Building a Link Shortener? Here's What I Learned About Click Analytics

I built a link shortener called Briefly a few months ago. It started as a weekend project. "How hard can it be?" I thought. Redirect one URL to another. Done. The redirect part was easy. The analytics part taught me things I didn't expect. The Redirect Is the Easy Part Seriously. A link shortener's core logic is maybe 20 lines: app . get ( ' /:code ' , async ( req , res ) => { const link = await db . findByCode ( req . params . code ); if ( ! link ) return res . status ( 404 ). send ( ' Not found ' ); // Track the click (async, don't block redirect) trackClick ( req , link . id ). catch ( console . error ); res . redirect ( 301 , link . originalUrl ); }); But the interesting stuff happens in trackClick . What Analytics Actually Matter When I first added analytics, I tracked everything. Timestamp. IP. User agent. Referrer. Screen size. Language. Every header I could grab. Most of it was useless noise. Here's what actually matters when you're sharing links: 1. Click Count Over Time Not j