How To Customize Your Bitly Link Shortening Domain & Tracking

Adding a Bitly account to SmarterQueue is a great way to easily shorten the links you share in your social media posts and track the engagement you're getting.

But SmarterQueue lets you go a step further, as you can choose unique domains for your links, and even connect multiple Bitly accounts and set which one tracks clicks for each one of your connected social profiles 💪

When Do Custom Bitly Accounts Make Sense

In your SmarterQueue Settings, you can choose the free Bitly domain or your own custom domain (if you've set one up) for each of your social profiles. You can also turn link tracking on or off on a profile-by-profile basis.

Here are some examples of why this is useful:

If you are managing different brands or clients, they can have their links tracked with their own Bitly accounts. This allows each client to view detailed analytics for just their own links in bitly.com’s analytics dashboard.
If you are using a custom domain for your Bitly links (e.g. acme.com), you can choose whether to use that custom domain for all your social profiles, none of your profiles, or just some of them.

How To Use Your Own Domain

If you want to use your own custom domain for link shortening, you should follow Bitly’s instructions to connect the domain to your Bitly account.

Once you’ve done that, and the Bitly account is connected to SmarterQueue, you can choose that custom domain for all links posted through SmarterQueue.

You can choose to use your custom domain for just one social profile, a group of social profiles, or all your social profiles.

If you don’t want to set up your own custom domain name, Bitly provides a short domain name you can use for your links: bit.ly

You may notice that some links you shorten will have a different short domain name (e.g. apple.com gets shortened as apple.co, mashable.com gets shortened as on.mash.to).

Those websites use Bitly’s Pro service, where their branded domain name is used whenever anyone shares a link to their website.

If you have selected to shorten your links with bit.ly and share a link to a website with a Bitly Pro branded short domain, your link will use the branded short domain.

However, if you have selected to shorten your links with your own custom domain, your link will not use the website’s branded short domain but will respect your choice.

How To Change Your Link Shortening Domain

With SmarterQueue, you can use different Bitly domains (default or custom) to shorten the links you're adding to your social media posts.

To set this up, head over to Settings:

From here select Link Tracking:

You can select the drop-down option under "Default Link Tracking" and choose bit.ly or the custom domain that you've purchased:

How To Set Up Custom Link Tracking For Social Profiles

You can also choose a unique domain for your links for each social profile separately, depending on how many custom options you've set up, or even the "none" option in case you're not looking to use shortening or tracking for one or more of your profiles.

Under Link Tracking, simply select "Add customer link tracking for a social profile":

In the "Link Tracking" drop-down menu:

Select the link shortener you want to use for these social profiles;
Then, select the Profile(s) that you want these settings applied to;
Click "Save".

💡 Note: To turn link tracking off for these social profiles, select "None" from the drop-down menu.

Moving forward, every time you add a link to a post for one of these social profiles, SmarterQueue will default to using your customized settings.

Bitly API Limits

The limits below refer to how many shortenings can the Bitly API process within a time frame.

You can make 100 bitlinks per minute on a single Bitly account
You can make 1,000 bitlinks per hour on a single Bitly account
Due to API Restrictions on Pinterest, there is no current Link Tracking available.

The number of links your Bitly account can shorten within a month depends on your Bitly plan.