In any given time period, your brand’s metrics tell a story about big wins, customers’ changing tastes, and investments that didn’t quite pay off. The more robust your data and tools, the better you can report results, prove ROI, or make the case for more budget.
Bitly Analytics is an essential addition to your marketing data reporting, capturing powerful engagement data like link clicks, QR Code scans, and landing page engagement. Even better, Bitly Analytics is built as an enhancement layer that can integrate with any of your favorite enterprise tools. Feed these details into your dashboards for an in-depth understanding of audience behavior and campaign performance.
This article offers what you need to know to integrate Bitly with your analytics dashboards—let’s get started.
Note: Any brands and examples discussed below were found during our online research for this article.
Benefits of enhanced dashboards with Bitly
Recent TechBehemoths research found that over half of marketers use at least three to five analytics tools, including 5% who use six to 10. This multifaceted approach brings together different data types from different sources to form a centralized and actionable picture of their campaigns and customers.
If you use Bitly Analytics to track your digital touchpoints, you already get robust in-platform insights. But the platform also integrates with leading analytics and business intelligence (BI) programs. When connected to other enterprise dashboards, Bitly data becomes even more valuable by tying engagement directly to outcomes like sales, media spend, or performance throughout the funnel. As part of a broader data landscape, Bitly Analytics helps marketing teams report their results and make better decisions every day. Here are a few benefits of these integrations.
Deeper campaign optimization
Link engagement tracking measures how an audience takes action in real time, and it’s all in a day’s work for Bitly. But most analytics platforms—like Google Analytics, Power BI, and Tableau—don’t natively track link engagement across every channel. Bitly’s integrations with these channels delivers essential link data, enriching your analytics dashboards and revealing exactly which creative sparks connections. From there, your marketing team can double down on the channels, topics, and offerings your audience loves and engages with most.
Executive visibility
From the scrappiest start-up to the most well-established enterprise, the marketing team is responsible for showing the C-suite and board that their strategy and campaigns are a worthwhile investment. With dashboards enhanced by Bitly Analytics, leaders get clearer ROI reporting from their existing BI tools. Alongside other data, execs can see unique audience engagement insights including:
- Link clicks
- QR Code scan data
- Device types used to click or scan
- Geographic locations during engagement
- Referring channels
Even better, Bitly Analytics enables roll-up reporting that compiles data across campaigns, brands, or regions. Busy execs can compare these results side by side to see marketing’s impact on the business at a glance.
Better cross-channel decisions
Every data point about your campaigns and engagement is just one piece of the larger marketing puzzle. When you put these pieces together, you gain more context on each aspect of your marketing strategy, and data from one channel can help guide the choices you make about other channels.
Bitly’s platform offers flexible, custom categorization features, so you can filter custom dashboards to break down engagement by channel, product line, or campaign type. Then, integrate Bitly Analytics with your other dashboards to review link clicks or QR Code scans alongside other KPIs and audience actions for a single view of your marketing performance. Refine your messaging or strategy by channel so each one can perform its best.
3 core Bitly data points to track
When does your audience take action on your campaigns? Why and how do they interact? Traditional analytics tools only give marketers partial answers to these questions, leaving them guessing or scrambling to figure out why traffic is up or down on a given day. In fact, Revsure found that just 29% of marketers consider themselves very successful at using attribution to achieve strategic objectives, leaving seven out of 10 struggling to solve tracking challenges.
Bitly helps you solve your marketing mysteries by capturing “last mile” data at the point of connection—when they take action. Boost your existing analytics tools with these three metrics from Bitly Analytics.
1. Clicks and scans at scale
Any time a potential customer clicks a Bitly link in your social media bio, or scans a Bitly QR Code on your package or poster, you can see their engagement at the speed of connection. That’s the power of short URL click tracking analytics. Watch the success of a recent launch unfold in full time via Bitly Analytics, then integrate Bitly with your other dashboards to see your performance and analytics from all angles via a central interface.
2. Geolocation and device insights
If you’ve ever wondered where your next best customers are located—and how to optimize your campaigns for their interests and their digital experience—Bitly Analytics offers the answers you’ve been waiting for. Enterprises with audiences around the world can segment audience data by region (even including city-level data).
Plus, capture data on the type of devices and operating systems they’re using to access your connection points. Refine your campaigns to look their best on every device, and troubleshoot any drops in engagement for certain device users to maximize reach.
3. Campaign- and channel-level engagement
Data about your overall marketing performance is important, but some of the most valuable insights come from studying your analytics by campaign and channel. Bitly Campaigns lets you tag and group touchpoints (such as links and codes) to create custom dashboards and review engagement by campaign. For instance, review a campaign’s performance across all of your social channels from a single view, or compare email engagement and SMS interactions side by side.
Enhance your recap of any campaign with granular details of how each channel performed in Bitly, or review all of your data from central dashboards on your other tools with Bitly Analytics integrations.
