Sniply Review: Is This Multi-Million Dollar Link Shortener Worth Buying?
Most of us already have a link shortener that we use daily. Switchy and the new Pxl.to are community favourites.
Does Sniply bring anything extra to the table?
Or can it be used as a stable backup.
Let’s find out!
What Does Sniply Do?
✅ Shortens your links
✅ Add a call to action to every link you share
✅ In cases where websites do not allow embedding of Call-to-actions (CTAs), Sniply uses a workaround to bypass the restriction
✅ There are 4 different CTA styles
✅ If you want to use it as an ordinary link shortener without CTAs, then choose the “Hidden” option. See below…
Sniply Use Cases
✅ Add your Call-to-actions (CTAs) to trending news and run ads to it. (e.g. Taboola, Outbrain, Facebook, Google ads…)
✅ The CTAs can direct traffic to your services, lead magnets, or anything you want.
✅ Or simply track the visitors with a pixel and retarget them in the future.
✅ Add CTAs when sending resources or pitch decks to your sales prospects.
✅ Add CTAs when linking to resources in your newsletters, so subscribers can come back to your website/ products.
✅ Automatically add Sniply links & CTAs to every outbound link on your website. A percentage of visitors will not return to your website after clicking on an outbound link. But with a CTA, some might.
✅ It’s basically a tool for getting more leads and traffic from either your own or other’s content.
Pros of Sniply 👍
1) They are focused on lead generation & CTAs
👍 Some websites, especially news sites or big brands, block CTA embeds. Examples are Amazon and Forbes.
👍 Sniply is one of the few link shorteners that can bypass websites that block CTA embeds.
👍 Some websites I tested still did not work (e.g. Amazon). But if Sniply can’t make it work, other ordinary link shorteners are unlikely to work too.
👍 The team is trying to circumvent it. More sites will be supported when the feature is out of beta.
👍 Since they are very focused on the CTA feature, we can expect to see more innovations in this area.
👍 Current design abilities are limited. For example, you can’t change the font size or add hyperlinks. Surprisingly, Retargetkit has better design options and triggers available. They are even able to trigger a CTA when visitors are trying to leave the page. This is not yet possible with Sniply.
Design options in Sniply
2) You can measure conversions
👍 It has a conversion tracker that tells you how many people converted after clicking on your CTA.
👍 Suppose you ran an Ad about Google’s update that affects SEO. And you add a CTA to let visitors download a checklist. You’ll want to know how many people follow through and downloaded the checklist.
👍 Sniply let’s you add a conversion script to measure the number of downloads.
👍 The conversions can be anything you set. Newsletter subscribers, Lead magnet downloads, or any webpage you’d like to track.
👍 For LTDs, only Retargetkit and JotURL has this feature.
3) A/B Test the CTA/ Link
👍 Most link shorteners let you run A/B test for the landing page by splitting the traffic to two or more destination pages.
👍 But that lets you test different variations of the landing page not the link or the CTA.
👍 Furthermore, without a conversion tracker, there’s no way to measure the performance of the link/ CTA.
👍 With Sniply, you can easily create a different variation of the CTA and see which one performs better.
4) Sniply summary’s uncluttered interface
👍 This is the feature that Sniply uses to bypass websites that blocks CTAs.
👍 They do it by summarizing the content on the webpage and displaying it on a summary page.
Here’s an example:
👍 There are two benefits to this feature:
- It automatically removes distractions such as sidebars and ads and shows only the content.
- It summarises the full article into only a few paragraphs so your visitors can get the key info quickly and visit your CTA.
👍 In the following screenshot, you can see how it summarizes a 3,000 word article into 300 words.
❗ However, there’s a problem with this.
❗ The quality of the summary is not good enough. And you can’t edit the summary.
❗ This feature is still in beta. They have more work to do.
5) Analytics that helps you understand User Behavior & Performance
👍 Analytics for most link shorteners shows you which country visitors are from and on what device they are browsing your page with.
Strangely, Sniply doesn’t tell you anything about that.
Instead, it shows you conversion and behavior analytics. And these are usually missing in other link shorteners too.
Metrics like:
- Average page per visit
- Average time on site
- Average time on 1st page
- Bounce rate
- No. of conversions
- Conversion rate.
- Traffic source
Wait… 288% bounce rate? 🤣. There may be a bug here. Or I set something up wrongly.
6) Company stability – Profitable MRR
- A stable company is important for LTDs. Buying LTDs involves some risk, and we want to minimize it.
- In an interview between Starterstory and Sniply, they reported an annual revenue of $420,000.
