Your campaigns are separated into channels, which correspond to how you plan to share your campaign links.
For example, say you create a campaign for your Fall 2023 product line and plan to share the links in social posts, paid Facebook ads, and email. You can create a separate channel for each of those:
- Social
- Paid Facebook
Creating channels for these allows you to track (and compare) your links' performance across paid, organic, and social media. And you can do so from within Bitly!
Campaign channels and UTM parameters
We can automatically add UTM parameters to your links when you upload — this is one of the reasons to use campaigns instead of manually entering UTM parameters.
If you want to use UTM parameters in your campaign, be sure to select Auto-add UTM parameters when you upload your links. This option is also required to upload your links to multiple channels at once.
Your channels are used as the utm_source parameter. The utm_medium field is always "bitly" and utm_campaign matches the name of your campaign. For example, if we share the link to this article in a campaign called "Get to know campaigns," with a channel called "social," our link would look like this:
- Original long link: https://support.bitly.com/hc/en-us/articles/14550428274317/
- Link with UTMs: https://support.bitly.com/hc/en-us/articles/14550428274317/?utm_campaign=Get+to+know+campaigns&utm_medium=bitly&utm_source=Social
- Short link: bitly.is/3H2ukWe
Analytics by campaign channel
Your campaign analytics show you the engagement data for each channel side-by-side, in real time, while also allowing you to click into each channel to learn more about your links' performance in that channel.
From there, you can click into each links' details page, to learn even more about its performance.
Each campaign needs to have at least one channel. You can create up to 500 channels in your account.