Shortened URLs have become very common place online these days, and have become even better tools for internet marketing. Most people have seen shortened URLs on Facebook and Twitter (especially due to 140 character limit) such as: bit.ly, ow.ly, and many many others. (example: http://bit.ly/bsAOhH)
From an internet marketing standpoint these are fantastic, because they help track and analyze where your traffic and links are coming from. Now some are probably saying well “that’s what analytics is for.” But! What if you are running a banner campaign on 10 different websites and several advertising suppliers? Are you going to dig through analytics for hours trying to analyze all the referring sites? You can, but I’d suggest not to.
The great thing about bit.ly is being able to track and see where the clicks are coming from (Facebook, Twitter, Banners, etc.) The drawback however is bit.ly doesn’t like to create more than one shortened link for a given URL (in fact it just won’t let you) However, using an effective anchor tag as your tracking link will generate as many tracking URLs as you need.
Example:
You want to create several tracking links for www.mygreatsite.com/Cool-Page.html
The thing to do is create a separate tracking URL such as:
…and so on for as many as you need.
Paste your links and click "shorten" and bit.ly will create a unique tracking link for each and let you use a separate link for each campaign, and let you easily see in your dashboard how many clicks and traffic sources. This should help you from having to log into several different websites and track statistics from numerous places. It doesn’t allow for ‘grouping’ links by campaigns or anything yet, but I’m sure they will come up with something in the future or possibly be an addition to their Bit.ly Pro service? We can only hope.
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