How clicks are counted

What LinkiFunnels counts as a click, what it filters, which post gets the credit, and why your numbers differ from LinkedIn's.

4 minute read

What happens when someone clicks

Every tracked link is a redirect. When a reader clicks go.yourco.com/x7Kq2a, the request reaches LinkiFunnels, which records the visit, mints a click id, and sends the reader on to your destination with a 302 redirect. The click id travels along as ?lf_cid=... on the destination URL and as a first-party cookie, which is how a later form submission or booking is tied back to this click.

A click is classified once, from the request alone, before anything is counted.

Before the click is counted it is classified as one of four traffic types. Classification looks only at the request itself: the user agent, the parsed device, and who owns the IP address. There is no scoring, no thresholds, and no history. A click is human unless something concrete says otherwise.

Traffic types

Traffic type	What it is	Counted
`human`	A visit with no positive evidence of automation. The default	Yes
`preview`	LinkedIn fetching your link to render the preview card in the feed	No
`bot`	A known crawler that identifies itself, for example search engines and social scrapers	No
`scanner`	A non-browser client such as a script, or a direct visit from a datacenter address. Email security tools that open links before you do land here	No

The rules run in that order and the first match wins. A request with no user agent at all stays human.

Every click is a click

LinkiFunnels does not deduplicate visitors. Someone who clicks your link twice is two clicks. There is no unique clicks metric; the number you see is human visits.

Which post gets the credit

A click is credited to the post the link was attached to at the moment of the click. Detaching a link from a post and pasting it into another moves future clicks to the new post. Historical clicks stay where they were.

Why LinkedIn shows a different number

LinkedIn counts a click on the post itself, including “see more”, the image, and your profile. LinkiFunnels counts only the link.
LinkedIn’s own preview fetch shows up as a click in many third party tools. LinkiFunnels filters it.
Readers who copy the link and open it later are counted by LinkiFunnels but not by LinkedIn.

For the same reasons, LinkiFunnels’ count is usually lower than a plain URL shortener and higher than LinkedIn’s link click figure. It is the number you can attribute leads to.