Question 1

What privacy boundaries does 1URL.at analytics use?

Accepted Answer

The analytics pipeline sets no analytics cookies, does not retain raw IP addresses or user-agent strings, and collects no cross-site or advertising identifiers. A daily salted hash supports within-day counting. Consent requirements depend on the site, other technologies, and jurisdiction.

Question 2

How do you count visitors without cookies?

Accepted Answer

Each UTC day a fresh 32-byte cryptographic salt is generated and stored for roughly 24 hours. When someone clicks a short link or loads a link page, the salt is combined with their IP and user agent and run through SHA-256. Only that hex digest is kept — never the IP or the user agent. Because the salt rotates at midnight UTC, the same person becomes a new anonymous identifier the next day, which makes long-term or cross-site re-identification computationally infeasible.

Question 3

What data is actually stored for each click?

Accepted Answer

For each click or page view we persist only: the owning user, the entity type and ID (short link, link page, or link item), the UTC day, and the two-letter country code from Cloudflare. Device class is captured but not yet shown in the dashboard. Slugs, destinations, titles, query strings, raw IPs, user agents, and referrers never land in our analytics rollup table.

Question 4

How does the analytics pipeline work end to end?

Accepted Answer

Short-link redirects and public link pages first increment a denormalized counter on the entity so the dashboard always has a live total. The event is then handed off to Cloudflare Workers Analytics Engine, a columnar store designed for high-volume sampled writes. Every hour a cron job queries Workers Analytics Engine, sums the sampled events back into whole numbers using the built-in sample-interval correction, and upserts one row per (user, entity, day, country) into the D1 clicks_daily table. The dashboard reads from clicks_daily.

Question 5

How fresh are the numbers I see in my dashboard?

Accepted Answer

The total click and view counters update in near real time on every redirect or page load. Country-level breakdowns and daily trend lines come from the hourly rollup, so a click you just made will typically show up in the aggregated charts within an hour. If you want a live-updating widget and email digests, those are premium features on the roadmap.

Question 6

How long is click and view data retained?

Accepted Answer

Free accounts can query up to 14 days of historical analytics, and premium accounts can query up to 90 days. Data older than 90 days is automatically pruned from the clicks_daily table. The all-time total on each short link and link page is preserved separately on a denormalized counter, so even when detailed rows expire, the lifetime number of clicks stays accurate.

Question 7

Can I see top countries, devices, and referrers?

Accepted Answer

Top countries are live in the dashboard today. Device splits (mobile, tablet, desktop) are captured at the edge but not yet surfaced in the UI — they are tracked as an upcoming release. Referrer data is not captured yet and is on the roadmap. We will add these columns to the same clicks_daily rollup rather than introducing a second pipeline.

Question 8

Can I export my analytics data?

Accepted Answer

Data export is a premium feature planned for the next analytics milestone. Today, analytics is visible directly in the dashboard in two views: a per-entity stats page with trend chart and top countries, and a summary card on the main dashboard. Server-side Measurement Protocol events can optionally be forwarded to your own Google Analytics 4 property if you configure the worker secrets, but this is independent from the internal pipeline.

Click and page-view analytics

Data handling

What is available