Bitly on September 21, 2026 published survey research showing that 79% of US consumers have abandoned an action after a social media link delivered them to a generic homepage instead of the product they had clicked for. Marketers and creators in the same study expect social links to drive an average of 39% of their revenue over the next 12 months.

In Short

Bitly, a company that sells link-shortening and link-tracking software, surveyed roughly 1,500 Americans - mostly shoppers, plus a smaller group of marketers and creators - about clicking links on social media. Nearly eight in ten shoppers said they have given up after a link dropped them on a website's front page instead of the product they wanted, and almost all admitted skipping at least some links so their feeds would not start showing them more of the same. If you pay for or post those links, the page behind the tap turns out to matter as much as the link itself, although the research comes from a company that sells tools aimed at exactly that problem.

What Bitly asked, and whom

Bitly fielded an online survey of 1,006 US consumers and 501 US marketers and creators between July 27 and August 5, 2026, according to the methodology published with the report. The document, titled The Click Expectation Report: What Consumers Want vs. What They Get, appeared on the company's blog on September 21 with an author box naming Jenny Coppola, Bitly's Senior Director of Brand & Content.

Its premise is fragmentation. A single social post, the report observes, can carry a caption link, a swipe-up, a product tagand further options buried in bio pages, stories and direct messages. Consumers, in Bitly's framing, "know exactly what makes them trust and click a link", while senders cannot see where their traffic goes once it lands.

Among the professionals, 45% identified as independent creators, influencers or small business owners and 55% as agency, freelance or in-house marketers; retail and eCommerce was the largest industry, at 28%. Consumers were 30% Millennials, 26% Gen X, 24% Baby Boomers and 20% Gen Z, split 50% male and 49% female.

Several things are missing: a margin of error, a weighting scheme, a panel provider and question wording. Bitly's promotional material describes the sample as more than 1,500 consumers, marketers and creators without mentioning that all of them were in the United States; the methodology confirms they were.

Where the click falls apart

Landing on a generic homepage instead of the product featured in a post is the most common reason consumers give for abandoning an action after clicking, cited by 79%, according to Bitly. Two triggers tie at 76%: security friction, meaning excessive redirects or a browser security warning, and a promised discount or promo code missing at the destination. A forced app installation or app-store redirect follows at 69%, pages not built for mobile at 51%, and the wrong region, language or currency at 49%.

Those six figures sum to 420%. Respondents could pick several triggers, so each percentage describes consumers who have abandoned something for that reason at some point, not the share of clicks lost to it. Bitly's promotion of the study speaks of abandoned purchases; the report itself refers to abandoning "an action", which could equally be a sign-up. For social commerce the point still bites, because each failure happens after a platform has been paid for the click or the impression.

Every trigger, the report argues, "traces back to the same root problem" - a link that does not go where the consumer expects. Some friction sits inside the link itself: a short link is a redirect by design, as the shortener's server receives the tap and forwards the browser, and tracking or affiliate layers can add further hops. Because the 76% option bundles redirects with security warnings, the survey cannot say which drives abandonment.

Age and device

Generational gaps are sharpest on mobile. A page not optimised for phones prompts abandonment among 41% of Baby Boomers but around 61% to 62% of Millennials and Gen Z. iOS users abandon such pages more often than Android users, at 57% against 47%, while Android users are warier of security warnings, at 82% against 77%.

That last pair deserves scrutiny. Both device figures exceed the 76% headline rate, and a total cannot fall below all of its parts unless some respondents use neither operating system and report a much lower rate, or rounding and differing bases are at work. The report does not say how many respondents used each platform.

Hesitation before the tap

Trust often erodes before any click. Concern about URL safety tops the reasons consumers pause, at 57%, ahead of links that feel like clickbait at 52%, vague destination descriptions at 44% and a mismatch between a creator's usual content and the destination at 42%. Long URLs packed with tracking characters bother 28%, generic shorteners that hide the brand's name 23%, low engagement on the post 20% and crowded multi-link posts 14%.

Two of those sit awkwardly with standard practice. Long strings of UTM parameters are how many marketers attribute social traffic, and generic short domains of the kind Bitly itself issues by default deter nearly a quarter of consumers.

Bitly's headline figure follows: 93% of consumers avoid clicking certain links on purpose so their algorithm does not serve them more of that content, and 43% do so always or often. Roughly half, then, do it only occasionally. The report adds that Gen Z and Millennials are the most likely to skip links for this reason, "both landing around 45%" - a number that cannot refer to the 93% measure. It is consistent with the "always or often" share, though the report does not say which it means.

