Initial email from Nathan outlining our need
Hi Joe
Im in New Zealand so if you are able to find a time that suits both yourself and I than happy to have a phone call.
A bit more about why Im interested, I work in the Marketing department at Victoria University of Wellington, a large (for NZ) university with around 20,000 students, we produce a lot of recruitment material for web, print and display with the intent to direct people to the rich information on our website.
For digital materials as you probably know we can use links with large amounts of characters and add google utm tracking ect, its quite powerful, but we want to do that in our print and display materials. At the moment we can create print suitable ‘short urls’ with a apache config file, it is quite technical and requires developer involvement, it also doesn't give us the analytics component like a digital link can.
This is where I see the Bitly platform being very useful, the easy to use interface will give our content creators the ability to create and track their marketing URLs far better than our apache config, which currently is sitting at nearly 1000 redirects - some what unsustainable.
So that why Im interested, Im sure there are other features that Bitly can offer that might be interesting and I’d be happy to hear more
Ebook, with some interesting examples
Notes from conference call with Joe
They offer so much more than we need, but at a price I doubt we can pay. Certainly, the cost is more than the beneift required to meet Nathan's requirements
Branded short URLs: Shorter than our current short URLs, as we choose to use the full domain name first;
Higher trust and consequently, click-throughs. Do we even monitor chick-throughs from short URLs used in digital marketing and social media?
Can tag every link, in every advertisement, and track how they are used. Compare and evaluate.
Pricing is driven by number of users (seats), number of branded short URLs used and hits on the API that all clicks go through.
Estimated cost for VUW: US$995/month for one branded URL and one user. Each user an additional US$75/month. Each branded domain an additional US$700/month
Notes for management
I was asked to pick up on behalf of Nathan the conversation with Bitly.com. He had already established our requirements as:
- Allowing content creators (e.g. publications staff) non-developers to create and maintain short URLS for publications
- Allow content creators to track their marketing
After many attempts, I was able to speak with Joe on a conference call. He was informative, constructive and keen to sell to us. However, the solution has some challenges for us, hence the following thoughts for us to discuss:
- Bitly.com is a powerful analysis tool to assist understanding the effectiveness of scoial media and online marketing
- It would meet Nathan's key requirement of allowing better and sustainable use of branded short URLs without developer input
- However, it is expensive (starting at US$955/month) and aimed at the power users of social media and online marketing, not really print/publications.
- As the real benefit would be in the marketing space, it is marketing staff who should lead any further conversations.
- My view is that it is an expensive solution to the requirements I was given. From a web team perspective, we should drop Bitly and either look for an alternative (simpler and cheaper) related solution or park this idea altogether.