Bit.ly – Not Just A URL Shortner, A Stats Tool Too

Posted on 23. Dec, 2009 by Web Design in Web Development

When you think of shorter URL’s, whats the first thing that springs to mind? For me it used to be tinyurl.com, because it lived up to its name. But Bit.ly makes your URL’s even shorter, and provides you with a whole load of tools to track, manage and act on your clicks.

What Is Bit.ly?

Bit.ly is a URL shorter that makes pasting URL’s a whole lot shorter, especially if you are short for characters. This can be very useful is posting to services such as Twitter, that only let you tweet 140 characters maximum. Bit.ly can take any URL and make it shorter. For example…

http://www.webdesigndev.com/inspiration/25-clear-and-beautiful-comparison-tables (80 Characters)

Can be shortened using bit.ly into something like the following…

http://bit.ly/4rVLVs (20 Characters)

Which is 4 times shorter than the long URL, thus saving tweet space.

How Do I Use Bit.ly On Twitter?

On the main Twitter website, Twitter automatically parses all links you paste into a tweet as a bit.ly link. This is great, but what happens if you want to go that one step further and manage clicks and stats? Well you can actually sign up for a bit.ly account, and manually shorten all your url’s that way. This allows you to track all your clicks to your shortened url’s, and also look over stats.

You can even use bit.ly in 3rd party twitter applications, such as TweetDeck. In the settings pane within TweetDeck, click the  services tab, and then type in your bit.ly username and then your API key that bit.ly provides you with.

How Does Bit.ly Benefit WebDesignDev?

Bit.ly benefits a big website like WebDesignDev, because we can manage live clicks and stats. When we tweet about something, we can see the live clicks coming in and how many clicks the bit.ly link got each minute.

On the bit.ly homepage when you are logged in, you can see a summary of all your shortened URLS. The number at the top is the number of clicks your unique link had, and the number at the bottom is the total number of clicks that have gone through bit.ly to reach the page your shortened URL goes to.

At the top of the homepage you can view a small summary of your weekly bit.ly stats. Included is a small graph which shows a bar representation of how many clicks you had each day of the week, and then to the right it tells you how many total bit.ly clicks you have had in the last week.

When you click on the stats summary, it takes you to the more in depth stats page. One of the sections is a full graph of your weekly clicks, and when you hover your mouse over each bar, it tells you how many clicks you had that day. You can also toggle the 30 day bar chart stats too.

Another great feature is that on the stats page it lists a pie chart of the top referrers to your bit.ly links, and also where in the world they clicked it from.

If the pie chart is too unclear, then there is also tables below with a more in depth review of the top link referrers, and the locations people clicked your bit.ly links from.

Enjoy using bit.ly and managing all your tweets with it. I would love to hear how how many weekly clicks your getting. At the moment we are averaging at around 18,000 per week.

Think you can beat that? Drop us a comment.