Turn a long web address into a short one on your own domain, and see who opened it — not just how many people did.
A text message holds 160 characters before it becomes two messages, and you are charged for each one. A typical web address — a policy PDF, a booking page, a term-dates page — is 70 to 120 characters on its own. Put one in a message and you have spent most of a message before writing a word.
A short link replaces it with a fixed 26 characters:
Before: https://example.ac.uk/students/notices/2026/autumn-assessment-timetable
After: https://alrt.uk/l/q7wm2np4On a send to 20,000 people, that difference is routinely the difference between one message each and two — the whole broadcast again.
Write your message as normal, with the full web address in it. As soon as the composer sees a link, a Use a short URL option appears underneath. Tick it, and the message preview and the segment count both update to what will actually be sent.
The preview shows an example address in orange. That exact address is not what anybody receives — every recipient gets a different one of the same length, which is what lets the report say who opened it.
Only https:// addresses are shortened. A plain http:// link is left at full length, because changing the address from one to the other can break the page it points at.
Short links are available to every workspace by default. Messaging → Settings → Short links has two controls:
Short links available decides whether the feature exists here at all. Switch it off and the composer stops offering it, campaigns send their addresses at full length, and no new short links can be created — including standalone ones. This is the control to use if recording which named person opened a link is not something your privacy notice covers.
Shorten links by default decides whether the box starts ticked on a new campaign. Whoever writes the message can still turn it off for that campaign. It does nothing while the control above is off.
Short links are served from your own alert-link domain — the same one your emergency response links use — not from a public shortener. Recipients see a domain they have had messages from before, which matters: an unfamiliar shortened link in a text message is exactly what a phishing message looks like, and people have been taught not to tap one.
Every recipient gets their own address. Two people who receive the same campaign receive two different links to the same page, which is what lets a report say who opened it rather than only how many did.
Open the campaign and choose the Links tab. For each link you see how many people opened it, the open rate, and when it was first and last opened. Choose a link to see the list of recipients, filtered to everyone or to the people who opened it. Export CSV gives you the whole list, including the people who did not open it — which is usually the half you want, because it is the follow-up list.
Your recipients are not the only things that open a link in a text message. Mobile networks scan links for phishing before they deliver the message, corporate mail security scans them again, and chat apps fetch them to build a preview. Left in, these push an open rate towards 100% on a message nobody read.
whoot. records them and excludes them from the figures. So an open rate here is lower than one from a tool that does not filter them — and it is the one you can act on.
Short links are not only for text messages. Messaging → Short Links creates one for anything: a poster, a QR code, a letter, an email, a sign at reception, a social post. You get the address to copy, and a running count of how many times it has been opened.
These are counted rather than attributed to a person, because nobody was sent one individually. Repeat visits from the same device in the same day count once.
You can change where a short link points at any time, and every already-published copy of it follows — the poster on the wall, the letter in the post, the message already delivered. That is the point of using one: a printed address cannot be recalled, but where it goes can be corrected.
You can also give a link an expiry date, or switch it off. Either way it starts showing a short "no longer in service" page, and the record of who opened it is kept. Deleting a link removes that record too, so switching it off is usually what you want.
For a campaign link: which recipient the link belonged to, how many times they opened it, and when they first and last did. For a standalone link: the number of opens and a rough count of separate visitors.
No IP address and no browser identifier is stored. Detailed open records are kept for about 13 months and then removed; the totals on the campaign report are kept for as long as the campaign is.