How to track link clicks on your website
Raw hrefs hide the story. A tracked short link shows the source page, device and time so you know what actually works.
If a button on your site just points to a long vendor URL, you only see the destination analytics. You do not see which page sent the click, which campaign copy won, or whether the QR on a poster is dead. Tracking website link clicks starts with a stable short URL that you own and a log that stays after the visitor leaves.
What you should record on every click
A useful click log is small. Keep the time, the short code, the referrer page, country, device class and whether the hop finished. That is enough to answer “did this banner work” without storing personal profiles. Link writes that trail when someone opens a short URL, then sends them to the real destination.
- Referrer: the page or app that held the link
- Campaign folder: ads, email, partner, QR
- Unique vs repeat opens on the same code
- Failed hops if the destination is down
Put a short link on the site, keep the SEO page
Do not replace your own article URLs with a shortener. Keep canonical pages for search. Use a tracked link only on outbound buttons, partner offers, download buttons and campaign CTAs. The public page stays indexable. The hop is for measurement.
On a landing, one short code per CTA is cleaner than one code for the whole site. Home, pricing and a blog post are different intents. Separate codes make the report readable next week, not only on launch day.
How Link shows this without extra scripts
You create the short link in the cabinet, drop the URL on the site or in a QR, and open the link card after traffic starts. No pixel on the destination is required for the hop count. If you already use UTM on the destination, keep them. The short link is the stable public face. The destination can still carry utm_source and utm_campaign.
Folders keep site links apart from email and ads. When a designer asks “what is the URL for the header button”, you copy one code instead of hunting a 180-character query string.
A simple weekly check
Once a week, open the codes that sit on the live site. If a header CTA is flat and an article CTA is moving, the page copy is the problem, not the product. If every code is flat, the destination or the offer is the problem. The log tells you where to look first.