Link Analytics
Every link you create while signed in gets its own analytics view. Enough detail to understand performance, deliberately not enough to identify individual people.
Total clicks
1,284
Last 30 days
Top countries
- India
- 486
- United States
- 372
- United Kingdom
- 168
- Germany
- 134
- Canada
- 124
Devices
- Mobile
- 742
- Desktop
- 486
- Tablet
- 56
What you can see
Clicks over time
A daily series showing exactly when traffic arrived, so you can see what worked.
Geographic breakdown
Country-level data derived from network routing, not from precise location.
Referring hosts
Which sites sent visitors. Host only — never the full referring URL, which can contain private paths.
Device, browser and OS
Broad categories, derived and then discarded rather than stored in raw form.
No visitor cookies
The redirect sets nothing on the visitor and loads no tracking script.
Fast redirects regardless
Analytics is written after the redirect is sent, so recording never delays the visitor.
What is recorded, precisely
For each click, Zurl stores a row containing:
- the link it belongs to, and a timestamp
- a two-letter country code, and region or city when the network provides one
- the referring host, such as
example.com - three labels derived from the user-agent: device type, browser family and operating system
That is the complete list. Specifically not stored:
- IP addresses. Used transiently to derive the country, then discarded.
- Raw user-agent strings. Detailed enough to fingerprint a device, so they are reduced to three labels and dropped.
- Full referring URLs. These can contain search terms and private paths. Only the host is kept.
- Any visitor identifier. There is no cookie, no fingerprint and no way to link two clicks to the same person.
Why the limits are the point
A shortener sits between a person and the page they wanted. That position makes comprehensive surveillance technically easy, which is exactly why it is worth constraining deliberately.
The practical consequence is that Zurl can answer "400 clicks, mostly from India, mostly mobile, mostly from Twitter" and cannot answer "who clicked this?". That is enough for the decisions people actually make with link data.
Reading the data honestly
Clicks are not visits. A click means a redirect was served. The person may have closed the tab immediately. Only the destination’s own analytics can tell you what happened next.
Bots inflate early numbers. Post a link in a group chat and previews are generated within seconds. Treat the first minutes of data with scepticism.
Country data reflects network routing. VPNs, corporate networks and mobile carriers all shift the apparent location. It is directionally useful, not exact.
Combining with destination analytics
Link analytics tells you a link was opened. To know what visitors did afterwards, you need analytics on the destination, with UTM parameters to attribute the source. Zurl preserves query strings exactly, so both layers work together: Zurl counts the clicks, your analytics measures the outcomes.
Full details of data handling and retention are on the privacy page.
Frequently asked questions
- What does link analytics show?
- Total clicks, a daily time series, top countries, referring hosts, and a breakdown by device type, browser and operating system, plus the most recent click events. Enough to understand how a link is performing.
- Does Zurl store visitor IP addresses?
- No. The IP address is used momentarily to derive a coarse country and is then discarded. It is never written to the database, which means Zurl cannot reconstruct who visited a link even if asked.
- Are cookies set on people who click my links?
- No. The redirect sets no cookies and includes no tracking script. Zurl only sets a cookie for its own signed-in users, to maintain their session.
- Can I see individual visitors?
- No, and this is a deliberate design limit rather than a missing feature. Zurl records aggregate patterns, not identities. There is no visitor profile, no cross-link tracking and no way to follow one person between links.
- Why do my click counts look higher than expected?
- Automated traffic. Messaging apps, email clients and security scanners fetch links to build previews or check for threats, which registers clicks before any human sees the link. Zurl labels recognisable bots in the device breakdown, but detection depends on how clients identify themselves and is never complete.
- Why is so much referrer data "Unknown"?
- Many clicks legitimately arrive with no referrer — from native apps, email clients, or because of browser privacy settings. A large unknown share is normal and does not indicate a problem.
- How long is analytics data kept?
- Individual click events are retained for 12 months, after which they are removed. The total click count on a link is a running counter and is kept for as long as the link exists.
- Can I export the data?
- Per-link analytics are available through the API for accounts with an API key. A direct CSV export from the dashboard is not implemented yet.