TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

Bitly Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 8.2 out of 10
Score
8.2 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Bitly are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

  • 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.

Reviews

54 Reviews

Link shortening is good but room for improvement

Rating: 8 out of 10

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

At our company, we use Bitly for various purposes. Firstly, it helps us shorten long URLs, making them more manageable and shareable across different platforms. Secondly, Bitly provides valuable insights into the performance of our marketing campaigns by tracking link clicks, geographic location of clicks, and other essential metrics. This allows us to make data-driven decisions and optimize our campaigns for better results.

Pros

  • Link shortening
  • Integration with other apps
  • Link analytics tracking

Cons

  • More detailed analytics like real time tracking
  • Better customer support
  • More clarity in documentation

Likelihood to Recommend

<div>While it is good for link shortening, and tracking there are some limitations to it.The current integrations with other tools are fine but this needs to increase so that more third party tools are supported.

</div><div>

</div><div>Bitly may be less appropriate for scenarios where more advanced analytics and reporting are required. In such cases, we have had to supplement Bitly with additional tools to gather the specific data we need for in-depth analysis</div>

Vetted Review
Bitly
2 years of experience

Came for URL shortener, stayed for the Analytics Features

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Bitly for nearly all URLs we put out publicly. As a real estate team, it is much easier to share a shortened bitly URL for our listings rather than a long, generated URL by our local MLS. We also use it for QR codes and eventbrites. The redirects are nice since when listings go under contract and then Back on Market and the generated URL changes, I can just edit the redirect so our shortened Bitly doesn't change and confuse the seller or mess up any marketing where we've already shared that link.

Pros

  • URL Redirects
  • QR Codes
  • Tracking Analytics for Links

Cons

  • They recently started charging after being free for a long time which was a bummer. We had already been using it for so long it wouldn't have been feasible to switch.
  • Some companies block Bitly due to potential phishing and use by scammers.

Likelihood to Recommend

It gets the job done and has a really good analytics tool. It links to Linkinbio and integrates with other apps as well. The redirect is a big pro for me since our URL are constantly changing but I don't want the short URL that I've marketing to be changing all the time.

Use Bitly for Reliable Linking!

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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!

Pros

  • Provides shortened links
  • Can be personalized to the business
  • Provides URL tracking

Cons

  • More functionality for the free version

Likelihood to Recommend

I think Bitly is well suited for most linking needs. I find it easy to use and it is very reliable. It shortens links for social posts, so you don't have to worry about character counts. Large organizations would be well suited to use their paid plan, which includes the option of customizing your links as well as their tracking options.

Vetted Review
Bitly
5 years of experience

Bitly gets the job done

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • Custom branding
  • UTM parameter management
  • Redirects
  • Reporting
  • QR Codes

Cons

  • More expensive than alternatives
  • Can get flagged as email spam
  • Slow customer service
  • More filtering options

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.

Vetted Review
Bitly
2 years of experience

Bitly is a great product to "shorten" my workload

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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

Pros

  • Easy
  • Quick
  • Simple

Cons

  • I didn't find anything.
  • Training for beginners.
  • More mobile friendly

Likelihood to Recommend

It was very easy to use. I didn't have to spend a lot of time learning the product. I was able to create an account and begin using it right away. That is extremely helpful as there are many different tools and I look for something that is very user friendly. I saw a higher click rate on our landing pages due to this program.

The go-to URL shortner

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • URL Shortening
  • Custom Domains
  • QR Codes

Cons

  • Adhoc Pricing
  • Accuracy
  • Campaign grouping tracking

Likelihood to Recommend

The ability to shorten an URL to a legible format - while incorporating your brand(s) via custom domains is very powerful and relatively simple to get up and running. The QR generation on the shorten URL's is a great feature and the ability to get simple top level tracking is good.

Vetted Review
Bitly
2 years of experience

Bitly: Please try an amazing link shortener!

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • Custom links for your brand.
  • Shortens internet addresses.
  • Build and strengthen your brand.
  • QR code creation.

Cons

  • 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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Bitly is a very appropriate tool if you are looking to build a brand name. This will help your customers recognize a shortened link address that can be memorable. It is also an easy tool to use, which means that you won't spend a lot of time learning how to manipulate it.

Fantastic service, excellent interface, valuable insight!

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • Custom URL's.
  • Tracking Statistics/
  • Easy user management (CMS).

Cons

  • App
  • Notifications
  • Automatic Reports.

Likelihood to Recommend

It's an excellent option when needing to shorten lengthy URLs such as our Google page review link. It may be less appropriate when linking to secure links as it may seem suspicious to users.

Great easy-to-use link shortening tool

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

  • Link shortening
  • Data analytics
  • Market-leading brand
  • Ease of use

Cons

  • 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

Likelihood to Recommend

Bitly is really well suited to novice users who have limited understanding of how domains work and need a simple way to be able to create ‘marketing friendly’ URLs that they can create for collateral across multiple channels. It is less well suited for use in environments where there is SEO value in avoiding creating a redirect chain.

Vetted Review
Bitly
10 years of experience

Using Bitly as a Software Marketer

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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).

Pros

  • Shortening URLs
  • Click tracking
  • Easy to understand interface

Cons

  • Advanced analytics
  • Searching through links on the dashboard

Likelihood to Recommend

If you need to shorten a URL for social media posts (Twitter, Instagram, etc.), it is helpful. For example, when you need to shorten a post for the Twitter character count limit, it is useful. In addition to shortening the character count, it allows you to track the clicks for each campaign. If you want to do Influencer campaigns, this can be helpful to see how many views/clicks the link got. For link tracking or app download tracking, I might use a different program because Bitly doesn't show advanced analytics.

Vetted Review
Bitly
1 year of experience