Home / Features / Tracked links
One tracked link per placement
The code goes in the URL, because that is what survives the in-app browsers most of your traffic arrives from.
The mechanism
You create a link with a label and get a code: yourpage?r=yt-pin.
Share that instead of the bare link. The code is recorded against the visit, and against any email
address or payment that follows.
One tracked link per placement, not one per platform. One for the YouTube description, one for the pinned comment, one for the end screen. You already know YouTube works. This tells you which part of YouTube did.
Why not a cookie
Cookies and local storage are sandboxed inside the Instagram and TikTok in-app browsers, and referrers are stripped. A tool that relies on either loses most of your real traffic and credits your best post to nothing.
Nothing is stored on your supporter's device to make this work.
Traffic with no code on it
Without a ?r= code, we take the platform from the origin in the
Referer header, and where that has been stripped, from the in-app browser's own
User-Agent: Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Threads and LinkedIn each name themselves there.
That is a best effort, and the most it gives you is a platform. Instagram and TikTok in-app browsers send no referrer at all, which is why the code exists: it is the only signal we can rely on, and the only one that names the placement.
The platform is stored on the link
The platform is worked out from the destination host when you create the link, and not recalculated when you open a report, so last quarter's numbers still match the screenshot you took of them.
A host we do not recognise is kept, not dropped. A newsletter, a podcast page, somebody else's blog: that is still real attribution.
What counts as a visit
Not crawlers, and not the link-preview bots that fetch your link whenever it is pasted into a chat. Real visits are marked in-app, mobile or desktop, which is how you find out that four fifths of your audience is inside a webview.