Bitly (Bit.ly) is one of the most popular link shortening tools. The vendor says it shortens 1 billion links per month. The company is privately held, based in New York City, and was founded in 2008.
$35
per month
BL.INK
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
BL.INK is a link management and URL shortening service that creates an environment to manage every touch, monitor for accuracy, and provides analytical insights to measure value and performance.
It gets the job done and has a really good analytics tool. It links to Linkinbio and integrates with other apps as well. The redirect is a big pro for me since our URL are constantly changing but I don't want the short URL that I've marketing to be changing all the time.
It's as simple as that using BL.INK. Our entire crew found it simple to set up, and we can now all shorten links for our company. It notifies you whether you've previously linked to that website or if you've used a specific short link. The Chrome extension is a nice addition, and I especially like the dynamic links, which allow me to send a user to different affiliate pages depending on where they're joining from, or to the webinar sign-up page before the webinar, the live YouTube page during the webinar, and the webinar expired page after the webinar. Everything is simple to set up, and their welcome sequence was excellent.
One thing I've noticed is that if you're shortening a link that you didn't create - for example shortening the link to a news article that you then want to share on Twitter - the analytics will continue to pull data from the original URL as a whole, and not just your unique Bitlink. It would be nice to be able to pull out the traffic that just my efforts are pulling to the site, and not every single source of traffic that site is getting.
Pricing is an issue if you upgrade to Pro OR Business plan.
when you share any shortened link to social media the resulted post sometimes missed the attached media or it shows a blank preview. May be it a technical glitch but happens with me sometimes.
Using Bitly to create shareable, trackable short links for social media couldn't be easier. Bitly is super easy to manage and offers easy monitoring of short links. Even with the few shortcomings or cumbersome features, Bitly is ranked number 1 for shortening links for our organization because of how simple it is to use.
I've witnessed very little availability issues with Bitly. This includes very rare occurrences of application errors and unplanned outages, of which I very much appreciate. When there are application errors or outages, Bitly does a great job of handling the issues in a timely manner and I am rarely out of the site for long at all. This is great, considering I was using Bitly for nearly every link that was posted to our social media accounts.
I have used Bitly's service on a variety of computers, systems, and browsers. With this being said, I have not noticed much of a change at all between the browsers and computers, and Bitly's performance is top notch. Reports are also completed in a reasonable time frame, and I have had very little problem with lag time on loading different pages on the site. Pages tend to load quite quickly.
For us, Bitly is a Godsend an an almost perfect solution. I have no complaints and would recommend them to almost anyone. I guess I would hold back from a 10/10 because short URLs can sometimes look spammy. For us, and what we need it for, it's just about perfect!
I did not receive any in-person training, as I felt that I didn't need this type of training in order to understand and learn Bitly. It was quite easy for me to explore Bitly and learn the features myself without needing a person to give me a demo or tutorial. Kudos to making a platform that is very straightforward.
I haven't experienced direct online training - However, several times while learning Bitly by myself I went to the main Bitly page to answer a few questions I had. This includes determining exactly what features I was receiving and then I would explore the website and find these features. Also, I went to the Enterprise tab when both deciding to purchase that upgrade, as well as after I purchased this upgrade. It was very helpful in learning exactly what came with that package and after the upgrade, I was able to look there and learn some of the aspects of the upgrade that I was missing
Very excited to use bitly for link tracing - I was very excited to begin using Bitly for this company, and I've had very favorable impressions of using Bitly in the past for a variety of different jobs. Knowing the amount clicks on each link is important for our overall strategy.
Bitly is the most fully featured and intuitive of the (albeit limited) options we have evaluated. Bitly is also the link shortener that our staff and our user base have had the most interaction with, so it was the choice with the least friction/switching costs up front. In this category, where the software provided has been more or less commoditized (at our level of usage) those were the most important considerations. The price point was and continues to be reasonable enough to not cause issues.
BL.INK is the first product I used for my organization but we switched Rebrandly due to pricing as it was cheaper. At the time we were a smaller company so we switched to Rebrandly due to the similarities between the two products. Since we have grown into a larger organization we switched back to BL.INK
Bitly's scalability is great. When I began using it, I only used it once in a while to promote blog articles from our WordPress site on Twitter. This was due to Twitter's character limit and URL shortening was necessary. However, once I became more familiar with it and started seeing the benefits of many of Bitly's features, I began using it for nearly every link I posted across all of our social media accounts. This increased the workload I filtered through Bitly, and we also upgraded from free to a paid account. This growth was handled very well by Bitly and I was very pleased with its ability to scale so easily.
Professionalism: We used to stick very long and unattractive URLs on our social media post but after discovering Bitly it has simply made us look more professional and made people take us more seriously online.
Longevity: If you think of the longevity of the links it can be frustrating to know that you're unable to delete them permanently resulting in your audience being able to always access your content using the Bitly link unless you permanently delete or change the original URL.
Market research: Being able to recognize the most popular links through Bitly analytics I am able to focus my efforts on creating similar types of content.
