How to spy on campaigns of competitors who use URL shorteners

URL shorteners are such a wonderful thing: they not only make URLs shorter (obviously), but they also give away some juicy details from those who use them when pushing online campaigns. Services like bit.ly, goo.gl, and others, provide publicly-viewable statistics you can often gleen valuable insight from. In this post, I'm going not only dive into some great URL shortener research methods, but I'm also going to show you how to use Google to find some of these links from your competitors! Results will inevitably vary, but the methods should still prove useful, regardless.

Beginning with URL shorteners, the concept is simple enough: add a + to the end of a bit.ly or goo.gl URL and see what kind of data there is to be found. For example, add a + onto the end of http://goo.gl/ONjPr, and you'll get http://goo.gl/ONjPr+. Additionally, for bit.ly, take a link like http://bit.ly/zjkC68, then add a + onto the end of it to get http://bit.ly/zjkC68+. Also worth mentioning, adding a + onto the end of those URLs is a great way to see where they actually lead to before you ever click them.