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"We can see that people clicked, we just don’t know what they did after."
It's one of the most common things marketers say when you ask about attribution. The clicks are there. The problem is what comes next: did that campaign drive signups, purchases, conversions? For most teams, the answer involves UTM parameters, platform analytics, and a spreadsheet holding it all together. It works until it doesn't, and usually it doesn't.
When we kept hearing this in customer conversations, at events, and on sales calls, we decided it was worth solving properly.
Why the existing approaches keep failing
When we sat down to solve this problem, we first had to look at the existing approaches to tracking conversions:
UTM parameters are the go-to for most marketers. You append source, medium, and campaign data to a URL, and your analytics platform reads it when someone lands on the page. Simple enough, except UTM parameters only exist on that landing page. The moment a user navigates to a second page, they disappear from the URL. You get credit for the click, but a conversion that happens three pages and two days later is invisible. UTM tracking tells you where someone came from, not what they did next.
Cookie-based tracking (the method used by most platforms, including Google Analytics and Meta) has a different problem. Cookies get blocked. Ad blockers target them. Browsers restrict them. Safari's Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) caps first-party cookie attribution to seven days, which means any conversion on day eight doesn't get attributed back to the original campaign. You're making budget decisions on incomplete data and calling it attribution.
Most link shorteners with conversion features have similar gaps. Some use URL parameters only, with no persistence beyond the initial session. Others use first-party cookies, which puts them subject to the same ITP limitations as everything else.
What we built instead
Rebrandly's conversion tracking uses local storage to assign a unique click ID to every visitor who arrives via a branded short link.
When a customer clicks a Rebrandly link and lands on a website, we attach a small identifier to their browser. Think of it like a name tag. That name tag stays in their browser storage for as long as they don't clear it or click a newer Rebrandly link. If they come back to the same site a week, a month, or six months later, that identifier is still there. When they convert (sign up, make a purchase, fill out a form), we can trace it back to the original link they clicked. The URL can be stripped of parameters entirely, and the attribution still works.
Where we win
Local storage outperforms cookie-based tracking in four specific ways.
Safari and Apple devices. Safari's ITP doesn't cap local storage the way it does cookies, so attribution isn't limited to seven days. Our window is configurable up to 90 days, and potentially longer depending on user behavior.
URL stripping. Many platforms and email clients strip tracking tokens from URLs before they reach the browser. Because our click ID lives in the browser rather than the URL, it persists even after the URL gets cleaned up.
Performance. Cookies are sent with every HTTP request the browser makes. Local storage has no such overhead; reads and writes happen client-side, with no impact on request performance.
Ad blocker resilience. Ad blockers target cookie-based tracking scripts. Local storage operations are less commonly flagged, which means more conversions get captured.
What we shipped and what's coming
Phase 1 is last-click attribution. You get a full analytics dashboard showing clicks, conversions, conversion rate, and revenue per link. Setup takes under 15 minutes: one snippet installed on your site, tracking enabled per link or across your whole workspace.
What's coming next: configurable attribution windows (so you can decide how long a click ID stays valid), page naming so your reports show readable labels instead of raw URLs, and URL matching rules for more granular conversion definitions. Further out, we're working on MCP integration and one-click setup options that remove even the minimal technical lift that exists today.
Every link you create should tell you the complete story: from the click to the conversion. That's what we built toward, and it's what we're continuing to build.
Conversion tracking is available on Professional, Growth, and Enterprise plans. See pricing →
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