What is worth measuring on a link-in-bio page
Four numbers carry almost all of the useful information on a link-in-bio page: how many people saw it, how many pressed something, the ratio between those two, and which link they pressed. The ratio is the one to watch — views move with whatever you posted that week, but the click-through rate tells you whether the page itself is doing its job, and it is the number that responds when you change the page rather than the marketing around it.
Views and clicks, and why the ratio is the honest one
Page views go up when a post does well and down when you post less. They measure your marketing, not your page. Watching them tells you what you already knew from the platform you posted on.
Click-through rate — clicks divided by views — is what the page controls. If it falls after you added four links, the page got harder to use. If it rises after you promoted one link to the top, the order was wrong before. It is the only number on the screen that responds to editing the page.
One caution: a page with almost no traffic has no meaningful rate. Two clicks out of three visits is not a 67% click-through rate, it is three visits. Treat a rate over a very small number of views as noise, and any tool that renders it as a confident percentage as slightly dishonest.
Which link they pressed
This is the number to act on. The most-clicked link tells you what people came for, and it is very often not the link you put first.
The useful move is boring and works: put the thing people press at the top, and remove or group the ones nobody presses. A link-in-bio page has a small budget of attention and every extra row spends some of it.
Referrers, and how much to trust them
A referrer is where the visitor came from, and it is partial by construction rather than by anybody’s failure. Apps that open links in their own browser often send nothing; some send only the domain; people who paste an address into a browser send nothing at all. A large share of traffic legitimately reads as “direct”.
So use referrers to find out that a channel exists — “people are arriving from a newsletter I forgot about” — and not to divide a budget between channels. Any tool that presents referrer data as complete attribution is overselling what the web reports.
Bots, and what a page cannot tell you
Every public address gets automated traffic: preview fetchers when a link is pasted into a chat app, security scanners, and crawlers. Some of it looks exactly like a visit. A tool that counts all of it will tell you your page did well on a day nothing happened.
What a link-in-bio page cannot measure, whatever it claims: whether the click became a purchase — that happens on the destination site, and only its own analytics can see it; the same person across two devices, which would require identifying them; and anything at all after the visitor leaves. Attribution ends at the click.
How Linksembly measures it
Views, clicks, click-through rate and per-link clicks for each brand separately, with referrers, countries, devices and browsers as breakdowns, over any window your plan retains.
Click-through rate is shown as an em dash rather than 0% when there is no traffic, because a brand nobody has visited has no rate and printing one would be a number somebody acts on.
Obvious automated traffic is flagged and excluded. Visitors are counted with an identifier that is a one-way hash of a rotating salt, the date, the address and the browser string — so it changes every day and cannot be reversed, the raw IP is never stored, and location is the country and nothing finer. That is a deliberate trade: it means “unique visitors” is unique-per-day rather than unique-forever, which is less flattering and more truthful.
Questions
- Why is my click-through rate over 100%?
- It is not, unless something is wrong. One visit can produce several clicks, so a rate above 100% is arithmetically possible on a very small number of visits — and on a large number it means views are being under-counted, usually by a cache serving the page without recording it.
- Why does so much traffic show as “direct”?
- Because the browser genuinely sent no referrer. In-app browsers, pasted addresses and privacy settings all produce it. It is the normal largest bucket on a link-in-bio page, not a gap in the measurement.
- How long is analytics history kept?
- It depends on the plan, and the range picker only offers windows the plan retains — asking for a longer one returns the plan’s window rather than silently showing less than you asked for.
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