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.
Hat tip to Adam Singer who emailed me to let me know about this new service.
About Daniel
Daniel Scocco is a programmer and entrepreneur located in São Paulo, Brazil. His first company, Online Profits, builds and manages websites in different niches. His second company, Kubic, specializes in developing mobile apps for the iOS and Android platforms.
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…
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.
try it now.
@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.
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.
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.
Nice to know about I definitely visit and get advantage from Tinyurl.com and its features.
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
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.
Really helpful tool.
Thanks for the post…
Will use it definitely.
@Boris, I am not worried if they share the info of how many people are clicking on my shortened links 🙂 .
@ 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.
Cool, however when I wanted to read their privacy policy the page doesn’t exist. Any thoughts?
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.
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
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.