Comparing Link Tools
How Ours Privacy short links differ from a standalone link shortener, what the first-party event model changes about measurement and compliance, and an honest list of capabilities not supported yet.
Why short links are part of this platform rather than something you buy separately, what that changes about the data, and where the feature is genuinely behind a dedicated link tool today.
This page is written for someone deciding whether to run campaign links here or somewhere else. If you already know the answer, the rest of the section is more useful.
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, in the same pipeline as 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 is applied by the same machinery. Whether a click is forwarded to a destination is decided by the visitor's consent choices, without short-link-specific configuration.
- Access control and audit logging are shared. Reporting sits behind its own permission because click analytics can carry protected health information, and 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.
What short links do not do yet
An honest list. If one of these is a hard requirement for your campaign, plan around it.
| Not supported | Detail |
|---|---|
| Custom slug | The short code is generated. There is no readable back-half such as /spring-sale. A branded domain is the way to make a link look like yours today. |
| Scan versus click split | A QR scan is recorded as a click. Use one link per placement when the split matters. See Reporting. |
| Link expiration | Links do not expire on a schedule. Disable a link manually to take it out of service. |
| Bulk import in the dashboard | No CSV upload. Bulk creation goes through the API. |
| Password-protected links | Not offered. |
| Deep links into mobile apps | Not offered. Short links resolve to web URLs. |
| Geographic or device-based routing | One link forwards to one destination for everyone. |
| A/B rotation across destinations | Use Experimentation, which is built for split testing and reports on it properly. |
| Link-in-bio landing pages | Not offered. |
| Non-URL QR codes | vCard, WiFi, plain text, and PDF codes are not offered. |
| Campaign roll-up in the dashboard | The Analytics tab reports one link at a time. Roll a campaign up in Web Analytics or through the API. |
| Referrer on the click | Not captured on the redirect path. Use one link per placement. |
| Tags and folders | Organization is by name and campaign value, with search on the list page. |
Two of these have a workaround worth stating plainly rather than burying: use one link per placement. It solves the scan-versus-click split, the missing referrer, and most of what tags and folders would give you, at the cost of a few more rows in the list.
Things that behave differently than you might expect
Not gaps, but behavior that differs from the convention in dedicated link tools.
- Campaign tags are not appended to your destination URL. They are captured as first-party properties on the click. If your landing page analytics needs to see them, put them on the destination URL yourself. See Campaigns and UTM tags.
- 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. Renaming a link splits its reporting history across two event names.
- 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.
How is this guide?