ckurl/

Link infrastructure for performance marketing.

ckurl mints a unique short link for every recipient of a campaign, resolves it in milliseconds from the network edge, and reports what happened afterwards — click by click, conversion by conversion.

  • One link per recipient
  • Edge resolution
  • Postback conversions

Anatomy of a link

ckurl.co.uk/7fq2a

Domain
Answers from the edge network nearest the person opening it.
Slug
Five characters that belong to one recipient of one campaign, and to nobody else.

No two recipients of a campaign are sent the same address.

Platform

Measurement starts with the link itself.

Attribution is a property of how the link was issued, not something reconstructed afterwards.

A link per recipient

Campaigns are minted in bulk, and every member of the audience receives their own short link. A click therefore belongs to one recipient without cookies, fingerprinting or inference.

Resolution at the edge

Links resolve from a global edge network rather than a single origin, so the hop between the message and the advertiser's page costs milliseconds wherever the recipient happens to be.

Outcomes, not just clicks

Destinations report leads and sales back by postback. Each outcome is matched to the link that produced it, so a campaign can be read in conversions rather than traffic.

How it works

Four states, one link.

Each link moves through the same sequence, and the report is simply the record of where every link in a campaign got to.

  1. State 01Minted

    An audience is fixed into a set, and one unique link is generated for each member of it before the campaign goes out.

  2. State 02Delivered

    Every link leaves with its own recipient, inside the client's own campaign, pointing at the advertiser's landing page.

  3. State 03Resolved

    The recipient opens the link. ckurl records the open — time, country, device — and forwards them to the destination.

  4. State 04Attributed

    Conversions reported by the destination are matched back to the link, and from there to the campaign, the country and the spend behind it.

Reporting

What a campaign report contains.

Figures are held per link and rolled up per campaign, so any total can be taken apart again.

Clicks
Total opens alongside the number of distinct recipients who opened anything at all.
Geography
Country and city as the network address reports them, with country rules enforced at resolve time.
Device
Browser and platform, taken from what the client sends when the link is opened.
Conversions
Leads and sales returned by the destination, attributed to the link that produced them.
Cost
Spend per campaign, and the cost of each outcome it produced.
Export
Every figure available as CSV, at link level or campaign level.

For recipients

Received a link that starts with ckurl.co.uk?

ckurl.co.uk is a link-shortening domain. A link on it looks like ckurl.co.uk/ followed by five characters. It was created for a marketing campaign run by one of our clients, and it forwards you to that advertiser's own website — your address bar shows their domain as soon as the link resolves.

When a link is opened we record the time, the country and city the network address suggests, and the browser it was opened in. That record is what makes the campaign measurable, and it is reported to the client who ran the campaign.

Every link can be traced back to the client who created it, and any individual link can be switched off. If a message you received was not something you asked for, the sender of that message is the party to take it up with — the link only tells us that it was opened.