Snipvio separates real people from automated traffic on every link, on every plan.
Why this matters
When you paste a link into Slack, Discord, X, or WhatsApp, each of those platforms fetches it to build a preview card. Search engines crawl it. Uptime monitors ping it.
Every one of those is a "click" to a naive shortener. Share a link in a busy Slack workspace and you might see twenty clicks before a single human has looked at it. Then you optimise your campaign around numbers that were never real.
What Snipvio shows
Open any link's analytics for:
- Human clicks: real people, and the basis of every chart
- QR scans: visits that came from scanning your QR code rather than clicking a link
- Bot scans: crawlers, preview fetchers, and monitors, counted separately
- Last 7 days: recent momentum
- Created: when the link was made
Below that: a thirty-day trend chart, and breakdowns by country, referrer, and device. All of them count humans only.
Scans versus clicks
Snipvio's QR codes encode a marker that distinguishes a scan from a click. That means you can tell whether your conference poster or your tweet drove the traffic, even though both point at the same link.
What counts as a bot
Snipvio matches a long list of known agents: search crawlers like Googlebot and Bingbot, social preview fetchers from Meta, Slack, Discord, X, Telegram, and LinkedIn, AI crawlers, uptime monitors, and scripting tools like curl, wget, and Python's request libraries. Requests with no user agent at all are also treated as bots.
Reading the data honestly
- Referrers show where a click came from, but many apps strip that information. A large "Direct" share is normal, not an error.
- Countries come from network-level geography, which is approximate and can be masked by a VPN.
- Devices distinguish mobile from desktop by user agent.
The numbers are directional. They will not match your website's analytics exactly, and neither tool is wrong: they measure different moments.
How long click data is kept
Click data is kept for as long as the link exists. There is no automatic expiry or cleanup, so a link you created on day one still has its full history today.
Deleting a link deletes its clicks with it, and that cannot be undone. If you want the numbers, export or note them before deleting.
Frequently asked questions
Why are my Snipvio click numbers lower than other tools?
Because bots are excluded from the charts. Link previews, security scanners and crawlers all open your link, and a tool counting raw requests reports every one as a click. Snipvio separates automated traffic from human clicks, which usually produces a smaller and more accurate figure.
What counts as a bot?
Requests that identify themselves as automated, and requests whose behaviour matches known preview, scanning and crawling patterns. Filtered hits are still counted and shown separately, so you can see how much was excluded rather than having to trust an invisible filter.
How long is click data kept?
For as long as the link exists. There is no automatic expiry or cleanup, so a link created on your first day still carries its full history. Deleting a link deletes its click data with it, and that cannot be undone.
Are QR scans counted as clicks?
No, they are reported separately. A scan comes from a physical context and a click from an online one, so combining them would obscure which channel is actually working.