Most of you read this are using Twitter, online newspapers or other websites and would have come across Bit.ly the URL Shortener service. There’s not much chance of escaping URL shorteners, even today when SEO and friendly URL’s is what most people like. Bit.ly offers more and nows the chance to bring offline content into the world of URL tracking, with Bit.ly’s Pro service coming out of closed testing, you should get your own friendly URL too.
The joy of Bit.ly can be its randomness – such as you don’t know if the URL you clicked on will take you to a reliable news website or some poor bloggers rant on the web. Aside from the obvious, the point about bit.ly is that rather than tracking clicks on a long URL or a bit.ly URL you can now have your own URL like www.damiens.ws/15454a and even customise it as http://damiens.ws/socialmedia
So what if every poster on the street or TV advert or press advert for your brand had a custom Bit.ly URL? You could then track if a customer found your advert / poster / flyer interesting enough to put the URL into their computer - does that make you excited?
Engagement metrics and CPE are going to become more popular this year and next year, and so how do you take the offline world online? Or how can you start track the value of that billboard you just spent 10,000,000 dollars on?
Well that looks obvious! So how are you tracking offline to online engagement?
At the moment Bit.ly Pro offers free service – you provide a customer domain or sub domain and it does the rest.
