Tracking Marketing Effectiveness with bit.ly
posted by Craig Oda at
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
There are many services to shorten URLs for posting on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and LinkedIn. A popular service, bit.ly, recently added analysis capability which makes it much more useful to assess the success of social media campaigns. The basic idea is to apply a unique URL to each specific channel, Twitter, blogs, YouTube. Although the use of unique URLs is an old technique, bit.ly makes it easy to set up unique URLs without having to ask technical staff for help. The bit.ly service, which sees about a third of the monthly visitors as the more popular TinyURL, also presents the data as a set of graphs that are easy to view. Marketers can now set up and track things on their own.
I previously used notlong.com which has a similar tracking capability and the additional advantage of creating unique URLs. For example, I used notlong.com to create and track this URL for a blog posting on social media ROI.
http://mediaroi.notlong.com
Although it is nice to have a custom URL, a feature that bit.ly lacks, the analysis capabilities of notlong are much weaker than bit.ly.
If you set up a bit.ly account, you are presented with a dashboard of all your links. In addition to total views by date, bit.ly also presents charts and tables for Referrers, Locations, retweets on Twitter, and FriendFeed usage.
This level of features is much much better than TinyURL, a service with 1.75 billion hits per month. TinyURL does have a stealth feature that hides the original URL. This is a useful feature that bit.ly lacks, for those cases where you want people to get information but you may not want them to know who hosts that site.
The is.gd service offers URLs that are one character shorter than bit.ly. However, it lacks the tracking and analysis features. The is.gd service has shortened 5.5 million URLs to date.
There are numerous other URL shortening services, including budURL, eweri, hex.io, idek.net, lin.cr, POPrl, snipurl, twurl, and urlBorg. budURL, designed by Andy Meadows, has features for marketing people at small businesses, including a useful dashboard and a clickstream of URLs. However, the level of analysis isn't as deep as bit.ly right now. POPrl has a dashboard for tracking and a nice web page to view the most popular content that is being linked to.
bit.ly has a edge over the other services right now due to very strong analytics. It seems that they could easily turn their dashboard into revenue by placing advertisements on the side of the dashboard. I think that they should also develop more analytic features and offer a commercial service to marketing firms. There's an opportunity for bit.ly to become the Google Analytics of URL shorteners, the preferred tool of choice in any marketer's toolbox.
Here's another screenshot of bit.ly analytics.
This one shows a view of retweets.
Labels: bit.ly, social media
6 Comments:
Craig, does bit.ly track unique IP's? It looks like that is an advantage of notlong. If bit.ly adds a feature that separates out unique views, then I'll be sold.
David
I don't think that bit.ly tracks it out by unique IP. Are you sure that notlong has this feature? It doesn't appear on my notlong account. How do I see this data?
Give urlborg.com a try!
It has good statistics and it's built by a former OgilvyOne (athens) employee :-)
here is an example report page (just add /i to any urlborg short url)
http://ub0.cc/2w/1s/i.
Btw, if you are into QR codes, check this out (/qr at the end of short url): http://ub0.cc/2w/1s/qr
Dave, I see what you mean about the unique IPs. Notlong just lists out the number of unique IPs, it doesn't give you the actual unique IP.
I'm curious as to how you use this data? Unique IPs is not the same as unique views that we track with Google Analytics.
Also, can you use Notlong to track more than 10 days of data? I think that it may only show the 10 most recent days.
Let me know what you find out.
Hi Craig,
Not that familiar with notlong, but I imagine unique IP's helps you determine how many unique individuals clicked through your link. If you just track clicks, that's valuable data but you don't know how many of those are coming from different people. I think besides this benefit, you're right - notlong doesn't have some of the same analytics features such as more detailed historical data.
Dave, good point about the unique IPs. I'm hoping that bit.ly will add some of these features soon. It seems a useful tool that they developers of bit.ly could make some money from.
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