Google granting us the option of +MerusCase in a 2nd email.

Google+ URLs are generally a long string of random numbers. Good luck trying to direct your clients to that. Can you imagine asking someone to find you on Google+ and giving them 20 or so numbers as your unique identifier? Thankfully, you no longer have to. Over the last few weeks, Google has been slowly rolling out custom URL's for all users. Previously only super famous stars or athletes were given custom URLs. Now, we can all feel special!

One thing that is fairy misleading about the term "custom URL" for Google+ is that you're not able to have a unique URL, but you don't actually have the freedom to choose what it is. When you're given the choice to "upgrade" to a custom Google+ URL, Google gives you either one or a few choices that they have already pre-approved.

Last week MerusCase became eligible for a Google+ custom URL. Initially, we were offered google.com/+MerusCaseOakland. For most storefronts it makes sense to offer a URL with a geographic link, but for Merus - where we handle all of our business online and not in a storefront - we didn't want our URL to be associated with our geographic location.

Be careful when you "upgrade" to a custom URL and make sure it's the correct URL you want because once you change it to the custom URL, you cannot edit it (other than changing capital and lowercase letter). This made me very apprehensive with accepting +MerusCaseOakland. I simply wanted +MerusCase which wasn't provided to us as an option. So, I decided to search for a way to ask Google to approve my desired URL.

There were many discussions and questions similar to mine, although none seemed to directly apply to MerusCase's unique situation. For instance, I ran across quite a few people that had special symbols in his/her URL which caused problems when linking his/her Google+ page on another webpage that did not support those special symbols. Many of them were able to submit a form to Google to ask for a URL edit. It seemed easy to do the same thing for MerusCase, but when I went through the steps, I couldn't seem to find the form.

Finally, I found the simplest answer - submit feedback to Google+. So, I did just that. I clicked on Feedback from the Profile menu while on MerusCase's Google+ page and typed in my desire to have +MerusCase with no geographic link. I never got a direct reply, but within 2 business days I was sent another email where +MerusCase was now offered to us as our custom URL. That's a win in my book!