Last week, we had a chat with Alex Bass – founder & CEO at Efficient App, along with his wife and business partner Andra. Efficient App is a platform where people can discover modern software stacks and unlock their full potential through honest, no-bullshit reviews, comparisons, tutorials, guides and more.
They also run a YouTube channel where they review and compare software – by leveraging their experience implementing software into businesses of all sizes for over a decade.
In this post, we'll walk you through why Efficient App migrated all their short links from Short.io to Dub and how it helped them track tens of thousands of dollars in affiliate revenue.
Why are short links important to your business?
As a software comparison site, tracking and attributing link clicks to the apps we're recommending is critical as it’s ultimately the product/result that we are selling to our partners. A good link tracking and attribution tool helps us make key decisions on where to focus our future content and growth efforts. Otherwise we’d just be flying in the dark and unable to report our results to our partners.
What encouraged you to switch over from Short.io to Dub?
After using just about every link shortener on the market after over a decade (even going self-hosted), I was simply unimpressed with every solution on the market.
It felt genuinely like no one was actually excited about or passionate about, well, links...that was until I found Dub. I think the rest of the world just accepted that the uninspiring existing solutions on the market were 'good enough'.
Alex Bass
Founder & CEO
I didn’t switch to Short.io because it was a great solution – I did it because it was just adequate enough to do the most basic of redirects. Case in point: I never once used it for reporting because it was a complete mess.
Migrating from Short.io to Dub was as frictionless as it gets. We simply imported over all of our links with Dub's Short.io importer, and updated our DNS records to point to Dub. Just like that, everything was working in a far more modern and user-friendly interface.
What’s the biggest improvement you’ve noticed since switching over to Dub?
We’re actually able to check our click data against what our partners are seeing, and most importantly have a better idea of what channels are actually leading to clicks, and thus, conversions.
In the affiliate space, every software company seems to use a different affiliate link tracking platform, so Dub allows us to now have a single pane on glass to view all of our data, and report on it right alongside the platforms we’re using.
Dub has actually helped us catch click tracking discrepancies with some of our largest partners, which would have cost us thousands of dollars in lost income had we not noticed as quickly as we did.
Alex Bass
Founder & CEO
A potentially under-looked benefit is that the best tool is one that you use, and with Short.io and others, it was so dreadful logging in and trying to make sense of the data we had. With Dub being such a joy to use and segment data, our team is actually checking this data on-the-go many times throughout the day. One of just a few tools that we’ve gotten to that point with.
For instance, here's a direct comparison between Dub's dashboard and Short.io's:
The largest benefit that we’ve gotten from Dub is finding potentially missed opportunities and actually negotiation power. We can so clearly see where each partner stacks up with one another, and we know who we need to focus on further developing the relationship, and when it comes to existing partnerships, we so clearly know how many clicks we are sending over, from where, and the impact they are making. All highly valuable when it comes to, well, asking for more money.
What would you miss the most if you had to stop using Dub?
I’m not quite sure we could adequately run our business without Dub at this point. I’d definitely miss the reporting analytics, seeing how many clicks were had at preset intervals across specific types of links, and at an individual link level.
Dub has been essential for us! I love how modern and simple it is to use. It’s so easy to find all the data that I need in order to help make daily decisions in our business.
Andra Vomir
Co-Founder & Head of Content
Since Dub is open-source, I think the first thing we’d do if it no longer existed would be to fork it and build it deeply into our product. I just don’t think any other link shortener on the market feels competitive or is building at the speed and care that Dub has been since we first started using it over a year ago.
How was support like when you ran into issues?
In the few instances that we’ve had an issue arise, their team has swiftly solved the issue and had even put in safety mechanisms in-place for it to not happen again. Sometimes product feedback to support is implemented not even a few hours later and then posted on Twitter as a feature update. It really is unlike anything else I’ve seen. It’s so clear that the team not only cares deeply, but they are obsessed.
