Affiliate Marketing

How To Spy On Bit.Ly Stats

Posted in: Affiliate Marketing by Kuzzuk on July 16, 2009

Bit.Ly Stats Spy (Photo Credit: www.sxc.hu)

Bit.Ly Stats Spy (Photo Credit: www.sxc.hu)

Increasingly, a lot of affiliate marketers are using bit.ly as a convenient way to shorten and mask their affiliate URLs. But what many do not realize is the ease with which your competitor can spy on the stats of your shortened URL. Let me illustrate with an example.

Someone (obviously an affiliate marketer), posted this tweet on a making money on Twitter.


Want to make money go to http://bit.ly/sfxDF


Let’s say, you wanted to check how legit this person was and wanted to find out more without having to click his link. You could take his shortened URL http://bit.ly/sfxDF and add “info/” after http://bit.ly/ making the URL look like http://bit.ly/info/sfxDF.

Voilà, it shows me his bit.ly link stats. I can see he has had more than 1,700 clicks to that link, the location of his original link, which geographical regions generate the most clicks and whether there are any conversations going on in sites like Twitter and FriendFeed.

bit.ly Stats

bit.ly Stats

There you have it, a quick way to spy on bit.ly stats.