Why Your URL Might Be Costing You Customers (And What You Can Do About It)

Hannah Duder
Oct 15
3 min read

If you are spending the big bucks on radio and billboard ads but the customers can’t reach you because your web address is long and confusing, you are wasting your money! A .kiwi domain could be a perfect solution for you.

One morning, I was listening to my favourite radio show Fletch, Vaughan & Hayley on ZM. I listen to them daily via the podcast, but something really stuck with me on this episode. They were discussing a new feature from Opes Partners: a tool that calculates the average cost per night for a flat guest staying over. A tool I would have loved back in my Uni flatting days.

But then came the radio promo: the host had to read a long, complex URL full of forward-slashes, dashes, and complex paths. They even joked it “needed tidying up.” The URL was "www.opespartners.co.nz/flatmate-cost”. That got me thinking, how many businesses are losing impact (and customers) simply because they haven’t invested in a short, memorable URL? They could have used flatcost.kiwi for their promotion and redirected it their website.

The Missed Opportunity in Marketing Campaigns

When you spend thousands (or tens of thousands) on radio, billboards, social, whatever marketing channel, every element needs to work hard. Your messaging, imagery, targeting and yes, your URLs (web address/domain)

Consider this:

A listener trying to manually type a long URL is more likely to give up or make mistakes.
A URL that’s hard to speak or spell defeats the purpose of radio campaigns or word-of-mouth.
Even if someone remembers the domain name partially but not the path, they might land in the wrong place or not at all.

In short: you could be losing customers before they ever hit your site simply because of the URL.

Lessons from Across the World: Australia & Beyond

While in Australia, Andy noticed something interesting. Many well-run campaigns had snappy, redirect-style domains on their billboards, radio promos, or social posts. Short, branded domains that forward to the original home page, but which are easy to say and remember.

One standout is Go.Compare. In 2023, Go.Compare signed a back-of-shirt sponsorship deal with the Welsh Rugby Union (WRU) - making them the WRU’s first back-of-shirt sponsor. On Welsh team jerseys, you’ll often see go.compare printed behind the players’ names - a bold example of turning a URL into a brand asset.

They have leveraged the simplicity of their domain in mainstream media, and it pays off: people see the domain on a jersey, hear it on ads, and instantly know where to go.

What Makes a Great Campaign URL?

Here is what separates a forgettable URL from a campaign winner:

Short & memorable: ideally one or two words plus your domain (e.g. flat.kiwi)
Easy to spell and pronounce: no tricky hyphens, long paths, or confusing characters
Strong brand recall: even if someone only remembers half of it, the domain should guide them
Redirect capability: you don’t need to build a whole new site; just redirect the domain to where you want traffic to land
Affordability: a .kiwi domain costs very little compared to big media ad spend you have but can amplify the value of the campaign.

Why URL Simplicity Matters for Brand Recall

When your URL is easy to say, easy to type, and aligned with your offer, you reinforce the brand memory. Your marketing becomes more frictionless: people instinctively know where to go. That means higher conversion, less drop-off, fewer mis-typed addresses.

Think of it this way: if someone hears your website on the radio or sees it on a truck, but can’t remember it or is unsure how to spell it, the rest of the campaign’s momentum is wasted.