Link shortening is good but room for improvement
At our company, we use Bitly for various purposes. Firstly, it helps us shorten long URLs, making them more manageable and shareable …
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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$35
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- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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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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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.
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Reviews
(26-50 of 54)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
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
April 22, 2020
Bitly does what it says.
We use Bitly in our marketing department to measure engagement on social media and our website. Facebook and Instagram insights/analytics are great, but they're only part of the picture. Bitly has helped us to understand user behavior better. And this helps us to know what type of content to produce and share across our platforms.
- Track links
- Click stats
- Custom link tales
- Allows tags to help organize content
- Integrates/links with other social media mgmt software (we use Zoho Social) so links are automatically shortened and synced with Bitly.
- Haven't found any negatives yet
March 11, 2020
Bitly is a Perfect Link Hosting Solution for Our Needs
For our music media site, Bitly is crucial for being able to track downloads to let our clients and advertisers know click rates and such. We used to use an in-house script for download tracking and it was completely unreliable and possibly even a security risk. We have since completely shifted over to using Bitly as a solution.
- Hosted links.
- Short URLs.
- Click count.
- Custom URL notes.
- I suppose it could offer more data for link tracking, but really, I'm pretty satisfied with it as-is.
February 11, 2020
Using Bitly is a pleasure
One of the tasks that our department is managing is sending out push notifications to the users and we use Bitly to track the amount of people who followed the CTA. We also use personalized Bitly links to provide customers links to our feedback page when providing customer support.
- Personalized link: when we reply to user reviews on Google Play and App Store, we can’t provide clickable links. So it’s very important to create a link that is easy to remember and reproduce - and Bitly allows us to do it.
- Bitly allows us to track the activity of the link during the course of time.
- It’s actually hard to come up with something - Bitly has so many capabilities and is so easy to use!
January 24, 2020
Bitly: The Perfect Free Link Shortener for Social Media
I use Bitly mainly for social media posts. It really helps with keeping the links smaller and pretty-ing up your posts. It's great to not have to look at that long URL that clogs up your character spacing. It assists with leading people to our site while concealing all of the letters and numbers in more complex URLs.
- Creates a clean small link for oversized URLs.
- It's very, very easy to transmute your link.
- I can't believe some of the clicks tracked sometimes; it seems lower than expected.
- More tracking analytics would be nice in the free version.
I always suggest people try 2-3 different platforms when searching for marketing tools, but if you need something free to simply shorten your links to make your social posts cleaner, Bitly is an excellent tool. If you happen to use Hootsuite or Google link shortener, this functions basically the same way, but faster.
December 12, 2019
Branded Bitly Links Best for URL Shortening
We use Bitly links for link shortening on various websites we manage. It helps us easily created branded short links for sharing via social media. For example, we registered the tri.pet domain to use as the root for short links to long URLs of informative articles and discussion forum topics about pet amputation recovery for dogs and cats found on our tripawds.com website.
- Link shortening
- Shortlink branding
- WordPress integration has had its faults on a few of our sites.
November 13, 2019
Makes sense if you feel like you're in the dark with link tracking
At my current organization, we use Bitly to shorten links so we can drill down on the success of our marketing and advertising efforts to see which is the best and most successful. We include shortened links in our communications with customers so we can determine if they are clicking through to the proposal/file/etc. This program allows us to track the success of our efforts whereas before it was just a guess.
- Link shortening with custom endings.
- Geography and device specific data.
- Detailed info on dates of link clicks.
- Ease of use/setup.
- Expanded info on link clicks such as duration of time spent on site.
- Link sorting on the dashboard.
- Expanded list of endings.
October 25, 2019
Does More Than Just Shorten Links
Bitly is known by many as a web tool to help shorten long and very unattractive URLs. For us, we use Bitly for that and so much more as it's a very unrated tool with a lot of special features. Some of the other features I love about using Bitly is the ability to customize the URL so that it's easier for clients to remember as well as being able to track click rates and gather insights and analytics.
- 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.
- Restrictions: There are a few social platforms that do not accept Bitly links.
- Limited integrations: Although it was a pro the lack of third-party integrations does have it's limitations.
- Insights and Analytics: Only provides 30 days of reports which can be frustrating.
- Unable to change: After customising the URL it is not possible to change the links.
July 18, 2019
Making Link Shortening Easy
I have shared Bitly with my teachers as a way to share documents or online resources with others. I use Bitly any time I have an online presentation deck or document that I'd like to share because of its simplicity. It makes memorizing a long URL a lot easier.
- Shortens URLs.
- Makes documents shareable outside organization locks.
- Copies links.
- Has a Chrome extension available.
- To change/modify the Bitly link is a premium feature.
- Qr code generation would be neat.
July 17, 2019
Here's a bit About Bitly
We use Bitly to shorten and manage the links used for social and email.
- Serves as a central repository for links to our media page.
- Shortens links, making them more manageable.
- Provides metrics on link performance.
