Bitly Information Reviews & Insights

Score8.3 out of 10

133 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Bitly are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Customizable links: Many users have praised the ability to customize links in Bitly, as it allows them to easily manage and identify each link. This feature prevents their URLs from getting lost in a sea of indistinguishable links.
Analytics insights: The analytics feature in Bitly is highly valued by users, as it provides valuable insights for each link created. Users appreciate being able to see the number of clicks, the source of visitors, and trends in traffic behavior, which helps them make data-driven decisions.
Searchability: Users find Bitly's searchability feature beneficial, as it allows them to easily find links by using keywords. This saves users time and effort when retrieving links that were used months ago.

Reviews

13 Reviews

Information

The go-to URL shortner

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 27, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Not only super useful URL shortening - but the additional features like the ability to integrate webhooks or QR codes with the shortened URL's are incredibly useful. The best usecase we have is shortening incredibly long URL's to short ones for our digital brochures for our events - then placing the QR codes around the event, so visitors have access to maps, timetables etc on their own devices.

Pros

URL Shortening
Custom Domains
QR Codes

Cons

Adhoc Pricing
Accuracy
Campaign grouping tracking

Likelihood to Recommend

The ability to shorten an URL to a legible format - while incorporating your brand(s) via custom domains is very powerful and relatively simple to get up and running. The QR generation on the shorten URL's is a great feature and the ability to get simple top level tracking is good.

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (Publishing company, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Bitly: Please try an amazing link shortener!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 26, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is helpful as it can provide a short address. This feature allows our customers to reach easily to our content. It also makes it easy to share and identify links. Also, if you want to create QR codes, Bitly will do the work for you. Bitly also provides a customer service address, which is a great tool to make your brand stand by itself and differentiate from your competition.

Pros

Custom links for your brand.
Shortens internet addresses.
Build and strengthen your brand.
QR code creation.

Cons

Sometimes, redirection is not that fast.
Editing links is not currently possible.
There is a lack of tracking the specific sources of where the traffic comes from.

Likelihood to Recommend

Bitly is a very appropriate tool if you are looking to build a brand name. This will help your customers recognize a shortened link address that can be memorable. It is also an easy tool to use, which means that you won't spend a lot of time learning how to manipulate it.

Omar Raya León

Redactor in Social Media at Todos Los Jugadores (Writing & Editing, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

View profile

Bitly makes easy to generate custom and short links

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

March 25, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I have used Bitly for sharing links on different social media platforms. It helped our team to track users through different links. It is easy to use. The custom links feature is also very helpful. Adding tags helped organize links for archival purposes. We have also used analytics data for learnings.

Pros

Creating user friendly, good looking and easy to remember links.
Getting total click data of custom links.
Tags feature helps to organise.

Cons

User interface needs to be improved for more smooth operation.
Box to Create Custom links should be more spacious.
Need to make improvement for exporting data.

Likelihood to Recommend

The custom links of Bitly are very helpful to understand the behavior of different types of users. How many people are actually visiting our site from different promotional campaigns can also be tracked very easily. But it is a bit difficult to analyze the data of old custom URLs on a very large scale which needs to be simplified.

Verified User

Team Lead (Media Production company, 1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Great Free and Premium Features.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 24, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Bitly is shortening URLs and has the ability to track the analytics of the page that anyone with your Bitly login can view. It also populates the thumbnail and relevant SEO information when sharing it on social media accounts. It is easy to use and has a free or premium option.

Pros

Tracking Analytics.
Ability to customize.
shorten URLS.

Cons

Add more SEO data areas.
Options for thumbnail updates.
More analytic data.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is always appropriate for any company or person trying to shorten URLs to make them more appealing visually and it tracks the data views and post page. Any company that needs to share posts to social media, this is right for them. The free option is available to anyone.

Verified User

Advisor (Publishing company, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Bitly is Worth the Subscription

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

March 24, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Bitly as a means to create a variety of UTM codes to manage and monitor a variety of marketing campaigns that we have running concurrently. Using this tool, we are able to take extremely long URLs with several parameters attached and turn them into a user-friendly link. In addition, we can include our brand in the URL and then track everything through the administrative interface. This, in conjunction with our other analytical tools, has become an integral part of our marketing. We currently have dozens of active UTM codes, and Bitly helps us manage them effectively.

Pros

Shortens long UTM codes
Allows administrative tracking
Lets us include our brand in the link
Gives us the option to create a QR code

Cons

No suggestions for improvement

Likelihood to Recommend

The most effective use we have for Bitly is with UTM codes. We can always use shorter URLs, and Bitly does a great job with that. Since we market digitally, over the air, and in print, we often need short URLs or QR codes to help make links more readable. With SMS campaigns, having a short link is invaluable. Bitly handles all of this for us, plus allows us to include our brand in the link.

