Review - HP
April 04, 2016

Review - HP

Holland Pintarch | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Bitly

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.

Pros

  • Love how it links back to my original page
  • Gives me statistics on my clicks

Cons

  • Provide emails of those who only click once for follow ups
  • I have a better understanding of who looked at our customers' links

Using Bitly

3 - Marketing, social media
3 - Marketing and/or social media experience
  • Social media posts
  • Blog article distribution
  • SEO
  • SEO
  • More social media
  • Business cards
  • Via email distribution
Bitly helps us determine how many people are clicking on our links and where they are finding these links.

Evaluating Bitly and Competitors

Yes - Bitly didn't necessarily replace another product per say, but it did replace our old method of simply posting direct links. We found that link shortening was particularly useful for sharing our blog articles and products via our social media. This way, we can keep word count and links down to a minimum and I can also see analytics on link clicks. The best part of having this information is that I'm able to adjust the way I market these links on social media and the time/day of the week of certain postings. One way I've done this is that I've noticed early evening and midday around lunch are the best times to post blog articles, as this is when people have the free time to scroll through social media and read lengthier blog articles.
  • Price
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Analyst Reports
Reputation in the marketing industry is important in every decision we make. We chose Bitly because we have heard of favorable experiences with other companies using your service and I have personally used it in the past. If a product or company has negative reviews on websites, no endorsements from its previous/current users, very little social media following, and/or negative remarks on their social media accounts, it would severally impact my decision to purchase and use that service. When exploring services for help while managing my company's social media accounts, I didn't see any of these examples of a negative reputation for Bitly. This is why I was not hesitant in trying the free version and then upgrading to Enterprise.
I'm not sure - we would likely still go with Bitly. I don't know of any other services that provide as much as Bitly does as far as links and I'd still push to use Bitly if given the opportunity to chagce services. This is the best service at the best price. I have used Bitly with three separate companies and have appreciated the service for each of them. Again, reputation, price, and ease of use are all important factors in my decision on which services to purchase. I think the price for Enterprise is reasonable, Bitly has a great reputation, and I found Bitly very easy to learn and use on a daily basis.

Bitly Implementation

Very excited to use bitly for link tracing - I was very excited to begin using Bitly for this company, and I've had very favorable impressions of using Bitly in the past for a variety of different jobs. Knowing the amount clicks on each link is important for our overall strategy.
  • Implemented in-house
Change management was minimal - There was no change management used in our company regarding marketing services and Bitly - we use Bitly in order to keep better tabs on our marketing efforts and to make sure that we're using our social media ads at their best. As a digital marketing agency, it's important for us to make sure we're doing marketing and advertising at the top quality that we can.
  • None that I'm aware of

Bitly Training

  • Online training
  • Self-taught
I did not receive any in-person training, as I felt that I didn't need this type of training in order to understand and learn Bitly. It was quite easy for me to explore Bitly and learn the features myself without needing a person to give me a demo or tutorial. Kudos to making a platform that is very straightforward.
I haven't experienced direct online training - However, several times while learning Bitly by myself I went to the main Bitly page to answer a few questions I had. This includes determining exactly what features I was receiving and then I would explore the website and find these features. Also, I went to the Enterprise tab when both deciding to purchase that upgrade, as well as after I purchased this upgrade. It was very helpful in learning exactly what came with that package and after the upgrade, I was able to look there and learn some of the aspects of the upgrade that I was missing.
Yes. Bitly is very straight forward with how to use their service and it is very simple to use. I was able to pick it up very quickly and the platform is easy to navigate and explore, so I was able to continually learn different features and options without the need for in-person or online support. I very much appreciate the way the user interface is very clear cut and easy to follow. The clear labeling of features and organization of the platform also helps with ease of learning, so I am able to explore around Bitly with very little trouble.

Configuring Bitly

I think that Bitly's configurability is not too limited, or too complex. It provides a unique set of features and options that give the customer options, yet not too many as far as customization to completely overwhelm the user. I was satisfied with the product's configurability and would not wish to see it necessarily change to limit nor make it more extensive.
I don't really have an specific recommendations or best practices as far as configuring Bitly. I was the sole employee responsible for configuring and using Bitly in my company, and worked within a small marketing team. I was able to handle this myself and with very little supervision for configuring it into our systems and utilize this service.
No - we have not done any customization to the interface
No - we have not done any custom code
I did very little customization to the interface, as I found that on its own, Bitly was exactly what I needed. I also do not work with coding, so I was unable to add any custom code to the user interface and we had a busy technical team that was unable to assist in any coding I might have wanted to try.

