A click arrives with very little attached to it. Sometimes the browser says which page the visitor was on. Often it says nothing. The Where clicks come from card on the Analytics overview, and the Sources tab behind it, turn that thin evidence into six groups. Knowing how each group is filled tells you how far to trust it.
How a click gets its source
Lnki looks at two things, in this order:
- The referrer. When a browser follows a link from a web page, it can pass along the address of that page. If the referrer is a known social network, search engine, chat service or webmail site, the click goes in that group.
- The in-app browser. Apps such as Instagram and WhatsApp open links in a browser of their own and often send no referrer. When there is none, Lnki files the click by the kind of app that opened it.
A click with neither ends up in Direct / Unknown.
The six groups
- Social: social networks, whether the click came from their website or their app.
- Messaging: chat apps. Chats rarely send a referrer, so a click usually lands here because the chat app's own browser was recognised.
- Email: webmail read in a browser, and a mail app whose in-app browser is recognised.
- Search: search engines.
- Other websites: sites that are not a social network, search engine, chat or mail service. A blog that linked to you lands here.
- Direct / Unknown: everything that arrived with no referrer and no app to identify it.
Why Direct is large
Direct does not mean someone typed your link. It means nothing identified the source. That covers typed and pasted links, and also text messages, PDFs, QR codes scanned with the phone camera, native mail apps, and browsers or sites that strip the referrer.
The Sources tab has a card for this, No referrer, explained. It shows what share of clicks arrived with no referrer and how many of those the in-app browsers put back: Recovered from the app against Still unknown, with the apps listed underneath.
Shrinking the unknown
You cannot make a mail app send a referrer. You can stop depending on one. Give each place you share a link its own short link, and the link itself says where the click came from.
- For a campaign, Campaigns & UTM does this in one pass: one tagged short link per channel, reported by channel. UTM parameters explained covers the setup.
- For print, make a separate link and QR code for each placement, so scans from the poster and from the flyer do not merge into one Direct figure.
- For email, give the newsletter its own link instead of reusing the one from your social posts.
Reading the rest of the tab
Kinds of source is the same split as on the overview, with a note beside the groups that need explaining. Referring sites lists the sites that did send a referrer, most clicks first, each with its change on the previous period. It is where you notice that a forum thread or a partner's page has started sending people.
On the overview, the line that names the source bringing the most clicks leaves Direct out, since Direct is the absence of a source.
The analytics tutorial walks through the Overview, and how Lnki counts a click covers what is filtered out before a click is given a source at all.
