How To Use Bit.ly To Track Links And Clicks

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How To Use Bit.ly To Track Links And Clicks

Bit.ly is a great little free tool that allows you to shorten long URLs such as affiliate links

so you can more easily insert them into emails, tweets and such. Bit.ly Pro (also free)

allows you to track your clicks as well.

Today we’ll be going through using Bit.ly Pro to shorten links and also where to view

stats for those links & clicks.

Step 1: Shorten Links

When you log into your account, you’ll see a box as shown below where you enter the

long URL that you’d like to shorten. Simply enter the long link and click the “Shorten”

button.

Below the box you’ll now see a shortened link as shown below.

Copy & paste this short link on your website, social networking sites, email or any

place you want to share it.

http://www.slumdogmarketer.com/subscribe


Step 2: Custom Link

If you don’t like the look of the shortened link, you can create a custom link. To do this,

click “Customize” next to the bit.ly generated short link.

Enter the letters/word you’d like to use for the link & click the “Customize” button as

illustrated on the page below.

If the link is available, it will be updated. If someone else has already used that

customized set of letters or words, then you’ll have to choose a different word/letter

combo.

Once you have a unique letter/word combo, your new link will generate.

Copy & paste this short link on your website, social networking sites, email or any

place you want to share it.

Repeat for each link you want to shorten.

Step 3: Short Domain & Tracking Domain (optional steps)

With the Pro version of Bit.ly, you can enter a short domain and a tracking domain. To

do this, in the upper right corner, next to your username, click the down arrow and

select “Settings”.



Custom Short Domain

A custom short domain is used in place of the bit.ly.com domain when creating short

links.

For instance, if you owned the domains all-baseball-card-deals.com and abcd.com you

could enter http://aplc.com here and your shortened bit.ly links would look like

abcd.com/aQ7tz rather than bit.ly/aQ7tz

Just enter the short domain into the box and click the “Add Short Domain” button.

Note: Adding a custom short domain requires you to edit your DNS settings before it

will work.



Tracking Domain

This will allow you to gather data on how your domain is being circulated across the

web.

If you own the domain all-baseball-card-deals.com and set it as your dashboard

tracking domain, all of the bit.ly redirected traffic to all-baseball-card-deals.com would

show up in your stats.

You simply need to enter your root domain and click the “Add Tracking Domain”

button.



You’ll then be asked to verify your domain one of three ways…





Once you verify, you’ll see a new message in your dashboard…

Step 4: Sidebar Bookmarklet

Bit.ly has a sidebar bookmarklet that allows you to tweet, watch your stats and see

who is talking about the linked page on Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and blog

comments right from your browser’s sidebar.

To set this up, navigate to the upper right corner next to your username & click the

down arrow and select “Shorten Everywhere”.

The page will show you an outline of how the bookmarklet will look. At the bottom of

the page, there’s a yellow box that tells you to drag the link to your browser toolbar to

get started.

If you already have links set up in your dashboard, once the bookmarklet refreshes,

you’ll start to see your stats.

You can add your Twitter and Facebook account details so you can quickly post

directly from this bookmarklet.



You can find similar tools that work pretty much the same on this page:

http://bit.ly/pages/tools

Step 5: Reading Stats

Once you’ve had your links published to the web for a while, you’ll be able to view your

stats. To do this, log into your account and click “Analyze”.

The Metrics Summary will give you a breakdown of your stats in graph form for the

past 30 days, as shown below.

http://bit.ly/pages/tools



The Dashboard Summary will give you a different view of your stats for the past 24

hours, as shown below.



That’s it! You can now easily use short links and track the stats for each one.


Documents

How To Use Bit.ly To Track Links And Clicks