Click tracking when you're not a "data-driven marketer"

Enterprise shorteners want to sell you cohorts and workspace seats and integrations with tools I'll never open. Great if you're spending real ad money. Overkill if you printed 200 flyers for a church bake sale and want to know if the QR on the poster did anything besides look professional.

Ten clicks can still answer a question. I'm serious.

Nothing for three days then a burst usually means someone forwarded the link or a post picked it up — we saw that when a volunteer shared the bake sale link in a neighborhood WhatsApp group and clicks jumped from zero to eleven in an afternoon. All mobile might mean phone-native traffic or a landing page that breaks on desktop. Clicks from a country you don't ship to might be bots or bad targeting. Good to know before you spend more on Facebook.

You won't get statistical significance from ten visits. You will know if the link is completely dead, which is the usual failure mode for small campaigns. Dead link, fix the poster next year. Some clicks, okay, something worked.

If you share one URL on Telegram, email, and a poster, one number tells you nothing about which channel worked. Make three links to the same page with different slugs. workshop-tg, workshop-mail, workshop-poster. Split counts. No UTMs required if you'll glance at the dashboard once on Sunday night like I do.

Repeat clicks aren't always bots. Someone showing a friend counts. I clicked my own bakery menu link four times in one day testing on different phones. Sorry to whoever's analytics that polluted.

If clicks exist but nobody buys tickets, the link works and the page doesn't. Tracking won't fix a checkout button below the fold on Safari. Ask me how I know.

Short links are the cheap experiment. Asking one person "how'd you hear about us?" still wins at small scale. Do both if you have time. I usually only have time for one.