Comparing Link Tools
How Ours Privacy short links differ from a standalone link shortener and what the first-party event model changes about measurement and compliance.
Why short links are part of this platform rather than something you buy separately, and what that changes about the data.
The structural difference: where the click lands
A standalone link shortener creates a link, counts the clicks, and shows you the count in its own dashboard. The click is a metric inside that product. To do anything else with it, you export a CSV, or you pay for an API tier and build a pipeline to pull the data somewhere it can be joined to the rest of your marketing data.
An Ours Privacy short link creates the link, and the click becomes an event in your own account, named after the link, on the visitor's own timeline, alongside every other event you collect.
Everything else on this page follows from that one difference.
What you can do with a click that is an event
- Join it to behavior. A scan and the page view thirty seconds later and the form submission four days after that are the same visitor. That is a funnel, not three disconnected counts.
- Segment on it. Build an audience of everyone who scanned the lobby code and never booked, then suppress or retarget them.
- Attribute with it. A QR scan can be the first touch in a conversion journey, which is how print and out-of-home get credit at all.
- Route it. Map the click to a CRM, an ad platform, or your warehouse through the same destinations you already configured.
- Govern it. The click obeys your allow list, your governance rules, your retention policy, and your consent configuration, because it is not an exception to any of them.
None of those require an export, a scheduled job, or a second identity graph.
Compliance and vendor posture
For regulated marketing teams, the practical differences tend to be procurement questions rather than feature questions.
- No additional vendor. Short links are covered by the agreement you already have. There is no separate contract, security review, DPA, or renewal.
- The redirect happens under your domain. With a branded domain, the hop a visitor makes is on infrastructure pointed at a host you control, not a shared shortener domain.
- Consent works the same way. Clicks from visitors who opted out are not sent to your destinations, with no short-link-specific setup.
- Access control and audit logging are shared. Click reporting reads are audited like other regulated queries.
- Retention is yours. Click history lives under your account's retention policy rather than a vendor tier where history disappears when you downgrade.
Compliance requirements vary by organization, and none of the above is a substitute for your own assessment. It is a description of how the product behaves.
Where the feature is strong
- Dynamic QR codes with a real design surface: themes, module and corner shapes, gradients, a centered logo, frame shapes, transparency, and a contrast check, exported at print resolution as PNG or SVG. See QR codes.
- Repointing printed material. The code encodes the short link, so a poster printed in March can be sent somewhere new in June.
- Approximate location and device breakdowns on every link, with bots excluded by default.
- A full API and MCP tools, so per-location or per-provider codes can be generated in bulk. See Automating short links.
- Branded domains reusing your existing setup, with no separate domain to buy or configure.
Plan a campaign around short links
| You want to | Do this |
|---|---|
| Report scans and clicks separately | Give the printed code and the digital placement their own links. See Reporting. |
| Know which placement drove a click | Use one link per placement, and each link's clicks are that placement's traffic. |
| Retire a link when a campaign ends | Disable the link to take it out of service. |
| Create links in bulk | Generate them through the API or MCP tools. |
| Split traffic across destinations | Use Experimentation, which assigns visitors and reports on the test. |
| Read a whole campaign at once | Give the links the same Campaign value, then include their click events in an Insights report filtered by that campaign. The Analytics tab reports one link at a time. |
| Organize a large set of links | Use a consistent name prefix and a shared campaign value, and search the list by either. |
| Share a PDF or a contact card | Host it and point the link at it. Every code opens a short link, so it leads anywhere with a URL. |
One habit covers most of these: use one link per placement. It gives you the scan-versus-click split, the placement behind every click, and a list you can search by name.
Each short link forwards everyone to one web URL.
Things that behave differently than you might expect
- A link has to be published before it resolves. Short links follow the same versioning model as the rest of your configuration. Saving is not enough.
- The link name is the event name. After a rename, the link's Analytics tab keeps its history; an event-name report needs both names to cover clicks before and after.
- A link with no destination, or one never published, forwards to the Ours Privacy website. It does not show an error page, so a wrong landing is the signal that a link is unfinished.
Next Steps
- Short link concepts: the model behind all of the above.
- Creating a short link: build one.
- Recipes: worked configurations for the cases this page describes.
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