The behaviour is visible elsewhere. Brandwatch research published on March 16, 2026 found consumers openly discussing retargeting, algorithms and brand tactics in public forums. For an advertiser, a click withheld to protect a feed registers as an impression without engagement, indistinguishable from indifference. Social proof carries generational weight as well: low likes or comments make 32% of Gen Z distrust a link, against 23% of Millennials, 18% of Gen X and 7% of Baby Boomers.

What earns the click

Recognition matters most. The top driver of click confidence, at 48%, combines recognising the brand with a custom branded short link, according to Bitly. Personal trust in the brand or creator sharing the link follows at 44% - 50% among Gen Z, 38% among Gen X - then clear destination copy at 43%. Transparent labelling such as #ad or #sponsored matters most to Gen Z, at 39%, and least to Gen X, at 31%.

The 48% figure has a construction problem. The response option joins knowing the brand with seeing its name in a custom short domain, and the report uses it both ways, describing the answer for nearly half of consumers as "simply recognizing the name" before citing it in support of branded links. A bundled question cannot isolate what the link format adds.

Bitly supplies a separate number for that: branded links see a 2.3x lift in clicks over unbranded ones, according to its own platform data. No base period, link sample or category mix accompanies the claim, and nothing controls for the likelihood that companies paying for custom domains are better-known brands to begin with. It is an unaudited vendor metric.

Disclosure research asks different questions. IAB Australia data published on September 17, 2026 found 44% of Australian online shoppers less likely to act on a post they know is paid. Bitly measures whether labelling builds click confidence, not whether disclosure suppresses action.

Brands beat creators, except on lists

Corporate brands beat independent creators on trust across every content type surveyed, according to Bitly. The widest margin is on app or software downloads, 88% against 12%. Curated resource lists, such as product roundups, are the only category where the two draw level, at 50% each. Because respondents chose between brand and creator, the figures describe relative preference rather than absolute trust.

Research elsewhere in the creator economy depends heavily on the question asked. Google and Kantar fieldwork published in March 2026 found 79% of Gen Z respondents trusted creator recommendations on YouTube, from a subsample of 344, while Reddit research expanded on August 10, 2026 found first-hand peer experience twice as likely as critic or influencer reviews to be the top factor in US purchase decisions.

LinkedIn edges a tight platform ranking

The four platforms consumers named as most trusted when deciding whether to click sit within two percentage points of each other: LinkedIn at 19%, and YouTube, Instagram and Reddit at 17% each. The report's text carries no figures for Facebook, X, Pinterest or Snapchat.

Age reshapes the order. Instagram leads for Gen Z at 33%, against 18% among Millennials, whose favourite is Reddit at 21%. LinkedIn climbs with age to top the list for Gen X at 22% and Baby Boomers at 24%. TikTok falls at every generational step, from 12% among Gen Z to 2% among Boomers. One description does not match its numbers: the report calls 33% "more than double" 18%, a ratio of about 1.8.

How platforms treat outbound links shapes all of this, and the survey does not measure it. Analysis of X's open-sourced ranking code in January 2026 found no prediction for external link clicks among 19 engagement types and noted an in-app browser test X ran in October 2025; Elon Musk said on July 29, 2026 that X had not penalised linked posts for over a year. Instagram's long-standing single bio link helped Linktree, founded in 2016, build a business around aggregating destinations; Meta raised the limit to five in April 2023 and in March 2026 was testing clickable caption links for Meta Verified users.

The senders' side of the gap

The second half of the survey turns to the people sending the links. Difficulty tracking traffic across posts, bios, stories, DMs and paid is the biggest challenge, cited by 36% overall, 41% of marketers and 30% of creators. Connecting platform analytics to website or campaign data troubles 29% of marketers against 17% of creators. Creators are more affected by in-app browsers stripping tracking parameters or cookies, at 27% against 18%.

Why in-app browsers matter

That figure has a technical basis. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat often open links in built-in browsers implemented through WebView, which do not consistently support Universal Link and deep link behaviour and can modify URLs. The volume is real: Cloudflare's third-quarter 2025 figures put Facebook's in-app browser at 9.344% of Australian mobile traffic, and Instagram's at 5.216%.

Apple adds another layer. Safari strips click identifiers such as gclid and fbclid from links opened in Messages and Mail, and Safari 26 beta release notes in September 2025 listed tracking-parameter filtering in regular browsing. Private browsing, where Safari removes the GCLID by default, was estimated in April 2026 at roughly 20% of Safari sessions. The identifiers that auto-tagging appends are the most exposed, and in August 2026 Google Ads clicks were shown to lose paid attribution when GBRAID and gad_ parameters are stripped.

