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Bitly has proven to be an invaluable tool for users across various industries and roles. By shrinking and customizing long URLs, Bitly …
Starting at $35 per month
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What is Bitly?
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.
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Pricing
Basic
$35
Cloud
per month
Free
Free
Cloud
Customized
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Cloud
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
bitly project demo
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Bitly Video Demo
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bitly demo
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CMPE281 Bitly Demo
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CMPE281 Bitly Project Demo
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READ DESCRIPTION! -- Review & Demo Of Switchy.io Tutorial -- Bitly And Clickmagick Alternative
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Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Bitly?
Bitly Video
Creating and managing powerful branded links is easy. Check out our tips for using popular Bitly features, including custom domains, redirects and Campaigns.
Learn more at: bitly.is/resources
Check out the Bitly blog: bitly.is/blog
Bitly Integrations
Bitly Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Reviewers rate Usability highest, with a score of 9.5.
The most common users of Bitly are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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(130)
Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
- Recommendations
Bitly has proven to be an invaluable tool for users across various industries and roles. By shrinking and customizing long URLs, Bitly makes it easier for users to remember and share links. Marketing and communications departments have found Bitly particularly useful in shortening lengthy URLs for social media posts, helping them meet character limits and build trust in their posts. The analytics provided by Bitly have enabled users to track outbound clicks and gather data on how their content is performing beyond social media platforms. In addition, Bitly has been used in email marketing campaigns to implement shortened links required for XML product data coding. Users have also found Bitly helpful in shortening URLs on product labels, allowing customers to easily access product information. Overall, Bitly's ease of use, ability to create user-friendly URLs, and comprehensive analytics have made it a preferred choice for managing tracking links, creating UTM codes for marketing campaigns, and tracking click rates on social media posts. With features like webhooks and QR codes, Bitly has further enhanced its usefulness in shortening long URLs for digital brochures, event materials, and even offline sharing.
- Customizable links: Many users have praised the ability to customize links in Bitly, as it allows them to easily manage and identify each link. This feature prevents their URLs from getting lost in a sea of indistinguishable links.
- Analytics insights: The analytics feature in Bitly is highly valued by users, as it provides valuable insights for each link created. Users appreciate being able to see the number of clicks, the source of visitors, and trends in traffic behavior, which helps them make data-driven decisions.
- Searchability: Users find Bitly's searchability feature beneficial, as it allows them to easily find links by using keywords. This saves users time and effort when retrieving links that were used months ago.
Confusing User Interface: Numerous users have reported encountering difficulties with the user interface of Bitly, stating that it is confusing and in need of improvement. This confusion hampers their ability to perform tasks effectively and diminishes their overall experience with the platform.
Limited Analytics: Many reviewers have expressed dissatisfaction with the analytics provided by Bitly, as they are limited in scope. Specifically, Bitly only offers 30 days of reports and does not track specific sources of traffic. As a result, users feel constrained in their ability to gather comprehensive data and make informed decisions based on it.
Lack of Customization Options: A significant number of users have highlighted the lack of customization options for Bitly links, particularly in the free version. The absence of robust customization features restricts users' ability to personalize and tailor their shortened URLs according to their preferences, limiting its usefulness for branding purposes.
Users commonly recommend the following when using Bitly:
- Prioritize starting with the free version of Bitly before subscribing to assess its suitability and benefits.
- Consider upgrading to a custom domain for a superior experience and a more professional appearance in social media posts and other online content.
- Utilize Bitly for effective URL shortening, comprehensive analytics tracking, and valuable insights into external website links. This allows users to enhance their marketing efforts and effectively monitor link performance.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-25 of 52)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
March 29, 2022
Use Bitly for Reliable Linking!
I use Bitly to post articles, landing pages, and other content on our social media pages. The service is great as it shortens your external links so they all fit into your social posts. It is easy to use and it always works well!
