Recently a friend asked why one of his Twitter accounts with 3 followers had 18 clicks on a bit.ly link. There are several reasons for that and a few other things to explain if you’re new to URL shortening with bit.ly

Bit.ly is a common URL shortening service. There used to be just one or two of these and they weren’t very commonly used. As someone said recently a “back-water Internet technology.” Services like bit.ly are great when used with services like Twitter. They allow you to maximize what you can share in a 140 character post. They also make it easier to share long URLs over the phone and various other places.

A fantastic benefit of using a tool like bit.ly is the ability to see statistics on how many people are clicking the link. Bit.ly in particular will show anyone this information and will also display where it thinks the click came from. If you’re using Twitter (or any other form of social media) for business this makes it a great tool to track when your followers are active and what they’re interested in.

Now let’s get back to the issue of 18 clicks from an account with only 3 followers. Bit.ly URLs (and some others) are often aggregated into various sites to show where people are linking to. So someone might see your URL on another site, possibly even without the context of your original post. In addition while someone might not be following you they might have bookmarked your twitter page or added your stream to their RSS reader (Yes you can subscribe to someone from your RSS reader and appear to not be following them). Your social media feeds may also be scraped and added as content to another site somewhere and could be generating clicks from there also (this is a whole other blog post).

As a general rule bit.ly stats are fairly accurate but they don’t get everything. For example TweetDeck has an option that allows a user to see a preview of many types of shortened links and allows the user to click on either version of the link, not just the shortened version. Additionally most services like bit.ly offer similar preview options. You can add a + to the end of any bit.ly link and see all of the stats for that link, clicks, sources and the destination. Bit.ly also seems to make no distinction on how many times a single user might have clicked a link and will even record you if you click your own link.

Bit.ly stats are great for getting a feel for things but they’re not perfect. URL shorteners are best used as a benchmark over a final performance indicator. It’s a great way to get an idea on where outbound clicks from a social media stream are going if you don’t own the destination site but if you do then your on-site analytics are going to be much stronger.

If you own a site and need more advice on tracking the URLs you’re sharing with social media contact us, we can help!

This is a post from the Nullvariable Web Consulting Blog.

Understanding Bit.ly Stats