BL.INK offers a few different options to quickly see which content is currently trending through the analytics.
Viewing Individual Link Analytics
To see an individual link's click data, start by logging into BL.INK. Click on Links in the left navigation. From here, you will see a table view of your links.
Find your link from the table, and click on the row to open the Link Details drawer. In the drawer, you will see the total Engagement for that specific link. To view more detailed analytics, click on the Details button.
Here, you can see stats broken out into clicks, scans, and overall engagement.
NOTE:
A click is counted when a user clicks on the short link. A scan is when someone scans the QR code for your short link. Engagement is a combination of the clicks and scans. For more information, please check out our glossary of terms.
You can also view device, referrer, and location analytics as well as update the timeframe for the view.
Viewing Analytics Overview
To view overall analytics for a larger group of links, click on Analytics from the left navigation menu.
Here you will see the reporting on all your links combined within the domain. You can use Filters to change the time frame, attributes, tags, etc.
You can create more than one filter or add subfilters.
NOTE:
Due to account permissions, not all users have access to view data for other users' links. Check with the account administrator to request broader access if needed.
On the Analytics Overview you are also able to review Device, Location, and Referrers of your links. You can also view link tags and see how each tag may be performing.
At the bottom of the page, there is a calculation of your top links by engagement, clicks, and scans.
How long does BLINK preserve my click data?
Indefinitely. At BLINK, we do not remove click data unless we're asked to.
How are the analytics calculated?
Currently, BLINK counts a link preview as a click. For example, if you share a link in an SMS message, and the end-user taps the link to preview it, it is counted as a click for both Android and iOS devices.
There are some key differences with how these clicks are reported from the different operating systems.
Link previews or prefetch clicks from an iOS device are reported the same way that a regular click is. But for a link preview or prefetch click from an Android device, the data shared from the device is from an Google IP address.
BLINK uses the device's registered IP address to report general location analytics, which means that a preview click's location would be different than the end-user's location in the analytics.
These are some example IP addresses that are registered to Google:
- 64.233.172.132
- 66.102.7.108
- 66.102.7.96
- 66.102.7.97
- 66.102.9.68
- 66.102.9.69
- 66.102.9.70
- 66.249.83.40
- 66.249.83.41
- 66.249.83.42
- 66.249.93.68
- 66.249.93.69
- 66.249.93.70
- 74.125.212.228
- 74.125.212.229
- 74.125.212.230
- 74.125.213.41
- 74.125.213.42
- 74.125.213.43
NOTE:
This list is not exhaustive - there may be other example of google IP addresses that appear in your raw click data that are not included above.
You may also see this snippet in the user agenct string in your raw click data to help you identify Android preview clicks: Google-PageRenderer Google (+https://developers.google.com/+/web/snip
BLINK Analytics vs. Other Platforms
It is common for customers to compare the clicks received from various sites and social networks to the clicks reported in BL.INK.
Analytics numbers from Facebook and Twitter could be higher or lower than what is reported in BL.INK. For example, some promoted tweets have much higher click numbers than BL.INK and normal tweets have fewer numbers.
First, it is important to know how those clicks are being counted. Facebook counts a "click" as any type of engagement (clicks, hover, like, profile view, etc.) so a "click" between Facebook and BL.INK isn't really an apples-to-apples comparison.
Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other platforms do not share their algorithm for click counting, so, unfortunately, BL.INK cannot speak to another company’s data reporting, but BL.INK can share how clicks are counted in our Analytics.
BL.INK stats are unfiltered and BL.INK reports every click that a link receives - with 4 exceptions (see below). BL.INK does not limit clicks based on unique clicks (though BLINK analytics do break down unique and total clicks for each individual link), application clicks, etc. The raw details are reported at the bottom of the individual link page so users can see the hostnames of each click.
Click Exceptions
The following types of traffic are removed to provide a clearer picture of human-generated stats.
- Systems that self-identify as a "bot" (ex: googlebot)
- IPs added to your Block IP list will be removed from your stats
- Preview/pre-fetch clicks identified through HTTP headers
- Clicks originating from known and published data center IP blocks (ie, AWS)
All other click traffic will be visible to users through BL.INK click analytics.
Many customers use BL.INK as a baseline to measure effectiveness on "common ground" across the various sites.
Since Facebook and Twitter both use different methods for counting clicks, it is hard to get a sense of how they truly compare to one another.
When using BL.INK for both sites, while the numbers will vary somewhat from their numbers, users can measure Facebook versus Twitter clicks within BL.INK with greater equality.
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