- Provides shortened links
- Can be personalized to the business
- Provides URL tracking
- More functionality for the free version
March 29, 2022
Bitly gets the job done
We use a single branded domain and custom back halves to manage our tracking links. This allows us to manage our UTM campaigns across a number of distinct links. With the combination of branded domain and back halves, we can promote our links in a human-legible way across social, email, SMS, and printed materials.
We use their reporting tools to view traffic to short links, which is a more digestible interface for business users than our analytics platform. We also make heavy use of link redirects for managing time-bound campaigns.
We are on the basic plan, which has been more than accommodating of our use case and a more reasonable price point than the upgrade options.
We use their reporting tools to view traffic to short links, which is a more digestible interface for business users than our analytics platform. We also make heavy use of link redirects for managing time-bound campaigns.
We are on the basic plan, which has been more than accommodating of our use case and a more reasonable price point than the upgrade options.
- Custom branding
- UTM parameter management
- Redirects
- Reporting
- QR Codes
- More expensive than alternatives
- Can get flagged as email spam
- Slow customer service
- More filtering options
March 29, 2022
Bitly is a great product to "shorten" my workload
Used it to shorten urls for social media. It was a great tool to allow more friendly urls to show to our potential customers. It was extremely easy to use the program and made it easy for our customers to use. I would highly recommend bitly to any marketing professional. I used this program for all my social media accounts which helped my end users
- Easy
- Quick
- Simple
- I didn't find anything.
- Training for beginners.
- More mobile friendly
March 27, 2022
The go-to URL shortner
Not only super useful URL shortening - but the additional features like the ability to integrate webhooks or QR codes with the shortened URL's are incredibly useful. The best usecase we have is shortening incredibly long URL's to short ones for our digital brochures for our events - then placing the QR codes around the event, so visitors have access to maps, timetables etc on their own devices.
- URL Shortening
- Custom Domains
- QR Codes
- Adhoc Pricing
- Accuracy
- Campaign grouping tracking
March 26, 2022
Bitly: Please try an amazing link shortener!
It is helpful as it can provide a short address. This feature allows our customers to reach easily to our content. It also makes it easy to share and identify links. Also, if you want to create QR codes, Bitly will do the work for you. Bitly also provides a customer service address, which is a great tool to make your brand stand by itself and differentiate from your competition.
- Custom links for your brand.
- Shortens internet addresses.
- Build and strengthen your brand.
- QR code creation.
- Sometimes, redirection is not that fast.
- Editing links is not currently possible.
- There is a lack of tracking the specific sources of where the traffic comes from.
We often need to link to URLs such as review pages, social media accounts, long website URLs, etc., and it's much cleaner to use a shortener with a custom domain.
- Custom URL's.
- Tracking Statistics/
- Easy user management (CMS).
- App
- Notifications
- Automatic Reports.
March 25, 2022
Great easy-to-use link shortening tool
We primarily use Bitly for generating short URLs on platforms where there is a limited character count, for example, Twitter or in SMS messages. We also use it to track the number of link opens where we are redirecting users to documents, e.g. PDFs, and traditional methods of capturing data for analytics purposes cannot otherwise be used.
- Link shortening
- Data analytics
- Market-leading brand
- Ease of use
- Better integration of using custom domains with third-party platforms
- Ability to expire short URLS after a predefined length of time
- Checking of other users’ short URLs to prevent masking of redirects to harmful and/or spammy content
March 25, 2022
Using Bitly as a Software Marketer
We used Bitly to track clicks on our URLs as well as shortening URLs for social media, such as Instagram. It's very useful when making Twitter posts because we can limit the character count by using shorter URLs. We used it to monitor the conversion rate between views and downloads as well. For example, we might use it to shorten the app download link from App Store and track the click vs download ratio. It can be used to compare the accuracy of other analytics platforms too (I find they don't capture the page views as well as Bitly).
- Shortening URLs
- Click tracking
- Easy to understand interface
- Advanced analytics
- Searching through links on the dashboard
We make use of Bitly to accomplish two objectives: Having a short URL that could appear weird when the UTM parameters are included and also (and mainly) to have insights about the clicks like origin, device, etc.
