What is Bit.ly and How EarlToms Uses It
What is Bit.ly?
Bit.ly is a free and easy way to track clicks to your site. This is useful to be able to track the return on the money you spend marketing. It doesn’t require a membership. You can easily take any link and turn it into a bit.ly link. No need to get fancy and explain further. It shortens links. That’s what Bit.ly does and they do it well.
How to Use it
Click the right upper orange button that says “Create Bitlink.”
Once you click create bitlink a side popup will appear. Then you will need to type or paste the long URL that you want to shorten. Once the link is entered you click create and you are finished. It’s that easy.
How EarlToms Uses Bit.ly
This is where it can get a bit confusing since it is marketing. The part that confuses many are the number of clicks you will see on the bit.ly dashboard. It currently says over 6,000 clicks on a link I am tracking. This isn’t accurate but the reason we use this service is for analytics. The Google Analytics program will show the referrer, in this case bit.ly, and how many visitors your site receives. Bit.ly counts every click however, Analytics only counts visitors that viewed your site and didn’t immediately leave. This is referred to as the bounce rate. The lower the bounce rate, the better your site is viewed by Google. They want visitor engagement on your site. They can track this metric and so should you.
Now on to the way we use the product.
We use it for our Royaltie Gems to track the amount of visitors we get on a given day from proximity marketing. It wouldn’t be wise to set something and forget about it because you thought it was making you money but was actually wasting your money. Bit.ly doesn’t do that using the gems. Since we are able to track clicks and users that Google Analytics counts we can see what messages are bringing engaged users.
See our article on Royaltie here.
How We Get Sneaky Using Bit.ly
This is the area no one realizes can translate to your website and other marketing avenues.
Let’s imagine you set a message on your gems using the bit.ly link. You know what message is bringing engaged users. The message is the most important aspect of why we track bit.ly links. If we see a message converting and bringing engaged users to our site we take that message and use it on other marketing platforms.
Our clicks on one beacon since November 7, 2017, to February 6, 2018. As you can see over 1,000 clicks per month from Royaltie gems. We wouldn’t know this without using bit.ly.
If you are using a message that says, “Gomer Pile is buying houses in your area,” you will get clicks from those who know about Gomer. Does that mean Gomer is buying houses? Of course not but the user was curious and decided to see for themselves. Now we have the user on all other platforms because they visited our site. We can retarget the user across social media and search now.
Final Thoughts
This is an effective way to track metrics for your marketing platforms since every shortened link can be tracked. It’s also free. The main reason we use bit.ly is so we can see if our money is well spent with our marketing efforts along with getting users we need into the social funnel. The social funnel is more cost effective than worrying about a CRM or email funnel. You don’t have to do anything except run ads across social media from Facebook to YouTube. We worry about getting both customer’s feet thru our front door. We close them when it’s time without letting them spam our emails or block our number. Social media is a non-intrusive funnel that gets results. If you haven’t started using Bit.ly it is definitely something you should look into.
You can’t track your marketing dollars without using a program. Why would you spend money not knowing if it made you money?
Work Smarter not Harder Like EarlToms.
