Whether you’re a brand-new Bitly user on the Free Plan or an enterprise-level veteran who has been using our platform for years, there’s always more to learn and uncover with our user-friendly digital tools. (As we like to say around here, the possibitlyties are endless!)
So, how do you make the most of our solutions, from short links to mobile-friendly landing pages? We want to help you answer that question, so we created this guide to help you make the most of Bitly, from fundamental features to can’t-miss resources. Let’s dig into this roundup of some of the best practices you can start implementing for your marketing campaigns today.
10 ways to get more from Bitly
Bitly is here to help you make authentic connections with your audience and take your digital tools even further. Here are 10 of our best tips for maximizing your Bitly experience.
1. Customize your links and QR Codes
Short links and QR Codes let you reach your audience with simple, user-friendly touchpoints, wherever they are in their journey. You can take their value even deeper by making them reflect your brand and drive awareness with every click or scan.
You can adjust short links to match your brand name and individual campaigns, depending on your Bitly plan:
- Starting with the Growth Plan, you can build short links using your custom domain. Instead of bit.ly/123aBCd (using Bitly’s domain), your link might be yourbrand.co/123aBCd.
- Create descriptive links with custom back-halves. Even the Free Plan comes with five custom back-halves per month, so you can send links that clue customers into your campaign. (For example: yourbrand.co/springsale)
This is exactly how Hot Topic drives excitement for fandoms on Instagram. The retail brand uses its custom domain, “hottopic.me,” in short links, customizing the back-half for campaigns like their 2022 launch of Hellfire Club merch, thrilling Stranger Things fans around the world.
You can get creative with your QR Codes, too. Build codes that are distinctly your brand by customizing the colors, styles, and frames. You can even include your logo so your branding is unmistakable—and so customers can’t wait to scan and see what’s in store.
2. Create UTM parameters
The more you know about your audience—and which campaigns, channels, and offers appeal to them—the better your marketing will be. UTM parameters are some of the most powerful assets for tracking your campaigns in a detailed way. These bits of information are added to the end of your links, and you can review them in reporting tools like Google Analytics.
Here’s an example link with UTM parameters: https://www.178.128.29.131?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=pages.
If we shared just our homepage link (178.128.29.131), we would only be able to report that someone visited our site. With UTM parameters, we can learn more about the person who came to the homepage—for instance, Facebook was the channel (or source) that referred them, social was the medium, and they came via our Pages campaign.
UTM parameters traditionally create lengthy links. But when using UTM parameters with Bitly, you can shorten these URLs to make them more approachable, branded, and straightforward. Gain more clicks and learn more about your audience by combining the power of UTM parameters with short links.
3. Tap into Bitly integrations
Bitly is a powerful tool on its own, but it’s even better when you combine it with the other tools in your tech stack. We offer tons of useful integrations to help make workflows with Bitly more efficient and make your connection strategies more impactful. Pair Bitly with your go-to tools across several categories, like:
- Social media management: Shorten links straight from social media scheduling platforms like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Buffer.
- Productivity: Use your favorite productivity tools to create digital touchpoints with Bitly—customize QR Codes in Canva, shorten links at scale in Google Sheets, or send individualized short links via SMS straight from Salesforce.
- Automation: Kickstart hands-off link shortening with Bitly’s integrations that allow you to automate short link creation based on defined triggers in tools like Zapier and Workato.
Browse our entire integration marketplace to start creating short links and QR Codes that work harder for your business.
4. Monitor campaign performance
A good marketer executes an insightful, targeted campaign to their audience, then moves on to the next one. A great marketer is invested in understanding how each of their campaigns and tactics perform; they learn from their last launch to make informed decisions for the next one.
This process is easy with Bitly Analytics, where you can see big-picture and detailed metrics on how each of your short links, QR Codes, and landing pages is performing. Right from a central dashboard, review:
- Performance over time
- Clicks and scans by location
- Website referrers
- Top-performing campaigns
You can also customize the metrics modules displayed on your dashboard, choose from data visualization options, and filter by date.
To make the most of Bitly Analytics, make a plan for your reporting cadence. Decide with your team how often you’ll review the dashboard, and build strategies based on the data you gather from the reports on your tools. Your data is what you make of it, so build it into your workflows for higher-performing, audience-driven campaigns.
5. Troubleshoot in the Help Center
Whether you have a problem to solve with your short links or need technical tips on how to use our API, the Bitly Help Center is the place to answer your questions and get step-by-step guidance. Want to redirect a QR Code? We’ve got you covered. Need to know how to set up your custom domain? There’s a help article for that.
