Tracking URL shorteners

Support & Bugs
1

I use bit.ly with my twitter account for URL shorteners, in the referrals section, it does identify my twitter account as the source of traffic, my question is, are those coming from my bit.ly links or directly from my twitter account (where I have a direct link to my site). I have read that many of the 301 redirects lose the referral data and if that’s the case, how do I track links coming from bit.ly directly? I just want to make sure that these clicks are not being placed in the “direct traffic” bin as GA does.

Thanks

Dan

2

bit.ly preserves the referrer otherwise clicks on your your short urls would show as being from bit.ly.

What I did was install lilurl (a GPL url shortener) and add piwik tracking. It has its own idsite, so the stats are segregated from my other sites.