Views and clicks describe activity. Completed purchases, bookings, and subscriptions need to be checked where those actions happen.
Analytics can help you decide which links deserve attention, but only if you understand what is being counted. Links2 reports anonymous events. Its page views and clicks are not counts of unique people, and its link click share is not a customer conversion rate. Start with those distinctions before drawing conclusions from a chart.
Separate views, clicks, and outcomes
A page-view event records a visit being measured; the same person may generate more than one. A link-click event records activity on a destination; a visitor may click several links or click the same link repeatedly. Automated traffic, blocked requests, and failed network calls can also complicate interpretation.
An outcome is the action you actually care about: a submitted inquiry, completed purchase, confirmed subscription, or another business event. You usually need the destination’s records to establish that outcome. Do not label every click as a lead.
- Views: measured activity on the page.
- Clicks: measured activity on links and social icons.
- Click share: a link’s clicks divided by all counted clicks in the range.
- Business outcomes: completed actions confirmed by the destination system.
Use campaign links at the destination when appropriate
If you control a destination that uses Google Analytics, campaign parameters can help identify traffic arriving through a particular link. Google recommends using utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign together. Pick a consistent naming convention, and do not put email addresses or other personal information in those values.
For example, a link to your own site might use the URL below. Replace the example domain and names with your own. This supports reporting at the destination; it does not add campaign reports to Links2 or automatically measure a purchase.
Illustrative destination URL
- https://example.com/work?utm_source=links2&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=portfolio
Compare periods with context
Links2 uses inclusive UTC date ranges. Use the same range when comparing views, clicks, and link rankings, and remember that another service may report dates in a different timezone. Free includes 30 days of analytics history, so review the results while the relevant period remains available.
Record changes in traffic as well as page edits. A launch, a popular post, a holiday, or a new audience can alter behaviour independently of your button labels. A before-and-after comparison is useful for forming a hypothesis, but it is not a controlled experiment.
Turn the numbers into one next action
Start each review with your page’s main goal. Inspect the link that supports it, open the destination, and compare the promise with what a visitor sees. If a secondary link gets most of the clicks, consider whether the audience is showing a different intent than you expected.
Choose one meaningful change, note the date, and review again after enough activity to be useful. Sometimes the right change is to improve the destination or the offer rather than reorder the page. Keep a short record of what you changed and what remains uncertain.