It started with a therapy session. Al Berrios was working through some tough times when his counselor asked what might help him feel better. “Hiking,” he said, almost without thinking. That offhand answer turned into a weekly walk, then a Facebook invite to a few friends, then twelve people showing up on a trail outside New York City. Fifteen years later, that walk has become Outerthere, a small-group outdoor adventure company that gets New Yorkers out in nature, and Al still calls it the best job he’s ever had.
At a glance
- Outerthere replaced UTM tracking with Bitly’s Shopify integration, giving Al a direct line from campaign to sale
- Data from Bitly links helped him consolidate an overgrown inventory and rework pricing, tripling revenue year over year
- Bitly now works as Outerthere’s independent source of truth, no matter what platform the traffic runs through
Meet Outerthere
Outerthere is a small-group outdoor recreation company based in New York City, offering hikes, backpacking and camping trips, kayaking, rafting, biking, ski trips, and family-friendly outings, all run through a Shopify storefront. Al founded the business in 2012, and it’s grown from a handful of friends on a trail into a full-time operation he runs as a solopreneur, with a mission to make the outdoors feel accessible and welcoming to everyone.
The challenge: When the data trail went cold
Before Bitly, Al pieced his data together from wherever he could get it. He’d started his career in digital marketing “in the dotcom days,” so tracking links was second nature, but the tools kept shifting under him. When he moved his business onto Shopify in 2019, he leaned on it as his single source of truth, based on the belief that consistent numbers mattered more than perfect ones. Google Analytics promised more detail, but the price of entry stopped him cold: “I was quoted 20k to just customize my new Google Analytics dashboard, which is not in my budget as a solopreneur running a small business.” Bitly blazed the trail instead, a way to double-check unexplained traffic spikes without hiring anyone.
The Bitly solution: Blazing a new trail
What started as a simple way to validate his analytics gradually became the backbone of how he manages and measures his marketing. Al started by building custom back-halves for his most important links: a back-half like “/cancel-a-trip” sends guests straight to cancellation instructions. When he restructured his entire inventory, he kept the same short links and simply redirected the destination URLs, so his historical data stayed intact even as his website changed underneath it. He’s since folded Bitly directly into his domain manager, routing subdomains through Bitly to their destination pages, and organized his links into collections, grouping all his paddling trips together, for instance, so he can see how each group performs and back specific social posts with real numbers instead of guesses.
The biggest shift came with the Shopify integration, which replaced the UTM tracking he’d all but given up on. “Since I have so many Bitly URLs, whenever someone makes a transaction, it tells me it came from this particular Bitly link,” he said.
“Now I can see which campaign drove what, and which link is generating the most sales. Before, I had to go through UTMs, which meant friction and I wasn’t doing it. Using a Bitly link was so easy, and now I get that same data without the hassle.”
In addition, every purchase made through a Bitly link gets automatically tagged in Shopify, right alongside the tags he already used to flag no-shows and cancellations, so he can tell at a glance how much of his business is coming through a given channel.
That link-level visibility changed how Al runs the business, not just how he measures it. He noticed some activities, like skydiving and off-road tours, barely moved the needle, while hikes and camping trips consistently did. So he cut those product offerings and doubled down on what worked, then rebuilt his pricing around what the data actually showed.
“[My] Pricing has changed entirely from what I used to do to what I do now, based solely on the data I am getting in Bitly. That has generated a tripling of revenue this year versus last year.”
The next trailhead
Al hasn’t gotten to every feature yet. QR Codes and Bitly Assist are both still on his list, largely because he’s still catching up on everything the Shopify integration has unlocked. But he’s already thinking about what comes next: bringing on help for his outbound marketing, and handing that person Bitly data without handing over the keys to his Shopify backend. For a business he’s built and run largely on his own for fifteen years, that kind of safe, easy handoff matters.
From a therapy hike to a business built on data he trusts, Al’s story shows how much clarity a few small changes can bring. Bitly helped him get there, and it can help you get there, too. Feeling inspired? Get started today to link your marketing.
