Bit.ly: An Analytics Service Disguised as a URL Compressor
We at ASM were excited to hear that Bit.ly nailed down a $2mm Series A round last week. It’s our go-to URL compressor – yes, because it’s short and sweet, but more so because of the rich analytics and tracking it provides. Our president, Josh McHugh, recently gave a great example of why we’ve come to love bit.ly’s functionality. We used it to track – over time – the efficacy of a push to drive traffic to Dorm Life’s MySpace channel during our exclusive period with them:
On March 1, a day into the MySpace exclusive period, we noticed that traffic was barely trickling into the MySpace channel. So we sent out a tweet on the @dormlife channel, containing a link to the first episode of the season on MySpace.
We used Bit.ly to compress the link. An hour later, we could see that 20% of those who had received the tweet had clicked through to the video. 48 hours later, 90% had clicked through. 3 days after the tweet went out, clickthroughs on the link had all but died out, but the final result was that 94% of the Dorm Life fans who got the tweet clicked through.
Cheers to the folks who went long on these innovators.
Update: Joshua Schachter digs into this topic over on All Things D…
