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How we count clicks

Plain-language methodology for Snipzr link analytics. See the Privacy Policy for the legal basis and the Link stats API for the data shape.

Clicks, not visitors​

We count clicks, not unique visitors. We deliberately do not compute unique-visitor numbers: doing it accurately needs either a cross-request identifier (which we refuse to create — no cookie, no fingerprint, no salted hash) or probabilistic math we consider not worth the privacy cost. So a number labelled "clicks" is clicks; in the dashboard it means human clicks unless stated otherwise.

Human vs bots​

Every request to a short link is either a human click or a bot / automated request. We separate them by signature and report both — bots are counted and shown separately, never silently dropped.

  • Human = all requests − bots. This is the headline number.
  • Bots include known crawler user-agents (~50 signatures), link-preview "unfurlers" (the fetch a chat/social app makes to render a preview), prefetch/prerender requests (Sec-Purpose / Purpose / X-Moz headers), HEAD requests, and requests with no user-agent.
  • This is a best-effort signal, not adversarial-grade. A script sending a normal browser user-agent can inflate counts — don't use these numbers for billing or fraud decisions.

The raw total (humans + bots) is available in the API and CSV export but kept out of the default dashboard view — an uptime monitor hitting a link shouldn't make "82 human clicks" look like "43,000".

Repeat clicks (debounce)​

Short-link redirects carry a short private-cache header (~90s), so a browser reloading the same link within about 90 seconds is typically served from its own cache and not re-counted. This debounces accidental double-clicks; it is not a per-visitor dedupe.

Time — everything is UTC​

Days and hours are UTC. A "day" is a UTC calendar day; the hourly view is a rolling last-24-hours histogram by UTC hour. The dashboard labels times as UTC so the chart, the "today" boundary and the live badge all agree regardless of your timezone.

Countries​

We show the country a click came from — country only, never city or precise location. The country is derived at our content-delivery provider's edge from the IP address; we never store the IP. When the country can't be determined it shows as Unknown.

Referrers — "Direct / unknown" and hosts only​

The referrer is where a click came from. We store the referring site's host only (e.g. reddit.com) — never the full page URL. Modern browsers already trim cross-site referrers to the origin, so host-only loses almost nothing.

  • Direct / unknown means no referrer was sent — typical for clicks from apps, email, chat, and QR scans.
  • Other is a fold: to stay bounded and resist referrer-spam, we track at most 48 distinct referring hosts per link per day; beyond that, and for very small entries, hosts fold into "Other". (CSV export keeps every host.)

Devices, browsers, operating systems, languages​

Broad families only — desktop / mobile / tablet; chrome / safari / firefox; windows / android / ios / macos / linux; and the primary browser language (en, de, …). Derived from the user-agent and Accept-Language. No exact models or versions.

We split human clicks by source: a direct short-link click vs a QR scan (Snipzr QR codes resolve through a distinct path). This is the one dimension you can verify yourself — scan your own QR and watch it increment.

All-time vs the tracked era​

Per-day tracking started on a specific date. The link's all-time counter predates that, so we show the split honestly — "X total since creation (incl. bots) — Y before per-day tracking began [date]" — and the big lifetime number never silently contradicts the detailed per-day view.

Retention​

Aggregate statistics are retained for up to 750 days (~25 months) for every plan. Your subscription tier changes only how far back you can view — not how long we keep the data. Asking for a longer window than your plan allows isn't an error; we show what your plan can read and tell you how many days are actually stored. Deleting a link or your account deletes its analytics.

Freshness​

Today's numbers are live — they merge already-consolidated data with the current day's in-flight counts. An hourly job consolidates previous hours into permanent storage; a same-day number may dip briefly while that job runs, then settle. If our analytics store is momentarily unreachable we show recent data labelled "recent data only" rather than a wrong zero.

What we deliberately don't do​

No cookies or device storage for analytics · no cross-site tracking · no visitor profiles · no unique identifiers · no city/precise location · no full referrer URLs · no per-click event log in the product · no selling or sharing of this data.