Re: [bitly-api] What is the most refined level for extracting click information

[Matt LeMay]

Thanks so much for reaching out!

/v3/user/clicks returns the aggregate of clicks on ALL the specific user's short URLs.

/v3/link/clicks, when supplied with a user-specific bitly URL, provides the total number of clicks on that specific short link, which was created by a particular bitly user. There's no hard and fast rule for comparing clicks to retweets; there are cases where a link is actually retweeted more than it is clicked. The bitly API does not directly return any Twitter metrics (number of retweets, etc.)

It is possible to extract very refined metrics on a short link level using the API methods documented at http://dev.bitly.com/link_metrics.html. There are currently no API methods to get global, bitly-wide data broken down by referrers, though user-level referrer breakdowns can be retrieved via the /v3/user/referrers and /v3/user/referring_domains endpoints documented at http://dev.bitly.com/user_metrics.html. Again, there's no way to directly get metrics per the actual Tweet containing a specific bitly short URL -- if that short URL is copied and pasted, retweeted or posted to multiple channels, all of the traffic associated with the short URL will be reported via the API.

Hope this helps!

Thanks, and all the best,

Matt

On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 5:07 AM, Sun Tianshu <jamessu...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi everyone. I am very new to bitly API and  have several questions about user metrics provided by Bitly API:

1. For user clicks (not global clicks), what is exactly returned the API? a. the number of clicks for the specific short URL. b. the number of clicks for the specific tweets which includes the specific short URL. a should be larger than b since people can retweet or simple copy-paste short URL in new tweets which may incur more clicks

2. Following question 1:It is not clear to me to what extent we can extract really refined click information from API. a. on the short URL level b. on short URL level plus the referral site (where the clicks happens or where the same short URL are). c. on short URL level + referral site + tweets level (you can tell click number for each tweet including the same URL)

Thank you very much! Really appreciate any help or hint.

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