Is Bit.ly link trackable in Adobe Analytics

[utsavm1234]

Hello Members,

This is my first post in this community; so please excuse me if this is the wrong place for the question.

I found only one post related this topic, but the answer is not very clear to me.

We are running a social media campaign for our website and they are using "Bit.ly" as the URL in the campaign. Now if someone click on this; the source will be considered as "social" or "typed/bookmarked"? If the answer is "typed/bookmarked" - then what can be done from our end to show that "social" as source?

Regards

Utsav

[kayawalton · Accepted solution]

It depends on which social platform and what device platform the visitor is from. If they click on the bit.ly link from Facebook/X on a desktop, it will likely push that referral information through, but if they are on the app, it will likely come through as dark social or "Typed/bookmarked."

The best way to guarantee that you are tracking the referrals from bit.ly accurately is to add campaign parameters and map them in Adobe Analytics.

Documentation:

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/admin/admin-tools/manage-report-suites/edit-report... 

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/implementation/use-cases/campaign-tracking.html?la...

[Jennifer_Dungan]

@kayawalton is spot on.. the referrer is forwarded through the bit.ly service... it doesn't record as a separate referring domain.

Adding proper campaigns to your links is a great way to ensure that you can classify the incoming traffic where referrers may not be set (some mobile apps, the rel="noreferrer" directive on web, etc).

[utsavm1234]

Thanks for both of you, actually I suggested them about campaign ID. But as there are some limitations in using campaign ID as per organization policy (to be honest, not sure what's the problem actually ) - they wanted to confirm that there is no other way than Campaign ID.

[kayawalton]

Is the problem with the campaign ID because they think it is unique to the user? (We had someone who had the same hesitation.) You can also use other campaign-tracking approaches (our org uses UTM parameters) and then use classification rules to parse those out. This section has specific instructions on how you can do that: https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/implementation/use-cases/campaign-tracking.html?la...

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Another problem I can also see would be that URLs with Campaigns could be picked up by other unintended sources, meaning you may have a slight inflation on your tracking in those scenarios... but that should be a small amount and there really aren't a lot of other options.