- Shortening URL
- Giving insights about the clicks
- Servers with 99.99999% uptime
- Easy to create and manage URLs
- Providing analytics of others shortened URLs
- Insights about trending markets
- Custom daily reports
March 25, 2022
Bitly helps with the shortening of URLs
We do a number of webinars and use Bitly to easily share the links on social media. It is also so much easier to use as a link on stories than the large zoom link. I also love how Bitly will tell who the Referrers were like email, Twitter, etc, the countries, and the number of clicks.
- Shortens long zoom links.
- Makes it easy to share links on social media.
- Makes the link copy exchangeable so you can share easily.
- Website where they show the links is hard to read.
- If you have a number of links at one time, it is hard to find them.
- It's website is hard to read.
March 25, 2022
Bitly makes easy to generate custom and short links
I have used Bitly for sharing links on different social media platforms. It helped our team to track users through different links. It is easy to use. The custom links feature is also very helpful. Adding tags helped organize links for archival purposes. We have also used analytics data for learnings.
- Creating user friendly, good looking and easy to remember links.
- Getting total click data of custom links.
- Tags feature helps to organise.
- User interface needs to be improved for more smooth operation.
- Box to Create Custom links should be more spacious.
- Need to make improvement for exporting data.
Bitly is one of the early URL shortener programs. I like being able to track all clicks over a limitless timeframe. I can always go to my Bitly dashboard and see the results of my shared URLs from AD campaigns, FB posts, and other content streams I push to.
Bitly is easy to use. The URL for seeing the metrics over time is also simply adding /# to the bit.ly link and there is your data.
I have created so many bit.ly links over time that I occasionally run into "unique" URL names conflicting with links I had already created.
Bitly is fast, complete, and provides excellent back-end reporting.
Bitly is easy to use. The URL for seeing the metrics over time is also simply adding /# to the bit.ly link and there is your data.
I have created so many bit.ly links over time that I occasionally run into "unique" URL names conflicting with links I had already created.
Bitly is fast, complete, and provides excellent back-end reporting.
- Builds unique and readable URLS: bit.ly/MYCONTENT.
- Reporting is robust and very easy to access.
- Using Bitly as a default shortener for Twitter or Tweetdeck provides an additional layer of accountability and reporting.
- Shortening apps have gotten a bad rap and are blocked on some sharing platforms.
- Increase the level of security to eliminate some of the objections to Bitly inclusion.
We use Bitly to create custom short links for our social media postings. It’s brings a more professional look and feel to the posts than common short links or auto generated links. Bitly also gives us the track ability we need when putting links in less accessible places, like a print ad.
- Branded Links.
- Analytics
- Easy to Use.
- More integrations.
- Sometimes tricky to setup custom domain initially.
March 24, 2022
Great Free and Premium Features.
Bitly is shortening URLs and has the ability to track the analytics of the page that anyone with your Bitly login can view. It also populates the thumbnail and relevant SEO information when sharing it on social media accounts. It is easy to use and has a free or premium option.
- Tracking Analytics.
- Ability to customize.
- shorten URLS.
- Add more SEO data areas.
- Options for thumbnail updates.
- More analytic data.
At Mauna, we use Bitly to generate short links that are sent by SMS where the number of characters is limited. We also use it on social networks or WhatsApp to also be able to place all the query strings without the user seeing it.
- Generate short url in a simple way.
- Have click metrics.
- View all generated URLs.
- Generate short url programmatically.
- Edit the already generated short urls.
March 24, 2022
Happy with our time using Bitly. Would recommend.
Bitly was great for us when we needed a URL shortener for our social media posts. The pricing is great as well as the ability to create your own vanity URL is equally important. We also really appreciated the fact that they have their own internal analytics and tracking platform for seeing the activity on the URLs.
- Link shortening.
- URL branding.
- Better UI.
March 24, 2022
Good tool for social media teams tracking canpaigns
I use bitly to shorten links that have UTM parameters pertaining to our digital efforts.
