A client campaign goes out across email, three social networks, a paid placement and a printed piece, and at the end of the month the client asks which channel worked. If every channel pointed at the same long URL, the honest answer is a guess. Custom branded short links for client campaigns exist so the answer is a table.
This guide is the routine: set the client's domain up once, build the links so they report by channel and creative, get them approved, report in a format the client reads, and decide what happens to the links when the campaign is over.
Why the domain is the client's, not yours
Short links in a client campaign should be on the client's own
subdomain, go.client.com or similar, for three reasons that all
show up later:
- Recognition. The client's audience trusts the client's domain. A generic shortener domain in a paid ad or a printed piece costs clicks.
- Continuity. The printed brochure outlives the campaign and sometimes the agency. Links on the client's domain keep working whoever manages them.
- Ownership. At offboarding, the client keeps the domain, the links and the history. Nothing to migrate, nothing to argue about.
Set-up is a CNAME record on the client's DNS pointing at the shortener, verification, and an automatic TLS certificate. Do it during onboarding, not the week of launch. The multi-client guide covers the workspace structure around it.
Plan the links before the creative is final
Links get made in a hurry on launch day unless the plan exists before. For each campaign, list:
- Channels: email, each social network, paid, partner, print.
- Creatives or placements within a channel you want to compare: hero image versus carousel, button versus text link.
- Destinations: one landing page, or a variant per audience.
- The campaign token:
spring-sale, used in slugs, tags andutm_campaign.
Then the links name themselves:
go.client.com/spring-sale-email-hero
go.client.com/spring-sale-email-footer
go.client.com/spring-sale-meta-carousel
go.client.com/spring-sale-linkedin
go.client.com/spring-sale-print
One link per thing you will compare. Two placements sharing a link are a question you can never answer.
Build the links
- Build the destination URL with UTM tags in the UTM
builder:
utm_campaign=spring-sale,utm_sourceandutm_mediumper channel. Lowercase, hyphens, consistent. - Shorten each one in the client's workspace with the planned slug. Tag with the campaign and the channel.
- Set a fallback in your head now: where should this link go when the campaign ends? Note it in the link's notes field.
- Generate QR codes for print from the short links with the QR generator, never from the long URL, so print clicks are tracked and the destination stays editable.
- Test every link on a phone: redirect, HTTPS, UTM tags intact on arrival, click visible in the report. The redirect checker confirms nothing in the chain strips the tags.
- Check the preview card in the Open Graph checker. A short link unfurls into the destination's card in Slack, iMessage and LinkedIn, so the destination's tags are what the client's audience sees.
Get them approved
A client approval step for links sounds bureaucratic until a link in a paid campaign points at last year's landing page. Keep it light: a shared list of slug, destination and channel, reviewed by the client contact as a viewer in the workspace, with a thumbs-up before launch. Editors on the agency side make links; the client sees them and cannot change destinations by accident. Roles in LinkPilot (owner, admin, editor, member, viewer) make that split a setting rather than a promise.
Report in the client's terms
Clients do not want a dashboard tour. They want a page that says what worked.
- Unique clicks per channel, bots excluded, against the audience each channel reached.
- Conversions per channel from the client's web analytics,
grouped by the same
utm_campaign, beside the clicks. - Device and country split when it explains a result: a paid placement that was 90 percent mobile landing on a desktop-only form, for instance.
- The surprises: referrers you did not pay for, which mean the content got shared.
LinkPilot's analytics filter by tag, export to CSV, and can be published as a shareable report page with the agency's branding, so the monthly review is a link rather than a deck. The campaign reports guide covers the reading routine.
Optimise while it runs
- Move budget toward the channel with the best conversions per click, not the most clicks.
- Swap the creative behind the link that underperforms. Edit the destination, keep the slug, keep the history.
- Watch the first hour for bots. A burst of clicks seconds after an email send is scanners, not customers. Exclude flagged bots before anyone reads a number.
- Check redirects weekly during a paid campaign. A destination that moved is money spent sending people to an error.
When the campaign ends
Links do not get deleted. Each one is pointed at the fallback you noted at creation, usually the client's homepage or the current offer, and archived so its history stays in the report. The printed piece in a waiting room, the social post that is still indexed and the QR code on the back of a van all keep landing somewhere useful, on the client's domain, with the client's brand.
That is the point of custom branded short links in client work: the campaign has a start and an end, but the links and the evidence belong to the client for good.