- The company has been active since 2014, and was acquired in 2016 for a multi-million deal.
- There are currently 550 paying customers and 500,000+ users.
- As far as company stability is concerned, I consider them to be among the top 10% of LTD tools.
🙏 To be Improved
1) Below-average UI/ UX
👉 The user interface design looks dated; it feels like it was stuck in 2014. I know it’s not a big deal if you can create links easily and get more leads.
👉 But the user experience isn’t very good either.
👉 Creating a link, which is supposed to be very simple, is not as intuitive as other link shorteners.
👉 It took me a while to understand that to create a link, I need to create a CTA first. And each CTA can have multiple links. So each CTA acts like a project. I didn’t understood this and created one link with one CTA instead. And ended up with dozens of identical CTAs.
👉 It can be confusing at first, but the good thing is once you are familiar with their platform, shortening a link doesn’t take too many clicks.
👉 There’s also a slight delay when clicking a button or navigating to a page on their platform. The page can sometimes display an error 404, which needs to be fixed by refreshing it. This doesn’t happen very often, but can be frustrating. It also makes you wonder if their links load lightning fast? Especially if you are running ads.
2) Only CTAs (Not a true link shortener)
👉 Sniply does not have all the essential features needed to be a good link shortener, so if you’re thinking of buying Sniply to use as one, you’re going to be disappointed.
For example: No deep linking, not able to site title and description, can’t rotate links.
To be decent enough for using it as a link shortener, they just have to add deep linking and the ability to change titles and descriptions.
I don’t understand why this feature hasn’t been added for 8 years. This may be a sign they’re adding features slowly. I can’t find their changelog for the past 8 years, but I suspect there haven’t been many major upgrades in that time.
Maybe they hope to change that with this LTD launch.
👉 I do see that their website activity has picked up in the past 2 years. And that’s a good sign.
3) Cannot edit Meta data & Image
👉 I briefly mentioned this above, but wanted to highlight it here again to make sure you understand how important this feature is.
👉 It lets you change the title, description, and the thumbnail image.
👉 This is important because from time to time you’ll have issues where the title is corrupted or if the image doesen’t load properly. And so, you’lll need to manually edit it.
Here’s an example:
Funny this happened to their own deal.
Because I can’t edit the title, I’ll have to post it as 403 Forbidden. Or use another link shortener.
4) API not included in LTD
It’s a dealbreaker for those who need to automate the creation of links. Or use their API for other purposes.
It’s fine if you don’t need API.
⚡ Lightning Round FAQ
1) Do you need Sniply if you have Switchy or other Link shorteners?
Yes, if you want the CTA features.
And if you hope that they’ll continue to innovate and improve on this feature. They currently have a unique feature called the Sniply Summary that can bypass some websites that block CTAs. It’ll probably support more websites once it’s out of beta.
No, if you can count on Switchy or your preferred link shortener to release a better version of the CTA.
2) Good for a backup link shortener?
Not at the moment. While the company itself is stable with a profitable MRR; they do not have the core features needed for a link shortener.
They are one step away from releasing these features, but I’m not sure when they will do it.
3) Who should buy Sniply then?
If you want to use the CTA to get more traffic and leads. See my use cases at the top of the review.
4) What’s coming next?
The following info is from their roadmap:
A content service that will allow you to pick from a list of curated articles, making it easier for our users to find quality sources, filter content, and share it with the world. All of this while continuing to promote your CTAs.
A new flow for creating, managing, and sharing links that will get you quickly from an idea to a link that you share with the world!
New CTA designs that we hope you will love!
New CTA types that will ensure all links on the web work with Sniply
5) How are the deal terms?
Deal terms are good even at tier 1.
20,000 clicks per link. And you can create unlimited links.
It’s hard to reach 20k clicks per link unless you have lots of traffic or if you intend to run lots of ads.
Even so, you can always duplicate the links multiple times to refresh the limits 😉
I don’t find the stacking fair. $69 for 20k clicks and $139 for 30k? It should be doubled to 40k.
Tier 1 is the sweet spot. If you anticipate a lot of clicks per link, then go with the higher tiers.
Sniply Score:
Functionality: ⭐⭐⭐ (3/5)
Easy to Use: ⭐⭐⭐ (3/5)
Overall User Experience: ⭐⭐⭐ (3/5)
Deal Structure: ⭐⭐⭐ (3/5)
Overall: ⭐⭐⭐3/5
Share your thoughts in the discussion thread »
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Will you buy Sniply?
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