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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
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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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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
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- 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
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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.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-4 of 4)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
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
- Custom branded URLs
- Redirects
- Link shortening
- Traffic reporting
- Positive but hard to measure
- Allows us to open up URL-shortening & reporting to more business users
- More professional, branded experience on printed materials & QR codes
- Drives engagement better than alternatives
Bitly is the most fully featured and intuitive of the (albeit limited) options we have evaluated. Bitly is also the link shortener that our staff and our user base have had the most interaction with, so it was the choice with the least friction/switching costs up front. In this category, where the software provided has been more or less commoditized (at our level of usage) those were the most important considerations. The price point was and continues to be reasonable enough to not cause issues.
- Adding UTM parameters
- Generating shortlinks and QR codes
- Viewing traffic data
- Filtering by UTM parameters
- Managing a high volume of shortlinks
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
- Easy tracking
- Easy monitoring
- Easy shortening
Bitly is more effective at shortening and tracking links. Also since Bitly is so common, people are less hesitant to click on a Bitly short link as opposed to other short links. Bitly has a really easy to look at management system of all your short links. You're able to use Bitly to make decisions on campaigns because of that.
- Management of short links
- Creating short links
- Monitoring short links
- Locating short links without a title
- Comparing to short links
- Menu system is a tad cumbersome
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.
- TIME SAVER. Although at past jobs, I 've had access to robust analytics platforms - like omniture - they often take significant time, energy and effort to pull and analyze those metrics. Bitly is simple, real time and actionable.
- Showing referrers is extremely important - so that with one shortened link you can still see where clickers came from - without having to create an individual link per platform.
I used to use tinyURL - they had no analytics, and no customization options. Also, the link generated after the / was longer and took up more room. Bit.ly is better than Hootsuite's OW.LY because it's free. :)
- Generating a shortened link
- Creating a custom link
- Accessing the metrics associated with links
- Reviewing analytics associated with links
- I find no problems at all in the bitly platform.
Yes
Very well. There was a time wherein the mobile app lagged behind from a functionality perspective versus the desktop experience - however that has been augmented to be in line across the experiences.
March 23, 2016
When it comes to social media - Bitly saves the day!
In a social media capacity we use Bitly to shorten links so that we don't take up character space in our posts. Especially on Twitter, characters are at a premium, so being able to use Bitly to make our URLs the smallest number of characters possible allows us to deliver better messaging to our audience. Our entire marketing team also uses Bitly to shorten links for email blasts and other marketing materials. Bitly allows us to create more aesthetically pleasing content by eliminating long, cumbersome URLs. We also have opted to use a branded Bitly link, which further ties in our brand to everything we're doing.
- First, the obvious - it shortens links. Not only that, but you can customize the links so that each one is easy to manage and identify. The customization aspect is definitely a huge plus since it's easy to start drowning in lots of indistinguishable URLs.
- The analytics portion of Bitly is also great. You can garner insights for each link you create like how many clicks the URL has, where the visitors are coming from, and identify trends in traffic behavior.
- Searchability - Bitly saves each link you create and you can easily search for them using key words. If you need to pull up a link you used months ago, all you have to do is search for it in Bitly and it will come up.
- One thing I've noticed is that if you're shortening a link that you didn't create - for example shortening the link to a news article that you then want to share on Twitter - the analytics will continue to pull data from the original URL as a whole, and not just your unique Bitlink. It would be nice to be able to pull out the traffic that just my efforts are pulling to the site, and not every single source of traffic that site is getting.
- Paying for a branded Bitly link makes all of our branding look tighter and more cohesive. We promote so many links a day and that extra level of customization is great for keeping a consistent look and feel to all of our content.
- Link shortening and customizing - It's simple: Paste the link into a box, watch it get shortened, rename it, and move on.
- Search - Just search for a keyword or tag in the search box and you're off. As easy as Google.
- The analytics can be a bit clunky. I wouldn't 100% rely on Bitly's analytics to gain insights from your promotional efforts.
Yes, but I don't use it