Paste a link into a chat app and it gets requested before any person has seen it. The app fetches the page to draw a preview card. A security scanner may open it to check for malware. A browser may prefetch it because it guessed you would tap. None of those is a person choosing to visit, and counting them makes every campaign look better than it was.
Lnki's analytics are built around one rule: a click is a person. Everything else still redirects correctly, but it is counted somewhere else.
What is filtered out
- Bots and crawlers, including search engines, uptime monitors and security scanners.
- Link previews, the requests messaging and social apps make to build a preview card.
- Prefetches, when a browser loads a link speculatively before anyone taps it.
- HEAD requests, which ask for the headers of a page without loading it.
- Double taps, the second request when someone taps the same link twice in quick succession.
These are not thrown away. The Analytics overview has a Filtered out card next to Clicks and Unique visitors, showing how many hits were set aside in the period and what share of all traffic they were. If that share suddenly climbs, something automated has found your link.
Clicks and unique visitors
Clicks is the number of visits by people. Unique visitors is the number of different people behind them. To tell visitors apart without tracking anyone across the web, Lnki uses an anonymous visitor token that rotates every day. The practical consequence: one person who clicks on Monday and again on Tuesday is one visitor on each day, not a single visitor across the week.
How fresh the numbers are
A click shows up in Analytics within about a minute. The period picker at the top of the page compares the range you choose with the one before it, so every card shows both the number and the direction it is moving.
Reading the rest of the page
The Analytics page is split into five tabs. Overview is the summary. Traffic shows when clicks happen. Audience covers who is clicking, by device and location. Sources shows where they came from. Links ranks individual links so you can see which ones carry the result. The analytics tutorial walks through each tab.
For campaign-level questions, such as which channel worked, use Campaigns & UTM instead. It groups tagged links by campaign and channel; UTM parameters explained covers how to set that up.
