Why short links get clicked more often than long ones

Look at the two links below and be honest about which one you would tap on a phone.

The first is forty characters of tracking parameters, campaign IDs and session tokens. The second is a domain and six characters. Nothing about the destination changed, but the second one feels safer, and feel is what decides a click in the half second someone spends looking at it.

There is a practical reason too. Messaging apps, forums and social platforms all truncate long URLs, usually in the middle. What the reader ends up seeing is a fragment ending in an ellipsis, which tells them nothing and hides the domain. A short link stays whole wherever it lands.

Short links also survive being copied by hand, read out loud, or typed from a screenshot. That sounds like an edge case until you watch how people actually pass links around.