Hey guys this is going to be a rather short post, but there is a very important message inside it. As I have been doing some testing with some new marketing strategies, I have found out that the statistics from Bit.ly are showing outrageous numbers.

At first glance, I thought a couple of the new marketing mediums were just exploding with hits, and that my conversion was not nearly as high as I am used to.

My google analytics, MLMLSP analytics and the bit.ly analytics were just not adding up.

I like to use multiple indicators of how my marketing is performing. Having different view allows me to know when something is failing….such as bit.ly.

So I investigated the problem and here is what I found about bit.ly. First off let me say this: I was a huge fan of tr.im, but they are shutting the site down soon if they have not already, so I was forced to use another link shortener.

Bit.ly, who is rumored to be bought out by the social media giant Twitter.Com, has a few downfalls in the way that it tracks URLS. Bit.ly allows decodes, Decodes can be caused by bots, and by applications, like browser plug-ins, which expand the underlying url without causing a click-through.

So what you see when you are looking in your “back office” of Bit.ly is a culmination of robots, plug-in and only a portion of that is actually clicks by users.

Be sure that you are using multiple sources to track your marketing efforts, with bad tracking you are going to make decisions that could drastically hurt your business, or hurt your marketing budget without even knowing why.

.
.