Bit.ly Adds At-A-Glance Click Counts

May 16, 2009 at 12:43pm ET by Danny Sullivan

Last week, I talked with Bit.ly about future product improvements in their URL shortener service that I’d like to see. I’m still working on a full write-up, but one’s already emerged: at-a-glance click counts.

I’ve shortened well over 200 URLs through Bit.ly, and it’s been a real pain to log into my account and then have to drill into the info page for each URL individually, to see how things are going. That’s now been quietly changed:

As you can see, the number of overall clicks is now shown for any URL you’ve shortened.

As I said, I’ve got a longer piece taking a closer look at the service, which recently became the default shortener used by Twitter. But some quick hits:

Feeling overwhelmed by the data? It would be useful if you could sort your URLs in order of most clicks received to least. That’s coming, along with other options, but not for a few weeks.

Want to shorten URLs with Bit.ly but use your own domain, such as recently offered by Awe.sm or some other places? There are no immediate plans for this.

Want the ability to group URLs into “campaigns” or other categories? That’s in the works.

Can’t find a past URL? Just shorten it again. It’ll use the same short URL as you were originally assigned, if you’re logged in, and then you can easily drill down into learning more about traffic to it.

For more about URL shortening services in general, see my past post, URL Shorteners: Which Shortening Service Should You Use? The chart doesn’t reflect Bit.ly’s new status as the default in Twitter, but I’ll update that and a few other things next week.

Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series, maintains a personal blog called Daggle and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan.

See more articles by Danny Sullivan >

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