How to see how many people clicked your link (without a paid shortener)

October 10, 2026 · 4 min read

You shared a link in a post, a bio, a group chat or an email and want to know if anyone clicked it. If the link points to your own site, your analytics can usually answer. If it points somewhere else, or you need a count for this one link rather than a page, you need the link itself to count.

Three ways to count clicks

Your own analytics with UTM tags. If the link goes to your site, add utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign. Visits from that link then appear as their own source, along with what those visitors did next. This is the best option when you care about signups, not just clicks.
A short link with stats. The short link records each click and forwards the visitor. It works for any destination, including pages you don't own, like a YouTube video or a GitHub repo.
The platform's own numbers. Newsletter tools and some social sites show link clicks. Useful, but each counts differently, and you can't compare them side by side.

Why click counts are often too high

When you paste a link into Slack, X, WhatsApp or iMessage, the app fetches it to build the preview card. Many simple counters log that as a click. So do search engine crawlers and security scanners in email systems, which open every link in a message before a person sees it. A counter that doesn't filter these can show dozens of "clicks" before anyone has actually clicked. Look for one that excludes bots and previews, and be suspicious of a burst of clicks in the first minute after you send something.

A free short link with click stats

The link shortener on this site makes a short link with a private stats page: clicks per day for the last 30 days and the countries they came from, with bots and link previews left out. It also gives you a QR code for the same link. There's no ad page in between, and every destination is checked against malware and phishing lists.

Links made without an account work for 30 days, which suits a single post or campaign. Bookmark the stats page when you make one, because its address is the way back to your numbers.

Get both numbers

A short link tells you how many people clicked; UTM tags tell your analytics where the visit came from and what happened after. They combine well: tag the long link first with the UTM link builder, then shorten the tagged link. The short link counts clicks, and your analytics credits the visits to the right post.

Make each link answer one question

One link per place you share it. A single link pasted into your bio, a newsletter and three posts gives you one number you can't split. Five links give you a ranking. If you track campaigns in measuremy.site, each tracked link is credited to its campaign automatically, and you can ask your coding agent which post brought the most visitors and signups.

See it on your own site

measuremy.site is cookieless analytics your coding agent can read. 30-day free trial, no card. Plans from $9/month.

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Add measuremy.site analytics to this project: connect the measuremy.site MCP server at https://a.measuremy.site/mcp (it signs in with OAuth, no key), then tell me how to sign in. Details: measuremy.site/llms.txt

Free tools

Free UTM link builder: Add utm_source, medium and campaign to any link.
UTM link checker: Find broken UTM tags and see which GA4 channel a link lands in.
Link shortener with click tracking: Short links with a click count by day and country.

All free tools