Popular link-shortening service Bit.ly is giving its enterprise customers a new analytics dashboard today, allowing large publishers to better track the distribution of their links on a per-story basis. The benefits of the new dashboard are obvious — publishers and companies with large presences on Twitter and Facebook can use the dashboard to see which of their articles and social media strategies are working best.
Of course, there’s more than one way to measure success, which is why the dashboard allows publishers to analyze the popularity of their articles both by the number of times their links are clicked (page hits, in other words) and how their links are being shared. For example, TechCrunch could use this to visualize how many clicks were generated by a tweeted story from our official account versus how many were from links users took the initiative to share themselves. The higher the latter statistic, the more viral a story was.
Bit.ly’s Enterprise accounts run $995 per month (they cater exclusively to high-traffic sites); free accounts are also available for users who need fewer features. You can see a breakdown of Bit.ly’s price-points here.