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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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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
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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
(1-25 of 36)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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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