Likelihood to Recommend 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
Read full review It is a costly solution but well worth the money because of the details and information. We used others in the past but switched because it links with WIX. Sometimes I feel as if it is not capturing all our web traffic simply because it doesn't even track when our business is using it. It is good for some leads but I think there can be more it is missing.
Read full review Pros Shorten and link branding: Bitly helps to turn long URLs into short ones that can also be customized to suit any business name. Tracking and analytics: A great thing to be able to see the social media channels that visitors are clicking from and where they are in the world. Integrations: Bitly integrates well with third-party tools to help improve workflow and tech tools. Free plan: There are some great features on the paid plan but for those not yet ready to invest Bitly provides a great free option. Read full review It gives you valid leads that have been on your website looking for your products The information is always accurate and detailed about their visit It notifies you when the customer is looking for help or products, so you know when to reach out to them Read full review Cons 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. Read full review I wish the process could be a little more automated somehow. Right now it is more manual, at least in our process, to aggregate the accounts and segment accordingly. It seems more geared towards sales, rather than marketing. We are struggling a little to use this at scale, but it could be where we are in maturity of using the product. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We've had great success with Bitly and will continue using it.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review The tool takes a bit to learn and you go through an onboarding to get a better understanding. Once you go through that, the tool is very user friendly and a piece of cake to use - anyone can go through it, no IT skills need to run and manage their platform.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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!
Read full review While we have not had a lot of issues, the Lead Forensics team has been helpful in addressing them. The software is fairly intuitive, and issues rarely arise. This could also be from a lack of use on our part, but we have not had a great deal of interaction with the customer support team.
Read full review In-Person Training 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.
Read full review Online Training 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
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Lead Forensics is the best as far as I can tell, but choices that are a fraction of the cost come pretty close. Some places like ThomasNet even throw this functionality in for free now. I guess it's a question of if you view this type of intelligence as a luxury or essential.
Read full review Scalability 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.
Read full review Return on Investment We have seen an increase in event surveys since user Bitly in addition to the QR code There are less technical issues when users are trying to use the Bitly URL Can't beat free and when we have the budget would upgrade as the costs for benefits is worth it Read full review In the end, we canceled our subscription, however, we had a couple solid leads from our use. We reached out to those clients. We didn't generate actual business, but at least we're on their radar. In general, we have a better understanding of the marketing capabilities Lead Forensics can offer us. They provided us all of the tools we'd need to be able to recommend it to our clients. We were able to see the effects of our marketing and learn from their successes of different tactics. Read full review ScreenShots Lead Forensics Screenshots