Shorten, Share and Track Your Links with Bit.ly

Daniel

Tinyurl.com is a cool service. It lets you transform really long URLs into shorter and user friendly ones. In situations where you have a limited space or characters to use, for example in Twitter, it becomes really handy.

What if, however, suddenly you could also track the stats behind the short link that you will create? Stats like how many clicks it got, where those clicks came from, what country was the user located when he clicked and so on. All updated in real time? That would be nice huh?

Well the service already exists, and it is called bit.ly. I just created a test URL there and used it a bunch of times. It counted the clicks after a couple of seconds, mentioned that they were direct clicks, and that I was located in Brazil.

bitly-link-shortener

If you use Twitter extensively, this tool might be a blessing. You will be able to track at what time of the day more people will click on your links, where those users are located and so on. Give it a try, I am sure you will like it.

Hat tip to Adam Singer who emailed me to let me know about this new service.

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19 Responses to “Shorten, Share and Track Your Links with Bit.ly”

  • Eryaman hali yikama

    Good info thanks for sharing with us.Nice information, valuable and excellent, as share good stuff with good ideas and concepts, lots of great information and inspiration, both of which we all need, thanks for all the enthusiasm to offer such helpful information here…

  • medyum

    I’m not a fan of Tinyurl as the review networks I use won’t let me place Tinyurl links on my blogs so it would be nice to check out something else.

  • topcool

    try it now.

  • Gloson

    @Mathieu

    I said 2 characters because…

    Let’s take my blog post, 30 Quality Articles to Read, as an example.

    http://bit.ly/46kLN = 19 Characters
    http://tr.im/hWpU = 17 Characters.

    That’s why.

  • Mathieu

    @Gloson

    You save two characters using tr.im?

    bit.ly = 6 characters
    tr.im = 5 characters

    ???

    Personally, I like bit.ly because it is integrated in TweetDeck, which I use everyday.

  • Gloson

    tr.im (http://tr.im) has a similar feature, being able to track URLs. The advantage of using tr.im is you save 2 characters 🙂

  • David

    As a blogger/creator, I understand how such a service could be useful. As a reader, though, I hate it. I want to know where I’m being directed and almost always check the address before clicking (look at the bottom of the browser window just before clicking). It’s rare that I follow through a Tinyurl or bit.ly link.

    …Just so everyone understands that they may get better data, but they may also be discouraging people from clicking.

  • Dean Saliba

    I’m not a fan of Tinyurl as the review networks I use won’t let me place Tinyurl links on my blogs so it would be nice to check out something else.

  • Durward Sobek

    Nice to know about I definitely visit and get advantage from Tinyurl.com and its features.

  • Mathieu

    Great post about bit.ly Daniel.

    Another feature that you didn’t mention though, is that bit.ly also tracks who re-tweeted (using the same link of course). It’s always good to know when you want to return the favor.

    @MathieuB on Twitter here

  • Blue Chew

    Bit.ly what an Excellent find for us affiliate promoters. Wow, I really like the fact we can get hit counts and that bit.ly also offers click stats. Thank you so much for this post. Now it’s Time to get TRACKING.

  • Nikhil

    Really helpful tool.
    Thanks for the post…
    Will use it definitely.

  • Daniel Scocco

    @Boris, I am not worried if they share the info of how many people are clicking on my shortened links 🙂 .

  • Mr. I

    @ Nate

    I have found twurl inaccurate too! It never reports less than 15 clicks. Moments within sharing, 10 clicks appear in stats.

    I will give Bit.ly a try.

  • Boris Mahovac – Email Marketing Coach

    Cool, however when I wanted to read their privacy policy the page doesn’t exist. Any thoughts?

  • Ethan Smith

    I started using url shortening services with stat trackers once I knew that they were available. I use http://tr.im instead of bit.ly though – but the features are much the same.

  • Rarst

    Need to try this… I heard advice before but lazy to. 🙂 Twitter.com is barely in top 10 of my traffic sources so it is interesting how much are unregistered visits from clients and such.

  • Nate @ Debt-free Scholar

    This is great! I have used Twurl and it does not seem to be accurate. (e.g. It will show 20 clicks while my Google Analytics registers 2 visits)

    Thanks,
    Nate

  • Adam Singer

    Glad to help spread this, it’s a really good service. And hat tip to Eric Friedman (Marketing.FM) for recently sharing it with me.

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