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My campaign link became very long because of the Arabic campaign name, and I am sending it by SMS. How do I make it shorter?

Write the UTM values in short Latin text, such as national_day instead of «عروض اليوم الوطني», and keep the Arabic name in your campaign sheet. Each Arabic letter is written in the link as two %XX codes, which is six characters. In our example, changing only the campaign name took the link from 159 characters to 79. The builder writes the link and does not shorten it, so short values are how you keep it compact.

Published · 3 min read

Where the length comes from

Links cannot carry Arabic letters as they are, so each letter becomes two bytes in UTF-8, and each byte is written as three characters such as %D8. That makes six characters in the link for every Arabic letter, and a space becomes +. The name «عروض اليوم الوطني» has 15 letters and two spaces, so it takes up 92 characters in the link, while national_day takes 12.

The comparison as the tool produced it

Offer page https://example.com/oud, source sms, medium sms. First we entered the Arabic name in the UTM campaign link builder:

https://example.com/oud?utm_source=sms&utm_medium=sms&utm_campaign=%D8%B9%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B6+%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%8A%D9%88%D9%85+%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%88%D8%B7%D9%86%D9%8A

That link is 159 characters. Then we swapped the campaign name for a short Latin value:

https://example.com/oud?utm_source=sms&utm_medium=sms&utm_campaign=national_day

Only 79 characters, roughly half. Both links are technically valid, and analytics tools turn the Arabic name back into letters when they read it, but a text message cannot absorb the difference.

Why length matters in SMS in particular

An SMS has a character limit set by your provider, Arabic messages usually get a shorter limit than English ones, and the link counts as part of the text. A 159-character link can eat the whole message and split it into parts, each billed as a message. Before sending, paste the full text with the link into the Word and character counter and compare the character count with your provider's limit.

A practical routine that keeps the Arabic name

  1. Give each campaign a short, clear Latin name: national_day, eid_2026, ramadan_sale.
  2. Keep a small sheet with one column for the Latin name and one for the Arabic name your team knows it by.
  3. In the builder, turn on lowercase and replace spaces with _ so names stay uniform.
  4. Keep source and medium short as well, such as sms; every character in the message counts.
  5. Copy the link and send a test to your own phone to check it arrives in full and the link opens.

And if you need something shorter still?

The fixed part of the link, the domain, the path and the parameter names, cannot be cut without breaking what the link does. If it is still long after shortening the values, the next step is a link-shortening service that you give the full tagged link to. The tool does not do that: it only builds the link text. If you use a shortener, open the short link once and check that it lands on the tagged link with its parameters intact.

Common questions

Is an Arabic name in the link wrong?

No. It is valid and analytics tools read it back as Arabic. The only issue is length, which bites hardest in text messages.

Does the tool warn about length?

A note appears when the final URL passes 2,000 characters, far longer than any text message. The message length you need to check yourself.