How important is URL length?

[HMCOE]

Is URL length really that important?

I have many articles that would lose meaning if the URL was shortened and for most, they would have to be under the root domain instead of under the category in order to fit.

Has anyone tested if they were negatively impacted by URL's that are too long?

[BenRWoodard]

I had one experience with an ecommerce site that needed to rank for product codes not just the product name.  We didn't want to hurt the existing rankings for the product names so we added a " | 45eSUT" (product code) to the end of the title.  This made most of the product titles way longer than the best practice length but within a few weeks began seeing our products showing up in Google under those codes.

It doesn't directly answer your question but I think the value of the title is found at the beginning but as long as it's not keyword stuffed, Google seems to appreciate the whole thing.

CTR is another story.