URL-Shortener

Short Links. One Domain. 

Client: Boehringer Ingelheim | https://www.boehringer-ingelheim.com/

When the company outgrows off-the-shelf link tools

Boehringer Ingelheim is one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies. Dozens of markets, product lines, therapeutic areas and marketing teams that launch campaigns, produce print materials and publish digital content every day. What connects all of it: links. And that is exactly where the problem starts.

Long URLs are useless for campaigns and simply impossible in print. External shortlink services like Bitly are the market standard, and for the vast majority of companies they are the right choice. A corporation of this size does the maths differently. A subscription is billed per user and per quota, and here neither grows in a straight line. Both grow with every market, every team and every campaign at once. What looks like the cheaper option at the start turns out to be the more expensive one. The assessment at Boehringer Ingelheim reached exactly that conclusion. Measured across the lifetime of the platform, building it was the less expensive decision.

Then there is what cannot be rented. A pharmaceutical company thinks in therapeutic areas, works with CID parameters alongside the usual UTM fields, and has to treat material cleared for regulatory purposes differently from a product campaign. Above a certain size, everything gets negotiated and adapted anyway. At that point, standard is just a word. A platform of your own does exactly what is needed. And nothing nobody needs.

Not off the shelf, but a platform of their own

The decision came early: no standard product, but an internal platform running under the company’s own domain, integrated into the Boehringer Ingelheim infrastructure and built to evolve over the long term.

Factorial developed the application from the ground up in Boehringer Ingelheim corporate design, with authentication through the existing Azure Active Directory SSO infrastructure. Marketing teams log in with their existing Boehringer Ingelheim credentials and can create their own short links, enrich them with metadata and manage them in a dashboard.

Extensive filters and full text search make short links easy to find again and to edit later. Any change to the long URL creates a revision, so an earlier state can always be restored.