How ASUG Uses Bitly Assist to Turn Member Engagement into Actionable Insights

America’s SAP Users Group (ASUG) is a trusted community for SAP professionals in North America, helping thousands of members connect, learn, and get more from their technology. SAP powers many of the world’s core business systems, from finance to supply chains.

Supporting that community means delivering content that keeps members informed and ahead of what’s next. For Ania Cotton, the organization’s SEO and Data Analytics Manager, knowing what’s working, which content drives engagement, and which channels drive results is key to delivering value for its members.

A growing podcast, and no way to truly measure it

ASUG’s content library was growing, but the data wasn’t keeping up. With a podcast distributed across Buzzsprout, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify, Ania’s analytics tech stack had little to show her. She needed a reliable way to know who was clicking, where listeners were coming from, and which platforms were driving results.

Their existing link shortening solution only covered content hosted on their own site. For everything else, there was a blind spot. That changed when ASUG turned to Bitly.

Building a link analytics workflow from scratch

Once Ania started using Bitly, she began by creating tagged Bitly short links for every piece of content distributed externally, organizing them by platform and campaign. Each Friday, she’d create the links for the following week. Each Monday, she’d return to update her dashboards, filtering by tag and date range to pull weekly and monthly performance snapshots.

She built customized dashboards within Bitly Analytics, tracking top-performing links, comparing channels, and monitoring engagement week-over-week. The data became a regular fixture in team meeting notes and stakeholder updates.

Using Bitly to track the engagement of those links—and also doing a monthly and a quarterly view to see what were our top performing links—helps a lot to understand how users are interacting with the content we put out and where we’re getting the most engagement,” says Ania.

Less manual work, more meaningful insights

When Bitly Assist launched, Ania was one of its first users. The AI chat assistant, accessible from anywhere within the Bitly platform, lets users ask questions about their link performance. For Ania, it changed how she approached her entire weekly reporting process.

Instead of downloading PDFs from each individual dashboard and comparing them manually, she could ask Bitly Assist to summarize performance, surface top links, or compare engagement across tagged campaigns, all in a single conversation.

Bitly Assist has streamlined how we analyze performance. What used to take 10 to 15 minutes of digging through dashboards now takes seconds,” says Ania, “It’s follow-up prompts also surface insights we might not have uncovered on our own.”

What stood out wasn’t just the time saved, it was what Bitly Assist surfaced on its own. During one session, the assistant flagged that a link from the past week was also the top-performing link of all time, without being asked. It broke results into performance tiers, added context, and offered recommendations for next steps.

The follow-up questions that it asks help spark different questions in myself that I might not have thought through before. It helps me understand the larger picture and the bigger numbers.”

At ASUG, Ania is a team of one when it comes to analytics, so Bitly Assist feels like having someone else there to help make sense of the data.

Data, not vibes: From analytics to strategy

The impact went beyond time savings. The data Ania gathered through Bitly started driving real decisions at ASUG.

By tracking which links drove the most engagement, and from which channels, the team learned where to focus promotional efforts for the podcast. They identified which social platforms were most effective, clarified when to use a single consistent link versus a speaker-specific one, and simplified their Monday email by reusing one link each week instead of creating a new one every time.

It definitely has helped shape strategy and how we approach our day-to-day because of the insights that we have, versus just guessing that it worked. We have a saying: It’s data, not vibes.”

When one episode promoted by a subject matter expert outperformed ASUG’s regular Monday email send, the data made the case for adding a speaker kit to the workflow. Ania could show leadership exactly what performed, and why it mattered, without asking them to interpret a dashboard.

Unlocking efficiency that drives impact

When you’re the only person regularly digging into data, efficiency isn’t optional. Bitly Assist has transformed Ania’s manual reporting process into a fast, streamlined weekly workflow.

The impact shows up across her work: faster reporting, clearer insights for stakeholders, and a stronger foundation for making strategic calls about content, channels, and paid media.

[Bitly Assist is like] a second me. Another version of me to help see the other side of what that data is. It’s definitely a data analyst, but also a strategist in a way.”

For Ania, that means less time compiling data and more time using it—helping ASUG reach the right members, on the right platforms, with content that actually lands.

Ready to streamline your reporting? Get started with Bitly and see how Bitly Assist helps you get answers and time back in your day.