Short links
What short links are for, setting them up, and fixing links that do not work.
What are short links for?#
They are how the source of your users gets tracked. On Analytics, Short links you get one link per channel to put in your profile bios, each with a copy button, and a chart of traffic by platform. Every link is a single letter on your own domain, for example yoursite.com/r.
A new project starts with seven of them: Reddit, X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, YouTube and TikTok. A project created earlier keeps the links it already has. For any other channel, an email, a campaign or a partner, create a custom link on the same screen: type a name, pick a letter and press Create link. It gets its own row and its own line on the chart.
They work for websites only. There is nothing equivalent inside a mobile app.
My short links do not work. How do I fix them?#
Ask us here first, because whether this is fixable depends on your project, and for some projects it is not.
A short link is a path on your own site, for example yoursite.com/x, resolved by the HeyCatch analytics SDK installed there. Nothing is hosted on our side. So it needs three things: a site URL on the project, the SDK live on that site, and a short redirect set up on the site itself.
That redirect is the part people miss. A one-character path has to lead to your site with the source tag attached, and your AI builder sets it up for you by following our install guide. If you do not control your own server or hosting configuration it may not be possible to add, so tell us here and we will look at your case.
One failure mode is worth naming on its own. If your server answers that path with an ordinary 404 page, the fallback cannot rescue it, because our code does not load on a 404 page and there is nothing there to read the visit.
That gives three different situations, and we check which one you are in before answering.
- The project is an App Store or Google Play listing with no website of its own. Short links cannot work for it at all. There is no site to host the path and no SDK to read it, and there is no setting that changes that. Use the listing link itself for sharing and read attribution from the platform's own console.
- The project has a site URL but no SDK yet. The links exist but nothing resolves them or records the visit. Install the SDK on the live site and they start working.
- The project has a site URL and the SDK. Then the links should resolve, and we look at the individual link.
If the Short links page shows "Connect your website/landing to create short links" rather than handing you links, that is situation 1 or 2.
My hosting has no redirect settings. Can I still use short links?#
Short links work by adding one redirect rule on your own hosting: the path /i returns a redirect to /?utm_campaign=i. If your AI builder set it up as /?utm_source=heycatch&utm_campaign=i, that is counted the same way. The parameter is the attribution, so a redirect to the bare / does not count. Once the visitor lands, our SDK reads it and clears the parameter out of the address bar.
- If your hosting has redirect settings, add that one rule and short links work. Vercel and Netlify support this on their free plans. Webflow, Framer, Wix, Carrd on Pro Plus and Shopify all have a redirect screen too.
- If your hosting has no redirect settings at all, Notion sites and GitHub Pages being the common cases, short links will not work on your domain.
Either way you lose nothing in tracking. Pageviews, sessions and conversions all keep working exactly as before. Instead of the short link, use the full one and the attribution is identical:
https://yoursite.com/?utm_campaign=i
It is longer, but nobody reads the address in a profile bio, and we count it the same way.
One thing not to rely on: the SDK does have an automatic fallback for one-character paths, but it only runs if your site serves your app on unknown paths instead of a real 404 page. Most website builders return a real 404, where our script never loads, so treat the redirect rule or the full link as the real answer.
Why does my short link not open my App Store listing?#
It never will, and if your project is an App Store or Google Play listing with no website, short links are not a feature you can use at all. Ask us here and we will confirm which kind of project yours is.
Nothing is hosted on our side. Each one is a one-character path on your own site, for example yoursite.com/x, which your own site sends back to itself with the source tag attached, and the analytics SDK there records where the visitor came from. So a short link never forwards anyone to an App Store or Google Play page.
The short link field only lets me put in one letter. Is it broken?#
It is not broken. Every short link is one letter on your own domain by design, so yoursite.com/x is the finished link, not a half-typed one. The pre-built links already have their letters, and for a custom link you type a name and pick its letter from the Letter list.
The more useful question is whether short links work for your project at all. They resolve on your own site through the analytics SDK, so a project that is an App Store or Google Play listing with no website cannot use them. Ask us here and we will tell you which of those two you are looking at.
What happens if I delete a short link?#
Deleting a short link permanently deletes the link and all the tracking data connected to it, its click history and its analytics included. None of it can be recovered, by you or by us. If you may still need those numbers, keep the link.
If I delete a short link, do I lose the data it collected?#
Yes. Deleting a short link permanently deletes the link and all the tracking data connected to it, its click history and analytics included, and none of it can be recovered. If you may still need those numbers, keep the link.