Every link in Lnki carries two numbers. My Links shows them as Clicks and Unique Clicks, and the Analytics overview shows Clicks and Unique visitors for the whole workspace. They are usually close and rarely equal, and putting the wrong one in a report leads to the wrong conclusion.
What each number counts
Clicks is the number of visits by people. If one person opens your link three times in a week, that is three clicks. Bots, link previews, prefetches and a second tap within ten seconds of the first are filtered out before anything is counted.
Unique visitors is the number of different people behind those clicks. Lnki tells visitors apart with an anonymous token based on the IP address and the browser, and the token rotates every day. Nobody is followed from one day to the next.
Unique is an estimate
Because the token changes daily and is not tied to a person, the figure has three known limits. The hint on the Unique visitors card states them, and they are worth knowing before you quote the number.
- It is counted per day and then added up. Someone who clicks on Monday and again on Tuesday is one visitor on each day, and two in the weekly total.
- Shared networks merge people. Two colleagues on the same office connection with the same browser can look like one visitor.
- Changing network splits one person. A phone that moves from Wi-Fi to mobile data looks like a new visitor.
The practical reading: unique visitors over a period is closer to ‘daily visitors, added up’ than to ‘individual people’. For a one-day send the two are nearly the same thing. Over 90 days they are not.
Which number to report
- Reach of a single send: unique visitors. You want to know how many people a newsletter or a post brought, and repeat visits by the same person on the same day should not flatter it.
- Load and activity: clicks. Traffic to a landing page, scans of a menu, use of a link in a help article. Each visit is real work for the destination, whoever made it.
- Trend over time: either, as long as it is the same one every time. The period picker compares each number with the previous period, and that comparison is only fair if you do not switch between them.
- Comparing with another tool: clicks, and expect a difference. How Lnki counts a click explains why a landing page's numbers will not match exactly.
The ratio is a signal too
Divide clicks by unique visitors and you get a rough figure for visits per visitor per day. Close to one means people click once and are done, which is normal for a campaign link. A clearly higher figure means people come back through the link on the same day: a QR code on a menu, a link to a dashboard, a link in a pinned message. That is a link working as a bookmark, and a reason to keep its destination stable.
Where each number appears
- My Links lists Clicks and Unique Clicks for every link.
- QR Codes shows total and unique scans for each code.
- Analytics shows both for the period you pick, and its Links tab lists each link's clicks with the unique count underneath.
- The API returns
click_countandunique_click_counton every link.
The analytics tutorial shows where the cards are.
