Perhaps the top reason to use Bit.ly (beyond obviously shortening links) is for its analytics. The service makes it easy to see all sorts of data about your short URL links going out to services like Twitter. But sometimes looking at the bigger picture is more interesting than individual data. Now you can see that too.
Today, the service has unveiled its new Bit.ly Click Summary. This is a new page on the site that allows you to see aggregate data for all your Bit.ly links over a set period of time. Currently, this only works for the past 7 days, but Bit.ly says that monthly views will be added soon as well.
Along the top of this new page, you’ll see a bar graph showing your aggregate clicks over each of the last seven days. Next to that, you’ll find pie charts showing Top Referrers and Locations for your link data. Finally, below that is a huge list of referrer and country data for the set time period (again, in this case, a week).
The referrer list is particularly interesting because it gives you a good sense of which Twitter clients are most popular among the people that click on your links.
As Twitter’s default URL shortener, Bit.ly has been gathering a ton of valuable link data for quite some time now. We’re still waiting for them to launch Bit.ly Now, a service expected to take on popular link sites like Digg.
This is AWESOME. bUT TC SUCKS
fascinating.
I am sorry, but I had to laugh at this one
hahaha… @googler that comment was funny!
How does bit.ly make money? what’s the business model?
business model?
same way as twitter.
its called venture financing. :P
business plan??? lool they hope someone somewhere will buy them… until that day .. they try to dominate the market…. :-)
I’ve never trusted the bit.ly stats personally. To many inconsistencies for me.
We may not be as popular as bit.ly, but we’re a LOT more profitable. We charge for our URL shortening services that have real-time stats, custom domains, and multi-user support. A real business model for real businesses. http://www.ez.com and http://www.budurl.com
at the end of the day bit.ly dominate the market…and it’s the main short url service for twitter… it’s like creating a paid version of facebook…
bit.ly is blocked in china, for a couple of months now ..
This new summary feature is cool looking but lacks useful and/or actionable data.
I would like to see Bit.ly do a better job separating crawlers and bots from the actual human clicks. This is the root of the cause of the apparent lack of accuracy in the Bit.ly reporting.
The best enhancement Bit.ly could make at this point would be to separate out human clicks and non-human clicks.
so true …. they need better stats… until that day ..their stats are almost pointless
As of today, bit.ly has flagged a warning for my art studio tour website, which has been on the web for 8 years and just had a recent revision. There is nothing suspicious on this website. I have linked to it from bit.ly for about 7 months on twitter with no problems. I can no longer use bit.ly to shorten URL’s because it also issued a warning for all the artists’ websites linking from the Studio Tour site too. I sent a support email to bit.ly but I don’t expect I will hear back from them. I am upset about this and really sad, because I did like the analytics aspect of bit.ly.
I would appreciate any ideas about how to get this corrected from bit.ly.