How to Track Bitly Links in Google Analytics?

Everyone that uses bitly will eventually want to know how to track bitly links in google analytics and this article will explain to you exactly how to do it! After reading this article you should understand how to track bitly links in google analytics better and be able to get accurate results without any confusion at all. You will also gain an understanding of why you need to track bitly links in google analytics and what you should use it for once you are tracking them. Bitly makes it easy to track links without having to copy and paste them all into your analytics software. Here’s how to use the bitly integration in Google Analytics to do just that! If you don’t already have an analytics account, sign up for one now—it’s free! You can also get free access to an analytics demo, which we’ll be using throughout this tutorial as our source data. Make sure you have the most updated version of Google Analytics by checking here.

Ways to track bitly links in google analytics

1. Log into your Analytics account, scroll down and click on the ‘Admin’ button next to your account name.
2. Click on ‘Create New Goal.’ 
3. Under ‘Goal Type,’ select ‘URL Destination’. 
4. Enter a name for the goal you’re about to set up, such as bitly URL. 
5. Paste the shortened URL (from Bitly) into the first field under ‘Referral Exclusion List’ and hit enter. 
6. In the second field under ‘Referral Exclusion List,’ enter the same shortened URL from Bitly and hit enter again – this should result in an error message that reads The referral exclusion list is already full. 7. To add another referrer URL, copy/paste the Bitly link you want to exclude and paste it into the third field in Referral Exclusion List (you will be copying/pasting this link twice). 
7. Hit enter after pasting the link to see if there are any errors or warnings. 
8. If there are no errors or warnings, close out of the popup window by clicking ‘Save Changes’. 
9. To check if it was successful at excluding our shortened URLs from tracking data, go back to your campaign report > All Campaigns > Overview > Sources > All Traffic > Referrals tab and look at all of our traffic sources: bit.ly URL will now be excluded!

Advantages of bitly links in google analytics

Bit.ly links provide a great way to track clicks and conversions through your website. Since Google Analytics can’t determine the quality of a link, it will count any click on a shortened URL as an organic visit to the corresponding site. This means that you’ll be able to see how many people clicked on your website’s shortened Bit.ly URL and then visited your site from there. 

Bit.lys are also easier for readers who may not know how or have time to copy and paste URLs into their browsers address bar- allowing them to click and go directly from the page they’re on, without having to retype the whole thing out each time. Furthermore, with these links it is possible to get metrics such as which ones were the most clicked links on a page. In addition to viewing raw data by clicking ‘links,’ one can view statistics by clicking ‘clicks.’ The ‘clicks’ button breaks down the clicks on individual shortened URLs and tells us which ones received more clicks than others per day. It also lets us know if certain days received more traffic than others and whether or not they correlated with higher number of clicks per day (also available by checking out other statistics like impressions). As a result, marketers using bitly links have been able to determine which posts performed well based off the number of clicks per day and maximize those posts accordingly!

Using Campaign URL Builder & Bitly to Track Your Links

To start tracking your links, you’ll need to head over to Campaign URL Builder. Fill out the form with the name of your campaign (mine is Website Launch), then use Bitly link shortener as the destination URL. Next, copy and paste your shortened link from Bitly into the field next to Destination URL. Now that your campaign is live, you can monitor how many clicks you get by going into Google Analytics and viewing your website’s traffic sources section. You should see a new report titled Campaigns where you can see how many clicks each campaign received. If you have multiple campaigns running at the same time, it’s important to know which one drove more traffic so you can allocate your resources accordingly.

How to view the data

To view the data, go to the Behavior section of Google Analytics and click on Links. In the column that says Outbound Link Types, you will see a list of outbound links. Click on one of the Bitly links and you’ll be taken to another screen that displays information about this link. You can see which keywords people are clicking on when they click on this link, how many times it has been clicked, how many visitors have clicked it, etc. It’s a great way to get a sense of what content is most popular or what content might need improvement! A note on creating a similar report: If you want to create this same report for your own website, then follow these steps: 1) Log into your Google Analytics account and select Content – Site Content – All Pages 2) Under Columns, scroll down until you find Page Title and then drag Page Title onto the rows box below; 3) Go back to Data List (which should still be highlighted blue) and drag Visits from the Columns menu onto Rows.

Conclusion

If you are looking for a way to track how many clicks your Bit.ly links are getting then it is possible. All you have to do is add the following code snippet: 

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