Posts Tagged ‘ly’

Bit.ly and Ow.ly best URL shorteners

Wednesday, August 19, 2009 11:19 - by Patrick Thornton

Not all URL shorteners are created equal, especially if you’re shortening URLs for work.

What good is it to shorten a link if it doesn’t work for end users? That will deprive you of page views and frustrate users (potentially losing customers). Speed and reliability matter.

Twitter and social media users know how important URL shorteners have become. Without URL shortening, Twitter and other microblogging services would be much less functional. Many journalists and news organizations are sharing links via Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and others. For these people and companies, URL shortening reliability is very important.

Royal Pingdom did a great study comparing the speed and reliability of URL shorntening services. Key findings:

  • Ow.ly had 0 downtime between July 16 and August 16 of 2009. That’s amazing. Bit.ly was close with 99.98 percent uptime. Tr.im came in last with a 99.10 percent uptime, which translates into almost 80 hours of downtime a year.
  • Is.gd is the fastest URL shortening service, followed by Bit.ly and Ow.ly. Snipurl was the slowest.
  • “Five out of nine services had a 99.9% uptime or better, which we have to consider acceptable.” There is a big difference in 99 and 99.9 percent uptime, especially when you’re trying to share links at peak times of day.
  • When speed and reliability are combined, Bit.ly and Ow.ly tied for first. Tr.im came in last.

Tracking shortened URL links with bit.ly

Wednesday, April 8, 2009 14:58 - by Patrick Thornton

bitly

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.

bitly_aggregate

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. :)

About BeatBlogging.Org

BeatBlogging.org was a grant-funded journalism project that studied how journalists used social media and other Web tools to improve beat reporting. It ran for about two years, ending in the fall of 2009.

New content is occasionally produced here by the this project's former editor Patrick Thornton. The site is still up and will remain so because many journalists and professors still use and link to the content. BeatBlogging.org offers a fascinating glimpse into the former stages of journalism and social media. Today it's expected that journalists and journalism organization use social media, but just a few years ago that wasn't the case.