Glossary
Click-through rate: the metric and its denominator
Click-through rate is clicks divided by impressions. The clicks are easy and we count them; the denominator is where the metric goes wrong, and it never comes from a shortener.
By Wasim Idrishi · Updated · 2 min read
Click-through rate is the share of people who saw something and clicked it: clicks divided by impressions, expressed as a percentage. The clicks are the easy half.
The denominator is the whole problem
Impressions are counted by whoever displayed the thing — the email platform, the ad network, the social feed. Each defines them differently. An email "impression" usually means a tracking pixel loaded, which misses everyone with images off. A feed impression may mean a pixel of the post entered the viewport. Two platforms reporting 3% CTR are frequently not measuring the same event.
A shortener sits on the other side of that boundary. We record the click; we have no idea how many people scrolled past without clicking. Any product that shows you a CTR without an impression source is either using an estimate or using a denominator you did not choose.
What gc.mw gives you instead
The numerator, with enough structure to be useful. Clicks and unique visitors per day, split by country, referrer host, referrer type, device, operating system, browser, language and UTM campaign. Bot traffic is counted separately and excluded from those breakdowns, so a crawler sweeping your links does not inflate the number you divide by.
Uniques come from a daily-salted hash of the visitor's address and user agent, counted with a probabilistic counter. That makes them approximate at scale and deliberately non-durable: the same person tomorrow is a new visitor, because we do not keep an identifier that survives the day.
Working the number out honestly
Take impressions from the platform that owns them, clicks from the link, and keep the pairing stable. One link per placement is what makes this possible — the moment two placements share a code, the numerator is a blend and the rate means nothing.
Example
A newsletter to 12,000 recipients, gc.mw/oct-r in the hero. The email tool reports 4,900 opens; the link
reports 611 unique visitors. That is 12.5% of the list and 4.9% of opens, and both numbers are worth
watching — but only because each has a denominator you can name.
Tag the placements first with the UTM builder.
Questions people ask
Does gc.mw report a click-through rate?
No, and it cannot. We see clicks, not impressions — nobody who runs a shortener knows how many people saw your post. We give you the numerator: total clicks, unique visitors per day, and breakdowns by country, referrer, device and campaign.
Should I use clicks or unique visitors as the numerator?
Unique visitors, when you are asking how many people acted. Uniques are counted per link per day from a daily-rotating visitor hash, so someone who clicks four times in an afternoon counts once — and counts again tomorrow, because the hash changes.
Keep going
Try it with your own link
Paste a long link and get a 10-character gc.mw link with a QR code. No account needed for 30 days; free forever with one.