Analytics forwarding for short link clicks

Connect a tool

Open Integrations, choose the tool, and enter its key. Each workspace has one connection per tool. A connection sends every counted click of every link in the workspace. You can connect several tools at the same time.

Google Analytics 4: Measurement ID (G-…) and a Measurement Protocol API secret. In Google Analytics, open Admin, Data streams, your web stream, then Measurement Protocol API secrets. Data collection: Global or EU. Google does not report a wrong API secret. After you connect, send a test event and look for it in Realtime or DebugView.
Amplitude: API key of the project. Data center: US or EU. Flared sends a test event when you connect and refuses a wrong key.
Mixpanel: Project token. Data residency: US, EU, or India. Flared sends a test event when you connect and refuses a wrong token.
PostHog: Project API key. Region: US Cloud or EU Cloud. Flared checks the key and sends a test event when you connect, and refuses a wrong key.

Before you connect, you confirm that you are responsible for any notice or consent that the law asks for, including for the visitor cookie. Flared stores each key encrypted, and the page shows only its last 4 characters. To use a new key, select Change key.

Each connection has a switch. Turn it off to stop sending clicks and keep the key. Send test event sends one test event to the tool. The key checks when you connect and the test events share one limit: 10 an hour per workspace.

What Flared sends

Each click is one event named flared_click. A test event is named flared_test. Each event has these fields, when Flared knows them:

Link ID: The ID of the short link, the same ID as in the API.
Short URL: The short link, such as https://flared.link/spring. Google Analytics 4 gets it with the UTM tags in its query, such as https://flared.link/spring?utm_source=newsletter. Amplitude, Mixpanel, and PostHog get the short link without a query and the UTM tags as separate properties.
Time: When the click happened.
Country: The two-letter country code of the visitor, when known.
Device type: Desktop, mobile, or tablet.
Browser and OS: The family names, such as Chrome and iOS, without versions.
Referrer: The hostname of the referring site, without the path or query.
UTM tags: utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_term, utm_content, and utm_id from the destination the visitor went to, up to 100 characters each.
User agent: The full user agent of the visitor’s browser, up to 512 characters. It waits in Flared’s delivery queue until the tool accepts the click, and Flared saves it nowhere else.
Visitor ID: An ID for the visitor in this workspace. See Visitor cookie.
Event ID: A unique ID for the click, so that a tool can drop a duplicate.

Flared never sends the visitor’s IP address or the destination of the link. Events to Google Analytics 4 are sent with ad consent denied (ad_user_data and ad_personalization).

Fields in each tool

The name that each tool gives to each field:

Field	GA4	Amplitude	Mixpanel	PostHog
Visitor ID	`client_id`	`device_id`	`distinct_id`	`distinct_id`
Event ID	`event_id`	`insert_id`	`$insert_id`	`uuid`
Time	`timestamp_micros`	`time`	`time`	`timestamp`
Link ID	`link_id`	`link_id`	`link_id`	`link_id`
Short URL	`page_location`	`short_url`	`$current_url`	`$current_url`
Country	`user_location.country_id`	`country`	`mp_country_code`	`$geoip_country_code`
Device type	`device.category`	`device_category`	`device_category`	`$device_type`
Browser	`device.browser`	`browser`	`$browser`	`$browser`
OS	`device.operating_system`	`os_name`	`$os`	`$os`
Referrer	`page_referrer`	`referring_domain`	`$referring_domain`	`$referring_domain`
UTM tags	`utm_* and a campaign_details event`	`utm_*`	`utm_*`	`utm_*`
User agent	`user_agent`	`user_agent`	`user_agent`	`$raw_user_agent`

In Amplitude, the link ID, the short URL, the device type, the browser, the referrer, the UTM tags, and the user agent are event properties. In Google Analytics 4, a short URL with its UTM tags that is longer than 1,000 characters is sent without its query.

Visitor cookie

While a workspace sends clicks to a tool, its short links set a first-party cookie named flared_vid on the short-link domain: flared.link or your own domain. The cookie holds a random value and lasts 1 year. It is Secure and HttpOnly, so scripts on a page cannot read it. Workspaces that do not forward clicks set no cookie.

Flared mixes the cookie value with the workspace before the visitor ID leaves Flared. Two workspaces never get the same ID for one visitor, and the cookie value itself is never sent. The cookie value waits in Flared’s delivery queue until the tool accepts the click. Flared saves neither the cookie value nor the visitor ID anywhere else.

A browser that sends Global Privacy Control gets no cookie, and Flared does not read a cookie it already has. Each click from that browser is a new visitor in the tool, and so is each click from a browser that blocks cookies.

Delivery and retries

Flared sends a click within about a minute.
Clicks over the workspace’s monthly allowance are not counted, and Flared does not send them.
When a send fails, Flared tries again up to 5 times, after 30 seconds, 2 minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, and 1 hour. When a tool asks Flared to wait, Flared waits that time, up to 1 hour, in place of the next delay. After the last attempt, Flared stops, and the click is not sent.
Amplitude, Mixpanel, and PostHog drop a duplicate by its event ID. Google Analytics 4 does not, so it can count a retried click twice.
The page of each tool shows the clicks sent and failed this month, and the last error.

Connection problems

When the tool refuses the key, because it is wrong or was revoked, Flared turns the connection off and the page shows the problem. Enter the key again to turn it back on. Clicks in the meantime are not sent.

Limits

Plus and Founding Lifetime include analytics forwarding. Free does not. See pricing.
When Plus ends, Flared stops sending clicks and setting the cookie. The connections stay, and sending starts again when Plus starts again. Clicks in the meantime are not sent later.
Analytics forwarding is set up in the dashboard only. The API and the MCP server do not change it.
A self-hosted installation does not include analytics forwarding.

Disconnect

Disconnect removes the connection and deletes its key. The owner can disconnect at any time, also after Plus ends. When no tool is connected, the short links stop setting the cookie. Deleting the workspace removes every connection.

Support

Email support@flared.page. The other ways to use Flared are in the documentation.