Managing Bitly & Enhanced Link Tracking

Meet our revamped link-tracking settings for improved organization and efficiency, simplifying your link-tracking tasks. Experience the seamless integration of Bitly and Google UTMs, empowering you with insights into click activity 💪

In This Article


The New SmarterQueue now offers enhanced management of your link-tracking settings by streamlining and centralizing them, ensuring a more user-friendly and efficient experience.

Navigate your way to Settings, then the "Link Tracking" area.

Here you’ll be able to:

  • See your already connected Bitly profiles (no longer part of your "Social Profiles" section);
  • Add and remove Bitly profiles;
  • Edit your Bitly settings;
  • Enable and disable Google Analytics UTMs;
  • Edit your Google Analytics UTM parameters.


How To Connect A Bitly Account

Follow these quick and easy steps to connect your Bitly account 💪

1. If you don't already have a Bitly account, head over to Bitly.com to sign up for a free account!

2. In a new browser tab, click the cog icon (⚙) in the top right corner of your SmarterQueue dashboard and select “Link Tracking”.

3. Click the Bitly button to link your account to SmarterQueue.

4. Follow the prompts on the screen to authorize the connection and "Allow" access.

5. Once your Bitly account is connected, link tracking will be turned on by default.

6. You can connect multiple Bitly accounts if you wish, and set up custom link tracking for each Social Profile under “Preferences” as shown under the "How To Manage Your Link Tracking Settings" chapter. Read on for detailed steps.

Effortlessly adjust your link tracking preferences within the dedicated "Link Tracking" area.

1. Manage your default link tracking settings by navigating to the cog menu (⚙) and clicking “Link Tracking”.

2. Scroll down to “Preferences” where you'll be able to adjust the “Default Link Tracking” setting - whether it is picking which Bitly profile you want to use, or if you want to turn Bitly off entirely with “none”:

3. Click the “Customize per Profile” toggle to choose your default link tracking settings per profile!

💡 Tip: Adjust the settings for individual posts in the Post Editor by clicking “Edit” in the Link section to change your link settings, including the link preview and UTM campaign tracking.

For more information on creating posts, please see "Post Creation: A Comprehensive Guide"?

How To Manage Your Google Analytics Settings

UTM parameters are “tags” that are added to the end of a URL, to help you track the effectiveness of a post published to your social media accounts. 

This is a great way to discover where your traffic is coming from, especially if the source is the great content you're posting to your social media via SmarterQueue 💪

To manage your settings, follow these steps:

1. Click the cog icon in the top right corner and choose “Link Tracking”.

2. Scroll down to the section labeled “Google Analytics”.

3. Toggle “Campaign Tracking (Google Analytics UTM)" on.

When enabled, the following dynamic UTM parameters will be automatically added to the end of every link that you share:

  • Campaign Source: _NETWORK_ (This is the social network your post was shared on)
  • Campaign Medium: social
  • Campaign Name: _ACCOUNT_ (The name of your profile)
  • Campaign Content: _CATEGORY_ (The name of your post category)

These can be combined – e.g. _ACCOUNT_ _NETWORK_ will result in “myinstagramhandle Instagram”.

Note: We recommend keeping Campaign Medium set to ‘social’, as this helps Google Analytics detect social traffic

  1. Click “Edit UTM parameters” to customize your UTM tracking parameters.

5. Make any desired changes and click “Save UTM Parameters” to save your changes.

6. If you want to turn off Google Analytics, simply click on the “Campaign Tracking (Google Analytics UTM)” toggle.

Common Questions

1. Why doesn't Bitly shorten the links for my Pinterest posts?

Due to API restrictions, Bitly Link Tracking was not available on Pinterest. 

As this is now possible, we're looking at adding this functionality to SmarterQueue soon.  

2. I updated my Bitly settings but my queued posts are still being shortened. Why? 

When changing the default link settings, this will only come into effect for new posts, or when you edit an already queued post. It will not update previously Queued posts. 

For example, you decide you no longer want shortened links in your articles so you remove Bitly. Any articles already queued will still have the shortened link, you will need to edit those articles and change the link if you don't want the shortened link to be posted.

3. Is there a limit to how many Bitly profiles I can have?

You can have as many Bitly profiles as you want, and it will not count towards your Social Profile limit.

4. Why aren't my Bitly links being created? I'm seeing an error that my rate limit was exceeded.

If you are seeing the following error:

"There was a problem creating a bitlink for your post: [RATE_LIMIT_EXCEEDED].

You can try to auto-fix all failed bitlinks. Otherwise, you may wish to edit the post and try to turn click-tracking on again."

Please note that Bitly has a rate limit for how many Bitly links you can create per hour - 100 per hour.

Rest assured, if you exceed your Bitly rate limit, SmarterQueue will automatically try again later to generate your links 💪 

5. My link has lots of text added after it, like this: 

utm_source=_NETWORK_&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=_ACCOUNT_&utm_content=_CATEGORY_

These are Google Analytics UTM tracking parameters. They help improve your Google Analytics, so you can see how your website visitors found your website. 

The capitalized words will be replaced with your own Profiles/Categories, which you can see in the Preview. 

If you don’t want them in your link, you can turn UTM off; or you can use Bitly to shorten the link into something prettier. 

6. How do I Configure Google Analytics To Work With Your UTMs?

There are two things you should do in Google Analytics to ensure your reports are meaningful:

  1. Make sure to ignore the “utm_sq” parameter that is added to Bitlinks.

If you have created several posts that link to a URL on your website (e.g. http://website.com/blog-post), and added Bitly click tracking for each post, SmarterQueue will generate a unique Bitlink for each post, and the destination of each Bitlink will be slightly different because a different “utm_sq” parameter is added for each post.

When viewing all of your visited pages in Google Analytics, it may show a separate row for each unique URL, due to the different parameters added for each separate post:

If you wish to group those separate rows into one row, so that you can measure all visitors to your base URL (http://website.com/blog-post), regardless of which unique post they came from, you can add a filter to tell Google Analytics to ignore the “utm_sq” query parameter:

  1. Make sure all of your UTM parameters are lowercase.

SmarterQueue creates all UTM parameters in lowercase (e.g. ?utm_source=myfacebookpage). 

If you create any UTM parameters with uppercase letters (e.g. ?utm_campaign=MyFacebookPage), Google Analytics may report them as separate UTM parameters, which makes it harder to group all of your traffic sources. This may mean you have two rows in your UTM reports, one row showing traffic from “myfacebookpage”, and another row showing traffic from “MyFacebookPage”.

To make Google treat both variants as the same source, you can apply a filter that makes all UTM parameters lowercase.

Note: It may not be a good idea to add UTM parameters to links that you don’t own (i.e. you can’t view the Google Analytics for that domain). Occasionally, websites are not configured correctly to handle UTM parameters, so by adding them, you may actually break the link that you’re trying to share!

SmarterQueue provides analytics for all your posts, segmented by profile and category, so even if you share links to other people’s websites, you can see which category or profile got the most engagement.