Overview
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.
Use Bitly for Reliable Linking!
Bitly gets the job done
Bitly is a great product to "shorten" my workload
The go-to URL shortner
Bitly: Please try an amazing link shortener!
Fantastic service, excellent interface, valuable insight!
Great easy-to-use link shortening tool
Using Bitly as a Software Marketer
Bitly solves it all and you don't need any other shortener
Bitly helps with the shortening of URLs
Bitly makes easy to generate custom and short links
Bitly Is Efficient and Cost-Effective URL shortener and tracking service.
A great tool for custom domain linking in social media posts.
Great Free and Premium Features.
Excellent tool for Startups that want to improve their user experience.
Awards
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Pricing
Basic
$35
Free
Free
Customized
Contact sales team
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Product Demos
bitly project demo
Bitly Video Demo
bitly demo
CMPE281 Bitly Demo
CMPE281 Bitly Project Demo
READ DESCRIPTION! -- Review & Demo Of Switchy.io Tutorial -- Bitly And Clickmagick Alternative
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Bitly?
Bitly Video
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
Comparisons
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Reviews and Ratings
(130)Community Insights
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
- 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
(1-3 of 3)- Shortening URL
- Giving insights about the clicks
- Servers with 99.99999% uptime
- Easy to create and manage URLs
- Providing analytics of others shortened URLs
- Insights about trending markets
- Custom daily reports
- Shortening URL
- Insights about clicks
- Friendly URLs
- It helps increase ROI due to the fact that as a marketer one can improve marketing strategies
- Creating short links
- Copying links created
- Read insights
bit.ly -- short on links, BIG on ROI
- 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.
- 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.
When it comes to social media - Bitly saves the day!
- 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.