I sent the same link to three Slack channels last Tuesday and realized I had zero way of knowing which one drove the 47 signups I saw that morning. I was using a basic curl command to shorten my links, but that didn't give me any insight into how they were performing — I just knew I had 27 clicks in total, but no idea which device or browser they were coming from. This was a problem, because I had 14 different links floating around, and I had no way to track which ones were actually working.
Why curl wasn't enough
I was using a simple bash script to shorten my links, which looked something like this: curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" https://linkcut.link/api -d "url=https://example.com". This worked fine for shortening links, but it didn't give me any information about how those links were being used. I could see the number of clicks in my terminal, but that was about it. Honestly, I was surprised by how little information I had — I assumed that shortening a link would at least give me some basic analytics, but it turned out that wasn't the case. Look, I know I'm not the only one who's run into this problem — I've talked to plenty of other developers who have had the same issue.
The spreadsheet that saved my sanity
I decided to try using a URL shortener that actually provided some analytics, so I started looking at LinkCut — I was looking at the device breakdown in LinkCut and noticed that most of my clicks were coming from mobile devices, which was surprising to me because I had assumed that most of my traffic would be coming from desktops. I set up a custom slug for my link, which made it easier to track, and I even generated a QR code for it, which I could use in presentations or on social media. The thing is, I'm not really sure how I would have done this without LinkCut — I mean, I could have tried to build my own analytics system, but that would have been a huge pain. As an aside, I was also experimenting with setting link expiry dates, which turned out to be really useful for tracking the effectiveness of my links over time.
When this approach falls apart
There are definitely some caveats to using a URL shortener like LinkCut — for example, if you're dealing with a huge volume of traffic, you might start to run into issues with link expiry dates or custom slugs. I'm not sure this is the best approach for everyone, but it worked for me because I was only dealing with a small number of links. The other thing to consider is that LinkCut is free, but it does have some limitations — for example, you can only create 5 links per month on the free plan, which might not be enough for some users. I still don't fully understand why some of my links were getting more traffic than others, but I'm guessing it has something to do with the fact that I was sharing them on different social media platforms.
One short thought that's been on my mind lately is that link rot is a much bigger problem than I initially thought — it's not just about broken links, but also about understanding how our links are being used. Has anyone else hit this exact wall, where they realized they had no idea how their links were performing?
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