Where the traffic lands

Marketers send traffic to a direct product page at a rate of 66%, creators at 40%, according to Bitly. A generic homepage is second for both, at 39% and 30%. Creators lean more on link-in-bio or directory pages, 24% against 17%, and on third-party marketplaces, 17% against 7%. The report calls these shares of traffic, yet the marketer figures sum to 129% and the creator figures to 111%; they read better as shares of respondents using each destination.

Then the admission. One in three marketers and creators, 34%, say their own social video links usually route to a generic homepage - the destination consumers most often abandon. Why would a product video point at a homepage? The report does not ask.

How senders measure

Social media management platforms with native link tracking lead among marketers, at 39%. Creators favour post-purchase or post-signup attribution surveys, asking customers directly how they found a product, at 33%. Marketers use manual UTM parameters nearly three times as often as creators, 23% against 8%, while 10% of creators and 3% of marketers do not measure links at all. The FAQ adds that 34% of marketers rely on link management or custom shortener tools and 29% on link-in-bio pages that track clicks. "The problem isn't that marketers and creators are bad at analyzing data, but that the tooling itself is scattered," the report states.

The creator preference for asking customers mirrors a wider shift. Fairing opened a beta on September 10, 2026 that extends its post-purchase survey, which asks buyers how they heard about a brand, with follow-up questions naming the show, creator or AI query behind a sale. Measurement is also where creator programmes struggle most: an Association of National Advertisers survey published on August 27, 2026 found 67% of marketers naming it the hardest step in influencer marketing.

The 39% expectation

Bitly gives only the mean for the 39% revenue expectation, which covers links in social profiles and content over the next 12 months - no median, no split by group, no distribution - and in a sample where 45% are creators or small business owners, some selling almost entirely through social, a minority can lift an average.

Consumer data elsewhere is cooler. NIQ and World Data Lab research published on August 27, 2026 found 68% of North American consumers had never completed a purchase through social media. The measures differ, since a bio link feeding a brand's own checkout may not register as a social purchase in a consumer survey, but the distance between the two is striking.

A vendor study with a product attached

Bitly sells the tools its report recommends. The product menu on the report page lists a URL shortener, QR codes, analytics, link-in-bio pages, branded links, mobile links and UTM campaign tools, and each remedy the report proposes maps onto one of them. The FAQ answers its own question with an unqualified "Yes, you should use link-in-bio and link shorteners for your social links." The report also cites more than 3 million customers, including two-thirds of the Fortune 500, according to Bitly.

None of that invalidates the consumer data, much of which aligns with independent research. It does mean evidence and conclusions arrive together, from a party with a commercial stake in how they are read. The category has not stood still either: Google set August 25, 2025 as the date its goo.gl shortener would stop working, then changed course that August to preserve actively used links. Bitly's closing lines are not modest. "The link isn't the shortcut anymore," the report concludes. "It's the whole relationship, compressed into a single tap."

Why this matters for marketers

Paid social is bought by the click or the impression, and the survey describes what happens after that money is spent. When a third of senders concede that their video links usually route to a homepage, the leak is structural rather than accidental!

Security hesitation has a documented basis. The Federal Trade Commission reported on April 27, 2026 that Americans lost $2.1 billion to social media scams in 2025, an eightfold rise since 2020, and BrandShield research published on September 9, 2026 found 31.6% of consumers would stop clicking the ads of a brand impersonated in a scam, while only 4.2% blamed that brand.

The landing page still decides the outcome. Contentsquare research published on September 2, 2026 found just 3% of respondents would buy anyway after a poor site visit, in that case among shoppers referred by AI assistants. The routes into a site differ; the failure point is often the same page.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Bitly, a link management company whose report page names Jenny Coppola, Senior Director of Brand & Content, as author. The survey covered 1,006 US consumers and 501 US marketers and creators, and its findings concern advertisers, agencies, creators and brands that send traffic from social platforms.

What: The Click Expectation Report found that 79% of consumers have abandoned an action after a social link led to a generic homepage, that 93% avoid some links to keep their algorithm from learning (43% always or often), that 57% hesitate over URL safety, and that 34% of marketers and creators admit their social video links usually route to a homepage. Senders expect links to drive an average of 39% of revenue over 12 months. Several figures carry internal inconsistencies, and the 2.3x branded-link lift is unaudited Bitly platform data.

When: Published September 21, 2026, from fieldwork conducted between July 27 and August 5, 2026.

Where: The United States, with platform trust measured across LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit and TikTok.

Why: The report documents a gap between where consumers expect a link to take them and where senders actually route traffic, compounded by in-app browsers and parameter stripping that fragment measurement. Its recommended remedies map onto the products Bitly sells, which places commercial interest alongside the consumer evidence.