Browse the Help Center for practical articles on a range of topics for each of the Bitly tools, as well as in-depth videos and webinars, integration help, and updates on the latest Bitly features. And of course, you can quickly search for whatever you’re looking for to head straight to the support you need.
6. Use multiple products together
What’s better than one digital tool? Pairing them together for twice the value. When you use more than one Bitly solution, you get a dynamic duo of user-friendly, trustworthy, and trackable marketing touchpoints. Try:
- Using a short link as the destination for your QR Codes. Turn a lengthy URL (hopefully featuring some UTM parameters!) into a branded, relevant destination that your audience can access within seconds using their smartphone camera.
- Linking a QR Code for your brand to a Bitly Page. Each time someone scans, you can send them directly to a targeted mobile-friendly landing page that matches where they are in their journey.
Take a page from Wight Tea’s book. Not only do they feature QR Codes on each package of their handcrafted tea blends, but they also include inserts with a code that links to a Bitly Page featuring helpful links for their customers. While a tea drinker is holding the product in their hands, Wight Tea is engaging its audience in user-friendly interactions, one box at a time.
7. Drive app downloads
Bitly’s suite of solutions excels at creating mobile-friendly touchpoints that take an in-person interaction into the digital world—namely, your website. But what if you also have a mobile app and you’re eager to both boost downloads and send users to your native experience?
We’ve got you covered. When you use mobile deep linking from a Bitly short link or QR Code, you can drive traffic and downloads to your mobile app. Each time a user clicks or scans one of these links, they go down one of two paths:
- If they already have your mobile app downloaded, they’ll open up a page within the app itself.
- If they haven’t downloaded your app, the link will send them to the App Store or Google Play Store (depending on their device type) to encourage them to download it. This creates fear of missing out, especially if you’re directing them to a deal or enticing content around an upcoming product launch, and lets you boost your app usage.
Plus, mobile deep linking offers additional metrics via your Bitly Analytics dashboard like app sessions, app store visits, and mobile web sessions, so you can see the results of your campaign in real time.
8. Build personalized links at scale
For your biggest and brightest campaigns, a primary branded short link might get the job done for your entire audience or targeted segments. But enterprise or retail Bitly users who engage with hundreds or thousands of customers might want to build many personalized short links to reach them on an individual basis. That’s where the Bitly API comes in, which allows you to create short links at scale.
Here’s how two Bitly customers do it:
- Koozie Group wanted to send simple, secure order updates to thousands of customers each month via email or SMS. Now, the promotional products brand generates unique, trackable Bitly Links for individual customers. After they click these trusted, branded links, they don’t even have to sign into their accounts to access the updates. The process offers ultimate convenience and trusted security for customers with every click.
- When monday.com launched WorkForms, the productivity platform wanted to make sharing user-friendly forms as straightforward and easy as possible. WorkForms lets users share the link to their form as soon as it’s finished. Via the Bitly API, they can shorten the link right away to a URL with the custom “wkf.ms” domain for an instantly recognizable and highly shareable link.
Create and send short links on a massive scale with the Bitly API for convenient user experiences and greater engagement with your brand.
Outside the API, you can also shorten links in bulk by uploading a CSV file that designates the Long URLs, custom back-halves, and UTM parameters. (Hint: We even offer a template to help you get started!)
9. Install the Bitly browser extension
The little touches make all the difference to help marketers work faster and make their tech stacks even more useful. That’s why we love the Bitly browser extension—and you will, too! This extension pulls Bitly functionality right onto your web browser, so you can shorten URLs or create QR Codes without even leaving your webpage. Customize short links or add UTM parameters faster than ever so that your go-to digital tools become a second-nature step in your marketing workflows.
Add the Bitly extension to Google Chrome, Firefox, or Microsoft Edge for free, and get started today!
10. Stay up to date on our blog
Looking for more tips like these to help you squeeze every drop of value from Bitly’s digital tools? You’re already in the right place. The Bitly blog is a treasure trove of actionable tips for various industries and use cases, customer stories from brands, tool-specific guidance, and marketing strategies.
Check in regularly to see what’s new and browse the latest content by category. You never know what you’ll find there!
Build connections with every click and scan
While we’ve covered some of our favorite best practices here, these are just the start of all the ways you can do more with your short links, QR Codes, and landing pages. As you scale up your strategy with our digital tools, don’t forget to check back here for updates, expansions, and even more ideas.
Best of all, the more you use Bitly’s suite of tools, the more insights you’ll gain and the more inspiration you’ll uncover for new uses, campaigns, and connection points with your audience. We can’t wait to see what you do next!
