'Net Features : short urls

5 Billion Reasons to use Bit.ly

Mike Phillips — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 15:51:00 GMT

According to the official bit.ly blog, the link-shortening service is nearing 5 billion clicks per month. Helping matters is that Twitter replaced TinyURL with bit.ly as the default link shortener.

Why does this matter to Web professionals? Trust and familiarity. Short links are great but also mysterious. Think of it this way -- you're more likely to get a click on a link that consumers are used to seeing. It's like the difference between displaying a link to a .com and a .net, .org, .info or any of the other "unfamiliar" extensions.

Sign up with a professional bit.ly account and you can customize small links even more, such as including your brand or website name in the link. You will also receive deeper analytics.

And if there's a hotter trend on the Web than any other, it's video. Bit.ly has that covered as well, with bitly.tv -- a page showing the millions of Web videos being shared with bit.ly links. So I guess that's 5,000,000,001 reasons to use bit.ly.

Bit.ly Gets New, Improved Features

Mike Phillips — Tue, 04 May 2010 18:45:00 GMT

Bit.ly, one of the most popular link-shortening services, has undergone an overhaul, including some new functions and improved features that will prove very valuable to Web professionals. It's been dubbed the "fugu edition."

The bit.ly sidebar addition (can be added to your toolbar) allows publishers to quickly shorten links while on any website then post those links to Twitter, Facebook, and through e-mail. The sidebar also shows current conversations around bit.ly links.

New tracking features will give deeper insight into how your links are shared. Start by adding "+" to the end of any bit.ly link. Also, users can now see total bit.ly clicks for any given link. That is, how many times a Web page has been clicked through from a bit.ly link regardless of who created and posted the link, in addition to the clicks generated from your link. This might be a good way to test the effectiveness of your copy when sharing a bit.ly link -- if the link is popular on the Web, but your link is not getting clicks, the copy surrounding your link might need some work or perhaps your timing is off.

A public timeline is available, so users can see your bit.ly link history. This timeline is sharable as a URL, RSS feed or can be exported as a list and could prove very valuable as a way for users to filter content from their most trusted and valuable resources. For publishers, this is could be a nice promotional tool to achieve better branding with avid users.

A new management feature pulls together the most critical data on one page, showing some basic statistics of each link plus expandable links for quick access to more details.

For those seeking even more functionality, bitly.Pro offers custom short links, deeper and real-time analytics and easy integration with other Web tools. Those interested can apply for the bitly.Pro beta program.

Short URLs With Analytics

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 15:37:00 GMT

The problem with using short URL services such as TinyURL is that you can't really tell how effective they are (how many people click on them) much less where they have been seen on the wider Web. In a time when analytics is so important, I believe that services such as Cli.gs (which offers short URLs with traffic statistics) will eventually become the norm.

Cli.gs enables anyone to create a short URL from a longer one. Web pro's will not be able to keep the information private unless they register for a free account (which is quick and painless). I created a "clig" for the WM weblog (http://cli.gs/jjgsry) which shows all the post that are public on WebsiteMagazine.com. Analytics are kept for 30 days. What's helpful at Cli.gs are the depth of the reports. Users can see the latest activity from search engine bots on their Cligs short URL, mentions on social media sites like Twitter and inbound links to the destination URL. There is even a handy little bookmarklet available which creates shortened links on the fly.