When a short link resolves, the redirect service sees one HTTP request. Everything on the analytics page comes from that request and nothing else. Knowing what is in it makes the numbers easier to trust, and stops you reading things into them that are not there.
What arrives with every request
The IP address. Resolved to a country and, where the database is confident, a region. We keep the country and drop the address itself before the click is stored, which is what lets us say the click data is not personal data.
The user agent. From it we derive device class (mobile, desktop, tablet), operating system and browser family. Version numbers are kept at the major level only.
The referrer. The page the click came from, when the browser sends one. Direct opens, most mail clients and many apps send nothing, which is why "direct" is usually the largest slice.
The link itself. Its slug, its workspace, any UTM parameters attached to the destination, and the campaign tag you gave it. These are the fields that make a click useful rather than merely counted.
The time. Stored in UTC, shown in your workspace's timezone.
That is the whole list. There is no fingerprinting, no cookie, no pixel, unless you have explicitly enabled retargeting pixels on a link, in which case the visitor is asked first.
What a click does not tell you
Who clicked. A click is anonymous by design. If you need identity, put it in the link: a per-recipient slug, or a UTM value your mail tool fills in.
Whether they were a person. Link scanners in mail security tools, link previews in chat apps, and crawlers all follow links. We filter the ones we can identify and mark the rest as suspected bots, but nothing catches everything. A spike of clicks within seconds of a send, all from one cloud provider, is almost always scanners.
What happened next. The redirect ends at the destination. Whether they bought, signed up or bounced is your site's data. Export the click rows and join on the campaign tag if you want to close that loop.
Reading the dashboard honestly
A few habits that keep the numbers useful:
- Compare like with like. Weekday against weekday, send against send. A Tuesday newsletter will always beat a Saturday one.
- Look at unique visitors alongside clicks. A hundred clicks from three people is a different story from a hundred people clicking once.
- Treat "direct" as "unknown", not "typed it in". It mostly means the referrer was stripped.
- Watch the bot share. If it climbs after you switch mail providers, the new one is probably scanning links on delivery.
Retention and export
The free plan keeps thirty days of click rows, Pro keeps ninety, Business keeps a year. Aggregates on the dashboard are kept for as long as the link exists. Any range inside the retention window can be exported as CSV or JSON from the dashboard or the API, and the export is the same rows we store, nothing summarised away.