What is lnkd.in in my analytics?

Why LinkedIn clicks say lnkd.in

LinkedIn’s help centre says it: when you share a link that is longer than 26 characters, LinkedIn shortens it automatically once you click Post, to make it easier to read. The help page doesn’t name the domain, but the short links in posts are on lnkd.in. A reader who clicks one passes through lnkd.in on the way to your site, and that is the referrer you see.

A link of 26 characters or fewer is not shortened. Those clicks usually come from LinkedIn’s own pages, and you see linkedin.com instead. When you move from one site to another, a browser by default sends only the origin of the page it came from, never the path, so even then you learn the site and not the post.

The app shows up differently

Taps in the LinkedIn app on Android can arrive as com.linkedin.android (sometimes written android-app://com.linkedin.android). That is the app’s package name, passed on by the phone. The page on android-app referrers explains how that works.

All three forms mean LinkedIn. Add them together.

What it hides

Which post it was, and whose. Your own post, a comment you left under someone else’s, a colleague resharing you and a link in a message all arrive as LinkedIn. If you post the same link every week, the weeks are indistinguishable.

How to see which post it was

Tag the link before you post it. LinkedIn shortens the address, but the short link redirects to the full one you pasted, tags included, so they arrive at your site:

https://example.com/?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=hiring-post-week-38

Use one utm_campaign per post. A tagged link is long, so LinkedIn will shorten it; that doesn’t matter, because the tags are in the address it leads to. Untagged lnkd.in visits are then posts by other people.

Where it goes in your reports

Tools that know lnkd.in put it under social. Tools that don’t list it as an unknown website under referrals. Read it as LinkedIn.

With Nordva Launch

Launch counts lnkd.in, linkedin.com and the LinkedIn Android app as social. A tagged link keeps its utm_campaign, so each post shows as its own row in your analytics. A UTM tag that names a channel (a medium such as email or social, or a known source) wins over the referrer when the two disagree. A visit carrying a paid-click id (LinkedIn’s li_fat_id is one), or a utm_medium such as cpc or paid, counts as paid instead.