How to Shorten 500 URLs Using Bitly and Google Spreadsheet

Bitly has become a ubiquitous tool for shortening long and complex URLs. You may want to get a nice and clean URL to make it memorable for the people you’d share your link with, you may want to track click data for future use, or you may need to shorten your URLs for social media platforms that limit the number of characters in a caption or an update. No matter what you need to shorten the URLs for, Bitly is one of the best solutions available to you at this time, which nobody can deny.

The problem arises when you have as many as 500 URLs to shorten. Let’s assume that you’re a busy Digital Marketer who’d like to track campaigns using utm parameters. Like it was said in one of my previous articles about Google Analytics URL Builder for Bulk Campaigns, you wouldn’t want to manually add tracking parameters to each of the URLs you have. You’d rather use an Excel spreadsheet to add utm parameters to as many as 50 destination URLs at once. Similarly, you can use a Google Spreadsheet to shorten your custom URLs on a single worksheet. The best thing is that the number is 500, this time! Amazing, isn’t it?! So let’s see how to shorten up to 500 URLs using a Google Spreadsheet.

How to Shorten Up to 500 URLs Using Bitly and Google Spreadsheet

Step 1: Gathering Your Login & API Key

1. Go to Bitly.com and create an account if you don’t have one.
2. Once you log into your account, click on the hamburger icon (4 parallel lines) at the top-right corner. It will unfold a list of items.
3. In the list, you'll find Settings. Click on it and you'll find Advanced Settings. Click on Advanced Settings.
4. Under your Advanced tab, you’ll find API Support. Click on API Support and you’ll see your Login as well as your API Key.
5. Copy both of them and save for future use.

Step 2: Working with the template (VERY IMPORTANT)

Now, go to this link: CLICK HERE

There's something I want you to know before you proceed.

• When I created this spreadsheet I didn’t enable “edit” for everyone. So you need to make an editable copy of it by clicking on File > Make A Copy. Give your copy a name and use it. You can't put your login and API Key in my template.
• Also, in my original template, go to Tools > Script Editor. You'll see a script opening in a new tab. Copy what the code. Now go to your editable version (the one you copied.) Go to Tools > Script Editor and paste the code. Save it!

Copy your login and paste it into the cell B1. Copy your API Key and paste it into the cell B2. Put your long URL into the cell B4 and you can immediately see your shortened URL in the cell C4. You can also put a name into A4, but this is optional. In this way, you can generate up to 500 shortened URLs. My best advice would be to copy all 50 custom URLs from the Excel template I created for this post and paste them from B4 to B54. It’ll save you some time.

If you find this post helpful, feel free to share it with others. Any comment or suggestion would be appreciated.

Remember, you need to make an editable copy of it by clicking on File > Make A Copy. You can't put your login and API Key in my template. Also, remember that my template uses a script. When you make a copy of it, you need to copy and paste the script I used on my template. (Special thanks to Jeff Adams for the tip)