Verified User

Manager in Marketing (Telecommunications company, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

Bitly Review

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 23, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Bitly helps us shorten URLs which can be easily remembered by the target audience to access some of our important landing pages. I have used it to promote webinars, training material, etc to drive more folks to those pages without the need to remember long links/web addresses by replacing them with a Bitly.

Pros

Shortens URL
Helps in tracking link analytics
Has a freemium product as well

Cons

Sometimes it takes a while to redirect
Link customization not possible sometimes on free plan
Tracking link sources is a challenge

Likelihood to Recommend

The easy to understand interface coupled with allowing users to choose the short link text and the ability to get analytics on link performance such as clicks makes Bitly a great tool to have in the marketing stack. The simplicity of the platform js what makes it even more powerful to use and deploy.

Verified User

Manager in Marketing (Computer Software company, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Bitly is a Perfect Link Hosting Solution for Our Needs

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 11, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

For our music media site, Bitly is crucial for being able to track downloads to let our clients and advertisers know click rates and such. We used to use an in-house script for download tracking and it was completely unreliable and possibly even a security risk. We have since completely shifted over to using Bitly as a solution.

Pros

Hosted links.
Short URLs.
Click count.
Custom URL notes.

Cons

I suppose it could offer more data for link tracking, but really, I'm pretty satisfied with it as-is.

Likelihood to Recommend

I run a prominent, niche music media site, and Bitly has become crucial to us for being able to track downloads to let our clients and advertisers know click rates and such. We use it for tracking free (and legal) song downloads and for tracking our hosted banner ad links. It might be a less appropriate service if the Bitly web link might seem spammy to some.

Verified User

General Manager (Music company, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Branded Bitly Links Best for URL Shortening

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

December 12, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Bitly links for link shortening on various websites we manage. It helps us easily created branded short links for sharing via social media. For example, we registered the tri.pet domain to use as the root for short links to long URLs of informative articles and discussion forum topics about pet amputation recovery for dogs and cats found on our tripawds.com website.

Pros

Link shortening
Shortlink branding

Cons

WordPress integration has had its faults on a few of our sites.

Likelihood to Recommend

I recommend anyone use the free Bitly account features to create short links for sharing long URLs on social media and in email campaigns. For anyone interested in branding their short links, I suggest registering a relatively short domain and using Bitly to assign that as your default root URL. For tracking traffic, I still recommend referring to Google Analytics reports.

Jim Nelson

Principal in Corporate at Agreda Communications (Internet, 1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

View profile

Too expensive for what it does

Rating: 2 out of 10

Incentivized

December 14, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used only used bitly to shorten URLs with a vanity URL. This was mostly for use on our social platforms.

Pros

It shortens URLs very easily.
The Chrome extension is very helpful and easy to use.
It is easy to add a vanity URL although it is something you have to pay extra for.

Cons

It is very expensive for what it does.
It does not provide much overall value.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you have a large budget, and short URLs with good branding is a concern, I'd recommend Bitly but if that is not the case then I'd look elsewhere.

Thue Lægdsgaard Madsen

Marketing Operations Manager in Marketing at Kissmetrics (Internet, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

bit.ly -- short on links, BIG on ROI

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

June 1, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently I use bit.ly to track clicks and in-bound marketing leads for a few freelance jobs I'm leading. One is to track clicks to a website that is selling books (directly from author) - another is my wife's business (small clothing company, Etsy store), and for a music streaming company that hasn't launched yet -- to generate more names for our email listserv. I used it to show click trends over time and to review referrers.

Pros

Ease of use. It's so simple it needs almost no explanation as to what info it delivers or how to use it.
Accessible information. I love that you can see the info about any link by simply including a "+" at the end of the link.
Personalized/custom links. Creation of these makes it super easy to remember the most important links -- and doubles as branding as well!

Cons

It used to be that the app was not as user friendly as the desktop version, but that was remedied last year. It's great now.
Although fully transparent info for all links is good, it might be nice if you could make a link's info private. Note: this may be accessible at the enterprise level of service, which I am not currently subscribed to.

Likelihood to Recommend

I have used bit.ly for my roles at NBA, VIACOM, BET and now with the small businesses I consult for. In my opinion, there is no better service for ease of use for shortening, and getting real time action oriented data for the links you generate.

Verified User

Employee in Marketing (Music company, 11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

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