Tracking shortened URL links with bit.ly

There are many URL shortening options on the Web, but our current favorite is bit.ly, due to its tracking and analytics capabilities.

Bit.ly allows us to track links we share with a surprisingly level of detail. It’s really the perfect compliment to our link journalism efforts on social networks like Twitter. We of course use Google Analytics to track BeatBlogging.Org, but until bit.ly came around, it wasn’t easy to track how well our efforts were doing on Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Bit.ly doesn’t just track how many people click on your links, it also tracks:

• Time — How many people click on links by minute, hour, day, week and all-time. It allows you to see the longevity of your links and what times are the best to release links.
• Location — Bit.ly breaks down who is clicking on your links by country.
• Referrers — How are people finding your links? Via Twitter.com? TweetDeck?
• Aggregate view — Bit.ly also shows you how many people have clicked on the aggregate link. Let’s say I share a link about a new beatblogging trend. I can see how many people clicked on my shortened version of that link, and I can also see how many people clicked on the aggregate of all the shortened versions of that link. This is a handy way to see how popular the content I am linking to is.

Bit.ly is the perfect compliment to Twitter. We’re hoping that one of the premium features that Twitter offers is advanced analytics, but until that happens bit.ly does a pretty nice job. If you’re going to engage in link journalism on social networks, you owe it to yourself to track the success of the links you share.

And if you’re intrigued by that provactive link bait that is in both images, you can find it here: http://bit.ly/GNGId

Just a little link-bait case study.