14 DAY TRIAL // For a while, as Twitter was taking off, URL shorteners were all the rage all of a sudden. New services were popping up left and right to the point where saying the market was saturated was an understatement. Soon enough, Bit.ly became the de facto URL shortener after Twitter chose it as the default service for the site. It didn't hurt that the service also offered one of the best experiences out there. An important component of the service consisted of the analytics tools it offered its users, which have now gotten even better with the launch of the Bit.ly Click Summary, a new feature to track stats from all of one’s links.
“For a long time, our users have been requesting summarized views of their click data. Today, we have taken the first in a series of steps to expose a summary of data across all of your Bit.ly links,” Bit.ly announced on the company blog. “At the top of your Bit.ly history, you’ll see a small chart displaying your overall day by day click traffic for the last week, along with a click total and a link to your summary stats page. On your summary page, you can see a view of the sites and countries where people are clicking on all of the Bit.ly links you have created.”
The tool is a natural extension of the features already available on the site, it just had to aggregate the data already available. For now, the stats only go back seven days, but the site will introduce monthly data as well at some point in the future.
The page features all the information you'd expect. The overall number of clicks broken down by days is presented in a chart next to the Top Referrers and Locations data. Below, the referrers and locations are listed in greater detail. While the click stats are great for your ego, the more interesting information comes from the other stats, allowing you to know where your readers come from and what clients they use. Bit.ly has been sitting on a gold mine of data from all of the links that get shared through the service daily and the company just has to figure out how to turn all that info into revenue.