Campaign URLs look terrible and that's costing you clicks
Your landing page can be fine while the link in the ad comment looks like a scam. UTMs belong behind the short link.
Nobody clicks a URL because the query string is elegant. I need to say that upfront because analytics people love their tags and I get it, I do, but humans scrolling Instagram at 11pm are not admiring your utm_campaign naming convention.
I ran a small Facebook ad last year for a friend's online course — budget was like $40 total, nothing heroic. The landing page was normal. Clean headline, payment worked, all fine. The link in the ad comment was not fine. It had utm_source and utm_medium and utm_campaign and utm_content and probably utm_therapy_session in the string. It looked like a hijacked domain to anyone scrolling fast, which is most people.
Clicks were bad. Not catastrophic, just worse than the creative deserved. The image was good! We shortened the same destination to myurl.su/course-fb and left every UTM on the long URL behind the redirect. Same spend, same image, same copy. Clicks went up enough that my friend noticed without me pulling a spreadsheet. I didn't run a formal A/B test with a statistician. I'm telling you what we saw in a week on a tiny budget.
UTMs are for your analytics tool, not for human eyeballs. Build the tagged URL in GA or whatever, paste that into the shortener, put the short thing in the ad. Done.
Name campaigns boringly. facebook, paid, spring-2026. Future you will not remember spring_2026_v3_FINAL_real. I have a folder of those. It's embarrassing.
Short links won't rank you on Google. Wrong tool entirely. This is for Instagram captions, Telegram posts, email footers, anywhere a human stares at the URL before tapping and decides in half a second if you're legit.
Before money goes live: open the short link in incognito on your phone, because most paid social traffic is mobile, and kill the link when the promo ends so old ads don't send people to a dead offer. Learned that one the hard way with a sold-out workshop.
Ugly links are a small detail until you watch a decent ad underperform because the URL looked sketchy. Then they're not small.