In the world of micro-blogging where every character counts, URL shortening services demonstrate their value all day long.  Follow nearly anyone’s Twitter feed and you’ll see that nearly every link has been shortened.  But is that all that services like http://bit.ly are good for?  Many URL shortening services offer click tracking as well.  But why is this important?

Many good bloggers and other webmasters know their audience.  They’ve got log analyzers that trace their visitors as they navigate through their site.  They know which articles are the most popular and which get no traffic.  But when you include a link to another website, how do you tell how many people have clicked the link to visit the page?  The destination blogger knows, but you don’t.

Shorten that URL

Using bit.ly, we can convert longer normal links to a shorter link that can be tracked.  Bit.ly will track every time someone clicks on your shortened link.  They provide some of the same basic tracking features that web server log analyzer use like number of clicks, referrer even locations.  Bit.ly will show you how many total clicks when through their service to the same long link (the URL before it was shortened).  It can give you an idea of how (in)significant your website is by comparing the number of clicks through your specific URL against the other shortened URLs that point to the same long link.

Bit.ly will also give you a list of micro-blogging conversations (Twitter, FriendFeed) that contain a reference to the destination link.  You can use this to find other people that are interested in the same topics or talking about the same things.

Branding Your Short URL

Bil.ly offers an additional service called Bitly PRO.  With this service, you can use your own domain in the short URL.  For example, the short URLs that I get from Bit.ly all start with http://mrobb.me rather than http://bit.ly.  This is a great way to promote your brand in Twitter and other micro-blogging services.  The Pro service is currently free (they do moderate applications) and they have an Enterprise service under development.

Easy to Use

It may seem like a hassle to shorten all of the URLs that you need and if you had to do it manually, you would be right.  Fortunately these services have published APIs to automate the shortening process for you.  Good Twitter clients will have the built in for you and Bit.ly provides an easy to use in-browser tool that let’s you send a Tweet or email with a pre-shortened URL in just two clicks.

Using these services, you will be able to track external links on your website nearly as easily as you can track visitors within your own web site.

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