- No personalization. Would prefer to utilize shortened link that includes our domain instead of those provided by Bitly.
- Would be perfect if it could be installed on individual devices as opposed to visiting the Bitly site.
June 06, 2019
Bitly is a must have tool for any digital marketer
We use Bitly to shorten links for social media or other marketing purposes. It turns a really long and hard to type or hard to remember hyperlink into a hyperlink that is easy to remember and easy to type. It's being used just within the Marketing department right now. It addresses the business problem of some links being difficult to communicate.
- Shortens long links.
- Easy to use.
- Free.
- I wish you could customize more within your shortened link
- The "create a Bitly link" button should be bold and in the center of the page.
- I would love a Bitly chrome extension.
May 30, 2019
Bitly is my Most Used URL Shrinking Service
I use Bit.ly to shrink a lot of links to client websites, brands and even affiliate links like Amazon and others. Anytime you need to shorten a link, customize the link URI slug and need to keep track of outbound clicks and analytics, I use Bit.ly. It has the easiest tracking system compared to other URL shortener services.
- Customize URI Slug
- Easily Track Analytics from Same Link
- Fast
- Supports API Integration
- Can't Go Back and Edit Old Short link Target URLs
May 30, 2019
Great affiliate link shortener
Bitly is a great tool to shorten affiliate links for use on social media. It’s one of the best link shorteners for eBay because it shows up as eBay.to and not as a Bitly. It stores all links and allows even free users to see the link status, which is a fantastic analytical tool.
- Shortens links
- Provides clicks by country
- Allows link customization
- It sometimes gets blocked by Facebook
April 22, 2019
DO NOT USE Bitly before you read this.
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Bitly shortened links are being used on our product labels. It allows customers to view product information related to their purchase.
- Ease of Use
- Unethical Company. They are holding an issue of ours hostage to get us to upgrade to enterprise level.
- Horrible Customer Service - They do not care about their customers. No help was given to solve our problems.
- Very Expensive - Compared to other solutions you are paying much more for Bitly. Also they only offer a complete solution at the highest paid tiers. We had an issue where we need to redirect a link and they would not allow us unless we upgraded to Enterprise level (Over $15,000 USD a year...)
- Bad features - They've taken basic level features and hid them from standard paid tiers, forcing you to upgrade to fix your problems.
December 05, 2018
Bitly the most complete option
Bitly is mainly used by the marketing department for social media, specifically. It helps us to measure the amount of clicks our posts or links receive. Bitly also gives some good statistics which is very helpful for the reports.
- Very easy to use.
- The setup or implementation es relatively easy.
- It gives you statistics of openings and where was opened (where the click comes from) from email, Facebook, etc.
- What I don’t like is that it is not as easy as Google Shortner, with Google you didn’t have to sign in to get a link shortened, but to use Bitly you must create an account.
- You must pay for every upgrade of the services (there are several options to upgrade) . It should be just one fee for all.
December 02, 2018
Super easy and straightforward to use
The marketing team has been using Bitly as a link shortener for use within social media posts for years. We did switch for a time to Google Shortener for awhile but with Google Shortener being discontinued, we've moved back to Bitly. Originally we probably used it to get around Twitter's character limit, although that's no longer relevant. However, being able to also track clicks and measure campaign performance later became more important. Also, there are a number of times when you need to share a link "offline" and being able to shorten a long link into a customized Bitly link that someone could remember is helpful.
- Very easy to use. Anyone with even limited tech knowledge would be able to begin using the service from day one.
- Managing and tracking links is very straightforward and offers you exactly what you need.
- Can use for free and even without signing in, so it's very open and available to everyone.
- Has been around long enough for it to be a trusted brand, so people feel secure in clicking on it.
- The free version doesn't allow for branding so you may have some customer confusion
- I sometimes suspect that it doesn't actually capture correct clicks; sometimes it feels like the data may be incorrect or missing.
November 21, 2018
Bitly - the easy way to shorten URL's
We use Bitly to quickly shrink and customize long URL's, as well as to get data on clicks to these links. This is used primarily by the social media team to accompany posts on specific social media platforms but is also used when sending internal email messages in addition to this.
- The ability to quickly shorten long URL's.
- The ability to customize shortened URL's.
- Providing data on URL clicks.
- It is somewhat complicated to connect with DNS to custom URLs.
- Would be great if the Bitly suite were integrated directly into social platforms.
- The Bitly pro version is fairly expensive when compared to the competition.
November 14, 2018
Quick and Easy Short Link Maker
The Marketing Department using Bitly for shortening links on social media. Bitly is also used for tracking those shortening links. Since Google got rid of their URL shortener, Bitly filled the gap. Bitly is easy to and manage for tracking all links the department distributes on social media. Bitly also allows you to see where conversions take place by process of elimination.
- Shorten web links
- Track web links
- Manage web links
- Better UI
- Add UTM within App
- Better Share Features
December 14, 2017
Too expensive for what it does
We used only used bitly to shorten URLs with a vanity URL. This was mostly for use on our social platforms.
