How to track link clicks

If you share a link, you usually want to know whether anyone opened it. A short link makes this straightforward, because every visit passes through the shortener before reaching the destination.

How it works

When someone opens a Zurl link, the service looks up the destination, sends the browser on its way, and then records that a click happened. No code needs to be added to the destination page, which is what makes this useful for links to sites you do not control.

Create a free account, create your links while signed in, then open any link in your dashboard to see its analytics.

What you can see

• Total clicks — every redirect served, for the life of the link.
• Clicks over time — a daily series showing when traffic arrived.
• Top countries — derived from a coarse geographic lookup.
• Referrers — the host that sent the visitor, such as example.com. Never the full referring URL.
• Devices, browsers and operating systems — broad categories only.
• Recent clicks — the last few events, useful for confirming a link works.

What is deliberately not recorded

Zurl does not store IP addresses. The IP is used momentarily to derive a country and is then discarded. It does not store raw user-agent strings, which are detailed enough to fingerprint a device; they are reduced to three broad labels first. It does not store the full referring URL, only the host, because the full URL can contain search terms and private paths.

The practical consequence is that Zurl can tell you "400 clicks, mostly from India, mostly mobile" and cannot tell you anything about a specific individual. That is the intended limit. The privacy page documents it precisely.

Reading the numbers honestly

Click counts are noisier than they look, and three effects dominate.

Bots inflate counts. Chat applications, email clients and security scanners fetch links to build previews or check for threats. Post a link in a group chat and it may register clicks before any human sees it. Zurl labels recognisable automated traffic as Bot in the device breakdown, but detection is based on how clients identify themselves and is never complete.

Clicks are not visits. A click means a redirect was served. The visitor may have closed the tab immediately. Only analytics on the destination page can tell you what happened next.

Referrer data is incomplete. Many clicks arrive with no referrer at all — from applications, native clients, or because of privacy settings. A large "Unknown" share is normal and does not indicate a problem.

Getting more precise attribution

Click counts tell you a link was opened. To know which campaign drove a conversion, you need the destination’s own analytics, which is what UTM parameters are for:

https://example.com/pricing?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=spring

These are read by the analytics tool on the destination site. Shortening a URL preserves the query string exactly, so the parameters survive the redirect and both layers work together: the short link counts clicks, the destination attributes what those visitors did. The UTM builder assembles the parameters correctly.

Comparing links properly

The most useful pattern is one distinct short link per channel. Create separate links for the newsletter, the social post and the printed flyer, all pointing at the same page. Each accumulates its own click count, so you can compare channels directly rather than trying to untangle a single number.

A custom ending per channel makes these easy to tell apart in your dashboard.