 160-character limit for SMS.
Shortened links solve this problem by letting you track clicks without using up extra space.
If you don’t use Customer.io’s shortened links, then you should disable link tracking for your message. You’ll need to do this for each SMS or WhatsApp message individually.
You can also enable or disable link tracking on a per-link basis using the {% cio_link %} liquidA syntax that supports variables, letting you personalize messages for your audience. For example, if you want to reference a person’s first name, you might use the variable {{customer.first_name}}. tag with the track parameter; track is a boolean where true enables tracking and false disables it. It’s true by default.
{% cio_link url:"https://example.url" track:false %}
Shortened links expire after 90 days
Short link paths expire after 90 days. Your workspace can reuse paths after they expire, but immediate reuse is unlikely given the large number of possible combinations.
While it’s unlikely that an expired path gets reused, or that users engage with messages older than 90 days, you should require a login if you send links to sensitive information. This ensures that you don’t expose personal information to users who click old links.