- It shortens URLs very easily.
- The Chrome extension is very helpful and easy to use.
- It is easy to add a vanity URL although it is something you have to pay extra for.
- It is very expensive for what it does.
- It does not provide much overall value.
December 13, 2017
Easy and powerful
My team and I mostly use Bitly to shorten and customize URLs to use in reports to clients where a "hot link" would not work or when we are not confident our clients will click on the link. I am sure there are some employees in the marketing department too but it's not widely used within our office.
- Easy to use on social media.
- Easy for our customers to use and increases confidence in our brand by not showing long, external links.
- I can use one Bitly link in a number of platforms which makes my life simple.
- I don't think people know how powerful the tool is when it comes to tracking "click-thrus" and website traffic.
- Users may only know this tool as a social media app but I use it in a professional research capacity when I don't need to use a more formal citation.
December 06, 2017
Awesome Product!
We use bitly when advertising on social media to shorten urls. They are easy to use and they make a post readable. The dashboard provides great data about click rates and when the person clicks. I highly recommend this product.
- Dashboard is excellent and provides useful data.
- Keeps social media posts concise and short.
- The ease of deleting old urls in the dashboard can be improved. I have to go through two steps to delete an old url.
- I would like to have dashboard with folders since I use bitly for several different locations and I would like to be able to organize my URLs by location.
June 01, 2016
bit.ly -- short on links, BIG on ROI
Currently I use bit.ly to track clicks and in-bound marketing leads for a few freelance jobs I'm leading. One is to track clicks to a website that is selling books (directly from author) - another is my wife's business (small clothing company, Etsy store), and for a music streaming company that hasn't launched yet -- to generate more names for our email listserv. I used it to show click trends over time and to review referrers.
- Ease of use. It's so simple it needs almost no explanation as to what info it delivers or how to use it.
- Accessible information. I love that you can see the info about any link by simply including a "+" at the end of the link.
- Personalized/custom links. Creation of these makes it super easy to remember the most important links -- and doubles as branding as well!
- It used to be that the app was not as user friendly as the desktop version, but that was remedied last year. It's great now.
- Although fully transparent info for all links is good, it might be nice if you could make a link's info private. Note: this may be accessible at the enterprise level of service, which I am not currently subscribed to.
April 04, 2016
Review - HP
Currently, I'm the marketplace manager for a startup called Growth Geeks. I just came on board a couple of months ago, and we aren't using Bitly as of right now. However, I plan on speaking with the team to begin implementing it for when we post links to our Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts (we post links almost daily to articles) - I also plan on seeing if they would like the enterprise level, but at the very least hoping they will be on board with the regular professional version.
Previous to this position, I was a freelance marketing and communications specialist for over a year. I managed roughly 4-8 clients at a time and was working full time hours - many of these clients were tech startups, some were retail sales, and some were actually advertising agencies themselves. For all of my clients, I was managing their social media accounts and/or consulting with their internal marketing teams to guide them on best social practices for their specific industry and business. When I was managing social media accounts for clients, I always used Bitly's services (sometimes the free version if their exec team didn't want to spend money on the professional version). Using Bitly helped me greatly provide analytics and demonstrate my ROI in their social media efforts (which is extremely important as a freelancer).
Apart from social media, I would use Bitly to post links to the client's website or blog on various forums. This helped me learn which forums were helpful to provide clicks on these links for a particular client, as well as which forums were not worth my time posting on. I also used Bitly in email marketing campaigns and on WordPress blog articles. Having solid data from Bitly analytics helped me provide value to my services, speak with management in very tangible ways they could understand, and helped secure future work with clients.
Also, I worked at a company called CJ Pony Parts as their Social Media Specialist. Twice a month I had a meeting with top management to go over my overall social media strategy, as well as particular campaigns. Using Bitly's analytics and link tracking, I was able to enter this meeting with clarity and hard data for my supervisors to understand ROI on social media. I was also the primary author for the CJ Pony Parts blog, so promoting my articles was particularly important to me and I used Bitly to tweet links and post on Facebook, and I was able to see exactly how many people were checking out my articles via social posts.
- Love how it links back to my original page
- Gives me statistics on my clicks
- Provide emails of those who only click once for follow ups
April 01, 2016
Short Review of Initial Bitly Experience
I use Bitly as part of our email marketing through Bronto. The URLs that we try to implement in our XML product data coding for Bronto require the use of shortened links in order to work, so I chose to use Bitly. I like how Bitly tracks the clicks on each Bitly link, but we will primarily be using the resources within Bronto for any necessary data analysis.
- Allows us to customize the URL for the Bitly link.
- Tracks clicks on each Bitly link.
- Works quickly and reliably.
- More extensive or advanced data analysis.
- Outside work with other software or vendors that will expand Bitly and also let Bitly be integrated within the software of other products.