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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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$35
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Free
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- No setup fee
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- 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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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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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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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
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- 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
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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 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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
March 30, 2016
Does size matter?
Bitly was used by my department for our social media posts. It's a great tool and simple to use. We share a lot of blogs that have very lengthy URLs so we needed a tool that would allow us to shorten it to meet Twitter's character limit.
- It's quick, and provides you with a shortened link fast.
- It tracks how many people actually click on the link. This is much better data than just seeing who is reading your post or liking them. They may not be engaging.
- More comprehensive analytics.
- It would be great if it integrated into more social media platforms.
- Shortening multiple URLs at a time would be beneficial.
March 25, 2016
Bit.ly = Good data
The Marketing/Communications Department uses Bit.ly as we manage all web and digital media. It's more aesthetically pleasing and it allows us to track user behavior and source traffic to pages.
- Great metrics dashboard - very easy to read and understand.
- Shortened links = less characters to worry about.
- Customization of links to make it more organizational/topical.
- I wish it was easier to customize the "bit" in bitly like the New York Times - I don't have the technological wherewithal to do it without support.
- Daily emails to show a metrics dashboard would be nice.
March 23, 2016
Easy to use shortening service and tracker
I had previously used bit.ly in my job as editorial assistant at a weekly newspaper, to both shorten links for social media and to track the popularity of stories and their sources. It's intuitive and clean interface made it easy to use, and now in my own personal and freelance writing, I still use it for the same purpose.
It wasn't being used by my whole organization, but everyone in my department implemented it on my direction, and they were all happy with it. When new employees filled the roles, they continued using the service, in concert with Hootsuite, which planned posts.
It wasn't being used by my whole organization, but everyone in my department implemented it on my direction, and they were all happy with it. When new employees filled the roles, they continued using the service, in concert with Hootsuite, which planned posts.
- Shortening links.
- Tracking clicks.
- Clean UI.
- I would love if it interfaced with other sites more easily, like Twitter or Facebook.
- It would be great if link names could be customized (maybe including the abbreviation of the publication or company).