Improvements to tracking your links with bitly

Over the past few months we have been working on some exciting improvements to the way we show link stats. Your feedback inspired these improvements, and members of the bitly community beta tested them. We are excited to share them with you today.

The improved link stats view — which you can access by adding a “+” to any bitly link or by clicking “view stats” on any link in your history — shows you much more than just the number of times your link has been clicked. You can now compare your bitly link’s performance to that of all bitly links pointing to the same content, find out who else is sharing a bitly link to the same content, and see what social networks and geographic regions are providing traffic easier than ever before.

A better bar graph

The bar graph at the center of the link stats page now lets you visualize your link’s traffic alongside that of all bitly links pointing to the same content. Use the toggles above the graph to turn these data sets on and off. View stats for the past hour, day, week or month by selecting one of the time options listed above the graph on the left.

For links more than a day old, you can see hourly click breakdowns for any day in the bar graph. Simply hover over a bar in the graph, and click ‘view hourly breakdown’. This can help you see the exact pattern of traffic that a link received on a given day.

 

Other bitly users who shared the same link

Interested in comparing your click stats to those of other bitly users? At the bottom of the page, you can see the other people who shared a bitly link to the same content. You will see up to six people, sorted by the number of clicks their link received. This list will only display people who have publicly saved this link with bitly. (Learn more about the difference between public and private links here.)  

Stats at a glance and link insights

At the top of the link stats page, you will see three different numbers: total clicks on your bitly link, total clicks on all bitly links to that same content, and the percentage of the total clicks that came from your bitly link. Below these stats is your bitly shortlink to copy.

 

Right underneath the header block, you will now see link insights that tells you something interesting about your bitly link, and how it performs compared to other bitly links that direct to the same content.

  

See which social networks are driving traffic to your link

Below the bar graph, you will see the list of domains where your bitly link was clicked. Clicks from large social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn or Google+ are added up and displayed together. Even better, if you connect your Twitter account to bitly, you can see recent tweets that include a link to the content you saved.   

 

 

Any clicks on domains that are not part of a major social network, such as a blog or corporate website, will be represented under “other”.

Where in the world your clicks are coming from

You can now gain a better understanding of where your bitly link is being clicked with a heat map that displays countries with higher click rates in red. To the right of the map, you will see a list breakdown of clicks by country, as we ll as the percentage of the total clicks that came from that country.

We’d love to know what you think about these improvements to the link stats page! Please send any questions or comments to support [at] bitly.com, or send a tweet to @bitly. Need a bitly account? Sign up here.