Clicks

Short.io reports two numbers for a link: total clicks, and human clicks with bot traffic filtered out. The plugin shows both wherever it shows either.

The period

Figures cover the last 30 days by default.

That is Short.io's own default, and here it is also the only sensible one:

WARNING

Short.io's total period reports 0 regardless of a link's real traffic. It returns zero for established links with plenty of clicks, so it cannot be used as a lifetime figure.

You can pass any of today, yesterday, week, month, lastmonth, last7, last30 or total - but bear the above in mind before reaching for the last one.

In the entry sidebar

Live figures, cached for 15 minutes by default (Statistics cache). Today's numbers are cached more briefly, since they are the ones actually moving.

Turn the display off entirely with Show click counts.

On the Links screen

Snapshots from the local table, not live calls - a fifty-row page would otherwise be fifty HTTP requests to a second host before it could render.

Nothing needs scheduling to keep them fresh. Viewing the screen queues a background refresh for any row that has aged past Statistics cache, and Craft's queue does the work; viewing an entry updates that entry's row from the call the sidebar makes anyway. A count on the Links screen can therefore be a few minutes behind the one in the sidebar.

To refresh every link at once - after short-io/adopt, or from cron if you prefer:

php craft short-io/links/refresh-stats

The command works oldest-first and throttles itself, so it is safe against a large account.

In templates

{% set clicks = craft.shortIo.clicks(entry) %}
{% if clicks %}
  {{ clicks.totalClicks }} clicks in the last 30 days,
  {{ clicks.humanClicks }} of them human
{% endif %}

A period can be passed as the second argument:

{{ craft.shortIo.clicks(entry, 'last7').humanClicks }}

The method returns null when the entry has no link, or when Short.io could not be reached, so always guard it.

Bots

humanClicks can be a lot lower than totalClicks, and that is usually correct rather than alarming - link previews in chat apps, crawlers and monitoring all count as clicks. Testing a link with curl will show up as a click but not a human one.

A note on cost

Statistics come from a different Short.io host from the links themselves, and are the slowest part of the integration. That is why the Links screen uses snapshots, and why the sidebar asks Short.io to skip the country, browser and referrer breakdowns it does not display.