Integrations with top enterprise analytics tools
How important is it for your martech tools to play nicely with others? The 2023 MarTech Replacement Survey found that over a third of marketers cite integrations or an Open API as an important factor in choosing a replacement software. Luckily, Bitly’s integration and connection options make it easy to complement the data from your existing business intelligence tools with data from your Bitly-powered digital connections.
Choose from some of the most popular and powerful enterprise tools, all of which integrate with Bitly via API, webhooks, or native connectors. As an alternative, you can also export Bitly Analytics data in CSV or JSON for simple and easy imports into your BI platforms. Check out how you can pair Bitly with some of these go-to dashboards.
Google Analytics and GA4
Bitly and Google Analytics are each powerful marketing tools in their own right, but taken together, they tell the start-to-finish data story businesses need to reach their audience. While GA4 gives you a detailed picture of your audience’s behavioral patterns and factors driving campaign performance, Bitly offers critical last-mile engagement before someone visits the landing page that Google is tracking for you.
Layer Bitly on top of Google Analytics to:
- See when audiences take action on a campaign and where they go after
- Learn what content resonates and when customers convert
- Measure click-through rates and check which platforms are most effective
Combining these tools is straightforward: Start by adding Google Analytics UTM parameters to a destination URL, shorten the link in Bitly, then launch your link and track engagement in both Bitly and Google Analytics.
Power BI and Tableau
A powerful business intelligence dashboard transforms marketers’ efforts to track what’s working with their campaigns and how that engagement fuels the wider business. Whether you lean on insightful reporting from Microsoft’s Power BI or focus on visual analytics with Tableau, you can use Bitly APIs to create intuitive integrations/connections.
Our API and exports offer enterprises the flexibility to visualize link and QR Code engagement straight from your business intelligence dashboards. That means enterprise marketing teams can review Bitly data alongside:
- Sales data to highlight campaign performance
- Campaign budgets to directly prove ROI
- Regional benchmarks to uncover competitive parity
Best of all, Bitly Analytics updates in real time, so you can report and iterate at top speed.
Looker and other BI platforms
Whether you use Looker or another of the powerful business intelligence tools on the market, you can also seamlessly integrate Bitly Analytics with your BI dashboards to match your team’s and business’s unique needs. The Bitly API and data connectors with analytics tools like Domo give you flexibility to pull essential reports where and how you need them, all backed by insightful engagement data.
Any BI platform that accepts API connections or data file imports can pull Bitly data to populate your next report or data visualization. Make your next report more robust with data at the point of connection.
Boost custom dashboards with the Bitly API
When you collect detailed data from every digital connection, the possibitlyties are endless. Thanks to the Bitly API, you can integrate analytics from your links, QR Codes, and mobile-friendly landing pages, no matter your dashboard needs. The Bitly API lets enterprise marketing teams query raw analytics data programmatically, enabling ongoing custom dashboards that surface the exact metrics you need to make decisions.
Enterprise flexibility
Large enterprises often build proprietary analytics software and systems to match their complex marketing data needs. Bitly fits into these platforms seamlessly. Bitly’s API documentation equips your development team to pull raw data directly into your dashboards. Collect the precise engagement metrics you need, apply filters with ease, and send Bitly data straight to your internal reporting systems for engagement analysis that’s built to last and to support your team and business.
Automation in action
After the initial setup to pull analytics data directly into your custom dashboards, you can rest assured that your reports will automatically populate with Bitly engagement metrics in real time. You and your team don’t need to keep making manual connections—simply find your link and QR Code data alongside the rest of your data for easy and straightforward reporting.
Real-time reporting
Life moves pretty fast in the enterprise world. If you don’t stop and look around at your data, you could miss out on the chance to beat your competitor to the punch. With Bitly data that arrives in your reporting landscape at the speed of customer engagement, you can make more informed decisions faster and respond to audience needs as fast as they change. Best of all, you can review reporting in the context of all your data to catch trends and evolving tastes.
How Bitly Ensures Data Accuracy and Security
The protection and privacy of customer data have never been more critical. Some of the most established enterprises trust Bitly to support their digital connections. That’s because our platform supports robust tracking and reporting of customer behavior and because of our commitment to the highest levels of security. We meet industry standards for enterprise security, with SOC II certification and GDPR compliance.
The Bitly Trust Center shares detailed documentation of our policies and security measures that keep company and consumer data safe. With reliable, audited, and secure data collection and storage, enterprises can look to Bitly for better and more data-driven decision-making that supports their business and protects their most valuable assets: their data and customers’ trust.
Make Bitly data part of your analytics story
Silos keep marketing teams from seeing the full scope of their campaign results and audience behavior. Bitly integrations knock down silos, centralize data, and expand the insights marketers lean on for better decision-making from every report.
Your enterprise marketing team can deepen the value of any analytics or BI dashboard with the help of engagement data from Bitly. With an enterprise plan built for the high-volume analytics needs of your business, Bitly provides the tools to collaborate on user-friendly digital connections at scale and the business results that come from every campaign.
Get started with Bitly today, and track all your connections from the dashboard you’ve been looking for.
