See Where Your Short Link's Clicks Came From

Your short links have always counted clicks. Now they tell you where those clicks came from.

Open Link Shortener, click any short link, and you will find two tabs: Link and Insight. The Link tab is the settings you already know — destination, status, the Pro options. The Insight tab is new.

What everyone gets

Free, on every short link you own:

• Total clicks — every click the code has taken since you created it.
• The last 30 days, against the 30 before them. A number on its own tells you very little. Sitting next to the month before it, it tells you whether what you did last week worked.
• Your top traffic source, by name — Instagram, WhatsApp, Google or Direct.
• A daily chart of the last 30 days, so you can see the day you posted.

That last one is usually where people stop scrolling. The spike lines up with the story you shared, and the link stops being an abstraction.

Where the source name comes from

When someone opens your short link, their browser usually says which page sent them. We group those into the platforms you recognise instead of showing raw addresses, so you see Instagram rather than l.instagram.com.

Some visits carry no source at all, and those are counted as Direct / typed. That is not a gap in the data — it is the honest answer for the two cases where a short link is at its best: someone scanning a printed QR code, and someone tapping a link inside a WhatsApp message. If Direct is your biggest source, your offline and messaging channels are the ones doing the work.

What to do with it

The numbers are only worth having if they change something. Three things they are good for:

• Decide where to post next. If Instagram brings four times what your Facebook page does, that is where the next campaign link goes.
• Check whether the printed thing works. Put a short link's QR on a menu, a flyer or a shop window, then watch Direct / typed. That is the only honest way to find out whether anyone is scanning it.
• See how long a post keeps working. The daily chart usually shows a spike and then a tail. The length of the tail tells you whether to re-share or move on.

What Pro adds

The lower half of the Insight tab is included with Pro:

• Clicks by source — not just the top one, the whole split.
• The daily trend over 7 or 30 days, on a full chart.
• Devices and countries for the clicks on that one link.
• Where the link ranks among your own short links, next to your average, so you can tell a strong code from a quiet one.

If your click count got smaller, this is why

A short link is not only opened by people. Search engine crawlers follow it. Chat apps and social networks fetch it to build the little preview card. Uptime monitors check it. Every one of those used to count as a click.

They do not any more. We applied that to past clicks as well as new ones, which means some of your links now show a smaller number than they did before.

Nothing was lost. Those visits were never people, and a click count that includes them quietly overstates every decision you make with it. We would rather show you a number you can trust than a bigger one.

Frequently asked questions

Why did my click count go down?

Because bots and link previewers no longer count, and we corrected past clicks as well as new ones. The figure you see now is the one that reflects people.

Does scanning the QR code count as a click?

Yes. The QR on your flyer points at the short link, so a scan resolves it exactly the way a tap does. It appears in the same numbers, usually under Direct / typed.

Do I need Pro to see any of this?

No. Total clicks, the 30-day comparison, your top source by name and the daily chart are free on every short link. Pro adds the full breakdown underneath.

What if the link has no clicks yet?

The tab still opens and tells you so, rather than showing you an empty chart and leaving you guessing. Share the link and the first click appears within a minute.

Have a look

Open Link Shortener, pick a link, and tap Insight. If you have been handing a code out for a while, the source line is usually the surprise.