Bitly Support

I haven't myself experienced any direct issues. I'm confident, with my previous experience, that any support issues I might have will be resolved within hours/business days of my ticket - as Bitly has never really let me down in the past. I am extremely happy with my service thus far.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None

Using Bitly

It's very simple to use and explain to others.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Link building
  • Link tracking
  • Analytics

Bitly Reliability

Bitly's scalability is great. When I began using it, I only used it once in a while to promote blog articles from our WordPress site on Twitter. This was due to Twitter's character limit and URL shortening was necessary. However, once I became more familiar with it and started seeing the benefits of many of Bitly's features, I began using it for nearly every link I posted across all of our social media accounts. This increased the workload I filtered through Bitly, and we also upgraded from free to a paid account. This growth was handled very well by Bitly and I was very pleased with its ability to scale so easily.
I've witnessed very little availability issues with Bitly. This includes very rare occurrences of application errors and unplanned outages, of which I very much appreciate. When there are application errors or outages, Bitly does a great job of handling the issues in a timely manner and I am rarely out of the site for long at all. This is great, considering I was using Bitly for nearly every link that was posted to our social media accounts.
I have used Bitly's service on a variety of computers, systems, and browsers. With this being said, I have not noticed much of a change at all between the browsers and computers, and Bitly's performance is top notch. Reports are also completed in a reasonable time frame, and I have had very little problem with lag time on loading different pages on the site. Pages tend to load quite quickly.

Relationship with Bitly

My colleague actually spoke with the vendor, but he had a very positive experience. He was pleased with the vendor's direct response to all questions asked and the Bitly employee also fleshed out the difference between the professional and enterprise services in ways that he was able to fully understand. Many sales people use jargon about their product or service that you have to be familiar with to understand, but this was not our experience with Bitly. It was a very good interaction and we upgraded to enterprise primarily because of that.
We've had very little issues with Bitly, so I actually haven't spoke with anyone regarding support. However, after the sale, I went through the enterprise features and self-taught how to use this new upgrade. I'm confident that if I needed any sales or customer support help, I would receive it immediately and in a friendly and professional manner. This is based off of the website's ease of use and the positive experience my supervisor had when speaking with a sales representative.
Again, I'm not the one who made the call with the sales representative to upgrade to the enterprise level. I'm unsure of what exactly was involved in this discussion and what was able to be negotiated. However, I'm sure that there were things that were able to be compromised and provided on our behalf, which is certainly appreciated by myself and my colleagues. We were very happy with our Bitly service and I plan to continue using it in all of my marketing/social media jobs in the future.
I don't really have any advice for working with the vendor. As I've discussed, myself and my colleagues have only had positive experiences using Bitly and working with the Bitly team to upgrade. The benefits of not really needing any support are great, but this also limits my interactions with Bitly employees. A tip that I would give anyone is to remember that customer support and sales representatives are people too, and should be treated as such. The best way to negotiate price points or what is provided in a service (as well as fix any bugs or issues you might have) is to treat the representative you're speaking to with respect and sincerity.

Upgrading Bitly

Yes - We upgraded to a new release of Bitly in the past and the new release went very smoothly. We didn't lose any of our data and there were very little unexpected impacts to our account or to our usage of the service. With each upgrade, we noticed several improvements and bug fixes, which are very much appreciated by myself and my team.
  • Upgraded user interface
  • Bug fixes
  • New features
  • New features
  • Bug fixes/glitch fixes
Yes - With one company I was working for, we upgraded from free to paid in order to access more features. At another, we upgraded from professional to enterprise, and appreciated several of the enterprise features. One of the best features that came with an upgrade was the ability to create branded links with our company name. Another is the ability to organize our account via department.
Yes - With any company I work with (freelance or employment) that has a need for Bitly, I would always advise to upgrade to enterprise. You can't beat the features that come with this version and I have literally used and appreciate all of them. Bitly should always be used by companies looking to really perfect their marketing strategy, especially when promoting links to their website or blog on social media.

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