How this differs from analytics
A page analytics tool runs inside the visitor's browser. To recognise a returning visitor it has to store something on their device, which under PECR requires consent, which is why the banner exists.
A click statistic is recorded on the way through. Someone taps the link, the server notes the request and sends them on. Nothing is stored on their device and nothing follows them afterwards.
That is a smaller measurement, and it is worth being honest about what it cannot do. It cannot tell you what someone did after they arrived, and it cannot follow a person across visits. It can tell you how many people came, roughly from where, and what they came from.
What you actually get
- Clicks and scans, per link and in total, in real time.
- Country and city, worked out from the request itself and thrown away afterwards.
- Which handset and browser they used, which mostly tells you how far to trust a desktop preview.
- Referrer, which site or app the person came from before they tapped.
- Whatever campaign tags you attached, kept intact all the way to the destination.
For a business deciding whether a leaflet was worth printing or which social platform actually sends people, that list answers the question.
Where this sits with UK GDPR
Nothing here is legal advice, and your own obligations depend on what else you run. But the shape is simple enough to describe.
PECR governs storing or accessing information on someone's device, which is what cookie consent is about. Counting a request as it passes through your own server does not store anything on the device. UK GDPR still applies to any personal data involved, which is why the sensible approach is to keep the data coarse: country and city rather than precise location, and no profile built against an individual.
Digily Link publishes what it collects and how long it keeps it in the privacy notice and the data protection page, and you can export or delete your account data at any time.
Reading the numbers without fooling yourself
Two warnings, both learned the hard way by everyone who has ever looked at link statistics.
First, the first day is always wrong. You click your own link while testing, you send it to three colleagues, and the early numbers are mostly you. Wait for the noise to clear.
Second, a total tells you nothing on its own. One hundred clicks is good or terrible depending on where they came from and what you spent to get them. Compare links against each other rather than against a number in your head.
One link per place
One habit turns this from a curiosity into a tool: never let two places share a link.
Same destination, different addresses: one for the leaflet, one for the profile, one for the email signature, one for the van. The customer cannot tell the difference and you get a clean answer about which one worked.
A minute of setup per link, and the answer stops being a hunch about how the month felt.
What to do with what you learn
Most of the time the answer is uncomfortable and useful in equal measure: one channel is doing nearly all the work and the rest are close to zero.
That is not a reason to abandon the quiet ones immediately. It is a reason to look at whether they are being given a fair chance. A link nobody can see is not a channel that failed, it is a channel that was never tried.
Change one thing, wait, look again. The link makes the change cheap, which is what makes the loop worth running at all.