Analytics

Open Analytics for the whole workspace, or a link's page for that link alone. The overview page shows the highlights.

What counts as a click

• A click is one visit to a short link that sends the visitor on to the destination, whether they clicked, tapped, typed it or scanned a QR code.
• Visits to a paused, expired, scheduled or deleted link aren't counted, because nobody was sent on.
• For a password-protected link, the click is counted when the right password is entered.
• New clicks usually appear within a few seconds. Watch them arrive on the Live page.
• Days run from midnight to midnight in the workspace's time zone.

Time zone

Each workspace counts its analytics days, weeks and months in one time zone, so a click at 9 am on Tuesday in Sydney counts towards Tuesday when the workspace uses Australia/Sydney. The same zone is used for charts, comparisons, CSV exports, chart notes and summary emails.

• New workspaces start in the time zone of the device you signed up on. Workspaces created before time zones existed start in UTC; Analytics offers to switch to your device's zone.
• To change it, an Administrator opens Settings → Analytics time zone, starts typing a city and chooses Save time zone.
• Changing it recounts past days from the individual click records we keep (90 days unless your administrator changed it), usually within a minute. Days older than that stay in the zone they were counted in, and Analytics says so under the dates.
• Daylight saving is handled: the day the clocks change has 23 or 25 hours. Zones with half-hour and 45-minute offsets, such as Adelaide, Darwin, India and Nepal, work the same way.
• The analytics API can report in any zone with timeZone, counted from the individual click records, so only for the last 90 days or so.

Live clicks

Every plan. Choose Live on Analytics, or on a link's page for that link alone.

• Clicks appear as they arrive, newest first, with the link, country, device and browser, the referring site, and whether it came from a QR code or carried UTM tags.
• The chart at the top shows clicks per minute for the last hour.
• Bots, link previews and security scanners are hidden unless you tick Show bots, link previews and scanners.
• Times are in your device's time zone. The page never shows addresses or anything that identifies a visitor.
• If the page says it's checking every 5 seconds, a network proxy is holding back the live connection; it still works, a little slower.

Chart notes

Mark things that could change your clicks, such as a newsletter going out or a post going live, so you can see their effect.

1. Open Analytics (or a link's page) and choose Add a note under Chart notes.
2. Choose the date, optionally a time, and write the note. On a link's page, choose whether it's for that link or the whole workspace; on Analytics you can tie it to a campaign.
3. Choose Add note. It shows as a numbered flag on the chart for that day, with the full note in the list below.

Managers and above add, change and delete notes; everyone who can see analytics sees them. All chart notes lists every note in the workspace. Notes are also in the API.

People and automated traffic

A lot of link traffic isn't people. When you paste a link into Slack, Teams, WhatsApp or LinkedIn, the app fetches it to show a preview. Email security systems open links to check them. Search engines and monitoring tools visit too.

We sort every click into one of these, using the browser's description of itself:

• Headline figures, such as Clicks from people, count only likely human clicks.
• Automated traffic lists the bots and tools we recognised, so nothing is hidden.
• It's an estimate: a tool we don't recognise yet counts as a person until it's identified.
• The service's administrators can add rules for tools that visit your links, such as a partner's system, and can say that an app the rules catch is really people. New rules only change how new clicks are counted.

Unique visitors

Estimated unique visitors is worked out per link, per day, without cookies:

• People on the same network using the same browser count once.
• One person using two devices counts twice.
• A person who comes back on another day counts again, because we deliberately can't link visits across days.

Over several days or links, the figure is a sum of the daily estimates, so treat it as "people a day", added up.

Privacy

• We never store full IP addresses.
• To estimate unique visitors, we combine the network part of the address, the browser and a random value that changes every day, and keep only a scrambled result. The daily value is deleted after the day, so visits can't be linked across days, even by us.
• We don't set cookies on people who follow your links.
• Country comes from our network provider and can be missing for some visits.
• Individual click records are deleted after 90 days. Daily totals are kept for your plan's analytics history.

More detail is on our security and privacy page.

Date ranges and history

• Choose Last 7, 30, 90 or 365 days from the period menu. The dates shown are days in the workspace's time zone.
• Figures compare with the same number of days just before, so you can see whether things are going up or down.
• How far back you can look depends on your plan: see Days of analytics history in Compare plans. If you choose a longer period, the report starts at the earliest day your plan includes.
• Need specific dates? The analytics API takes any start and end date.

Breakdowns

CSV export

Pro and above, for people with the Analyst role or higher.

1. Open Analytics (or a link's page) and choose the period.
2. Choose CSV.

The file has one row per link per day with clicks: day, link_id, short_url, destination_url, clicks, human_clicks, qr_scans, unique_visitors_estimate and conversions.

Summary emails

Business plan. Get a regular email with clicks from people, QR scans and your top links.

1. Open Analytics and scroll to Summary by email.
2. Choose Weekly, on Mondays or Monthly, on the 1st, then Save.

Each summary covers the last full week or month for that workspace, in its time zone, and arrives soon after midnight there. Everyone chooses for themselves; choose Never to stop.

Common questions