- Shortens long links
- Keeps track of all customized links
- Provides data such as number of clicks
- Links mysteriously stop working
- Making it easier to use customized brand bitly with website
- Notify users when a link clicked on isn’t working
- Verify that live URLs are being customized
March 24, 2022
Bitly is Worth the Subscription
We use Bitly as a means to create a variety of UTM codes to manage and monitor a variety of marketing campaigns that we have running concurrently. Using this tool, we are able to take extremely long URLs with several parameters attached and turn them into a user-friendly link. In addition, we can include our brand in the URL and then track everything through the administrative interface. This, in conjunction with our other analytical tools, has become an integral part of our marketing. We currently have dozens of active UTM codes, and Bitly helps us manage them effectively.
- Shortens long UTM codes
- Allows administrative tracking
- Lets us include our brand in the link
- Gives us the option to create a QR code
- No suggestions for improvement
March 23, 2022
Bitly helps test
We use Bitly to track engagement with particular pages and social media. Its ability to show clicks etc and track where they came from in a quick access interface saves so much time.
- ability to separate and track different sources of traffic
- isolate traffic to the same page from same platform
- A/B test messaging to a particular page and its conversion
- abillity to geo locate clickers
- better filtering of bots
- sometimes numbers are off - more accuracy needed
March 23, 2022
Bitly Review
Bitly helps us shorten URLs which can be easily remembered by the target audience to access some of our important landing pages. I have used it to promote webinars, training material, etc to drive more folks to those pages without the need to remember long links/web addresses by replacing them with a Bitly.
- Shortens URL
- Helps in tracking link analytics
- Has a freemium product as well
- Sometimes it takes a while to redirect
- Link customization not possible sometimes on free plan
- Tracking link sources is a challenge
March 23, 2022
Helpful For Users!
Our company is somewhat low tech and has to use creative ways to get things done. I use Bitly when asking event attendees to complete an online survey. I can give them the link to the survey in an easy to read and shorter URL so they can type quickly into their phone and complete the event evaluation on their mobile device.
- Makes long, complicated URL's easy to read
- Lowers the room for error when copying a URL
- I can create a brochure with a shorter Bitly link that looks easier to use than a long, complicated URL
- If Bitly could have its own QR code easily created in the same place
- If Bitly links could be customized without having an account created
- Simple tracking without having to pay
April 24, 2021
Its great at what it does but you pay a premium for it.
We use it to shorten links when sending SMS to save character length.
- Link shortening
- Reporting
- Price structure
- Is not competitive
April 22, 2021
Just need help from a human in customer service. Please.
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I use Bitly to shorten and customize links for our partners to promote our various products and events. It is used by the Operations and Marketing departments.
- Easy to shorten links.
- Easy to customize the back of links.
- Easy to figure things out, mostly.
- ZERO CUSTOMER SERVICE. How do I get help from a human that can actually help? the "Chat" has never had someone available. The Sales person I spoke with had zero ability to help with my account. I have wasted so much time just trying to get in contact with someone at bit.ly.
- Bit.ly does not manage redirects correctly and it seems like the most difficult thing in the world to get an accurate reading on the redirect links created through my account. I feel like I was robbed by bit.ly and no one wants to help or correct the matter.
April 19, 2021
Great for Marketing Teams of All Sizes!
We use Bitly in our marketing department in order to track and report on marketing activities.
- Easy to use platform.
- Allows you to create as many varied links as needed.
- Recognizable, trusted source.
- Does not allow you to see results further back than three months.
- Does not allow you to edit links once created.
- No ability to organize links in folders.
April 19, 2021
Bitly helps us maintain trust with our community
Bitly is being used by our Marketing & Communications department to shorten long format links into a branded link. This builds trust in our social media posts and also on print materials. Also, the analytics that are provided through Bitly allow us to see more data beyond our social media platforms about how that content is doing.
- Branded link shortening
- Analytics (clicks and referrals)
- User friendly interface
- Accessing billing information