Bitly (Bit.ly) is one of the most popular link shortening tools. The vendor says it shortens 1 billion links per month. The company is privately held, based in New York City, and was founded in 2008.
$35
per month
Google Tag Manager
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
From Google, the Google Tag Manager is a tag management application that facilitates creating, embedding, and updating tags across websites and mobile apps, thus gaining the benefits of data standardization and speed of deployment. Google touts an agency friendly system with multiple user access, and tools to improve tags performance like debugging, and rules, macros or automated tag firing. The Google Tag Manager also integrates with Google product DoubleClick. Moreover, Google Tag Manager is…
I am not sure if you can fully consider using Bitly as an alternative for Google Tag Manager, but similar tracking efforts can be achieved by creating custom links for specific actions on your website. It is much easier to implement and viewing the statistics in the bit.ly …
Generally I would recommend. If you are doing a tiny amount of volume (price sensitive and/or your team needs hands on support) you may be better served elsewhere, but I don't think you're going to get the easy of use and feature set that you would with Bitly. We have found that our user base is also used to seeing Bitly-shortened links in their daily browsing, so are less reticent to click a URL that isn't on our domain
Google Tag Manager is well suited when the marketer or marketing team does not work closely with the developers. In this scenario, it means that the marketer can deploy 3rd party tools such as live chat widgets, advertising pixels, and much more themselves in a timely manner. Google Tag Manager may be less relevant in an organization where the marketer is also the developer or has a strong development background, where they can implement the 3rd party tags directly on the site when they need. But even in this instance, there's still great benefit in using Google Tag Manager.
Selecting elements on a site [object, class, cookie, etc] (to later fire an event, send some data, etc) is very easy with triggers. Want to add an event when someone clicks on a button? Super easy. It was many many DOM selectors and you can even add custom functions if you need to do something more specific
In general, firing events in different circumstances is very easy mixing triggers and tags. You can track almost any element of the DOM and do whatever you want with it.
Testing is a great functionality. Only you can see what's on the site and you can debug it easily by seeing which events or tags were triggered and all the DOM elements involved (and why they matched the trigger).
Working in environments (staging, production) and versioning is easy to do, deploying changes in 2 clicks.
One thing I've noticed is that if you're shortening a link that you didn't create - for example shortening the link to a news article that you then want to share on Twitter - the analytics will continue to pull data from the original URL as a whole, and not just your unique Bitlink. It would be nice to be able to pull out the traffic that just my efforts are pulling to the site, and not every single source of traffic that site is getting.
There are several good integrations, but there can always be more. Native tracking for call tracking solutions, analytics providers, non-Google advertisers would be top of my list.
Documentation is just dreadful. Luckily there are some awesome folks out there doing crowdsourced tutorials (shout out to Simo Ahava) but by and large the Google Tag Manager instructions are worth what you pay for them.
Google Tag Manager makes tracking traffic to our websites effortless, which enables our developers to focus on other tasks. Setting up a new instance takes only minutes and additional scripts can be added/modified without touching the source code of a site in production. This enables our marketing directors to coordinate tests and experiments with minimal effort.
Using Bitly to create shareable, trackable short links for social media couldn't be easier. Bitly is super easy to manage and offers easy monitoring of short links. Even with the few shortcomings or cumbersome features, Bitly is ranked number 1 for shortening links for our organization because of how simple it is to use.
Google Tag Manager is the definition of a learning curve. At the beginning, you can barely do the minimum and it can seem questionable as to why you would use it. However, as users begin to learn its offerings and see how it can do much more, they will have a moment where GTM becomes a tool that empowers their ability to track and efficiently collect data for important business questions.
I've witnessed very little availability issues with Bitly. This includes very rare occurrences of application errors and unplanned outages, of which I very much appreciate. When there are application errors or outages, Bitly does a great job of handling the issues in a timely manner and I am rarely out of the site for long at all. This is great, considering I was using Bitly for nearly every link that was posted to our social media accounts.
I have used Bitly's service on a variety of computers, systems, and browsers. With this being said, I have not noticed much of a change at all between the browsers and computers, and Bitly's performance is top notch. Reports are also completed in a reasonable time frame, and I have had very little problem with lag time on loading different pages on the site. Pages tend to load quite quickly.
For us, Bitly is a Godsend an an almost perfect solution. I have no complaints and would recommend them to almost anyone. I guess I would hold back from a 10/10 because short URLs can sometimes look spammy. For us, and what we need it for, it's just about perfect!
I did not receive any in-person training, as I felt that I didn't need this type of training in order to understand and learn Bitly. It was quite easy for me to explore Bitly and learn the features myself without needing a person to give me a demo or tutorial. Kudos to making a platform that is very straightforward.
I haven't experienced direct online training - However, several times while learning Bitly by myself I went to the main Bitly page to answer a few questions I had. This includes determining exactly what features I was receiving and then I would explore the website and find these features. Also, I went to the Enterprise tab when both deciding to purchase that upgrade, as well as after I purchased this upgrade. It was very helpful in learning exactly what came with that package and after the upgrade, I was able to look there and learn some of the aspects of the upgrade that I was missing
Very excited to use bitly for link tracing - I was very excited to begin using Bitly for this company, and I've had very favorable impressions of using Bitly in the past for a variety of different jobs. Knowing the amount clicks on each link is important for our overall strategy.
Planning and communication will help greatly with an in-house implementation. If there are large teams, try to limit the number of people involved to 1-2 developers (back-end dev may be necessary depending on your platform), one analytics marketer and one project manager.
We use Pretty Links for custom URLs from our Word Press website. When that is not possible because the URL doesn't originate from the website, we use Bitly. It definitely has a purpose in our day-to-day operations. We also appreciate the information you receive like total clicks, top referrer and top location.
We moved to GTM from a standard Google Analytics implementation. GTM is much more flexible and easier to make changes, especially as the changes relate to multiple sites and environments. While there is a learning curve when figuring out how to use GTM, I believe the change has been worth it because it helps us understand at a more fundamental level how our tracking works and gives us a lot more control over what we track and how.
Bitly's scalability is great. When I began using it, I only used it once in a while to promote blog articles from our WordPress site on Twitter. This was due to Twitter's character limit and URL shortening was necessary. However, once I became more familiar with it and started seeing the benefits of many of Bitly's features, I began using it for nearly every link I posted across all of our social media accounts. This increased the workload I filtered through Bitly, and we also upgraded from free to a paid account. This growth was handled very well by Bitly and I was very pleased with its ability to scale so easily.
GTM is very useful to determine if a particular element on the site is useful (i.e. is it being watched, is it being clicked, does it help customers navigate through more pages). As an SEO person, I can use this information to decide what to optimize for but also to track progress and see improvements in engagement.
With the use of Google Tag Manager, I was able to easily inject an A/B testing tool which lead to several improvements in lead generation.
