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There was a post on Tumblr a while back from prokopetz about people incorrectly sharing advice on how to stop companies from tracking user activity by removing “anything following a question mark in a URL”. I reblogged with some commentary around what query parameters were, as well as some information about how Tumblr uses href.li links to defeat referral tracking.
I was thinking more about this topic recently and I wanted to put together a more complete and detailed run-down on what’s going on here and how it differs from other social media sites.
UTM_Source and UTM_Medium tracking from my own site
Query parameters are the technical term for everything following the question mark in a URL. They’re a way to pass information between web pages, sometimes within a site and sometimes across sites. In many cases, they actually enable key functionality, like with YouTube’s video ID system; the only thing that distinguishes one YouTube video from another is that part of the URL.
And sometimes they’re used to track user behavior.
For example, most marketing campaigns use so-called UTM parameters to pass information to web tracking tools about where users came from.1 You’ll often see utm_campaign, utm_medium, and utm_source following the base URL in marketing emails or advertisements — these values categorize your traffic so the company can understand how effective different efforts are at bringing you to their site.
Many social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn have built-in link shorteners — every time a link is added to post it’s replaced with a shortened version. On Twitter this looks like t.co and on LinkedIn it looks like lnkd.in.2 I’m not on Facebook enough to speak to that platform but I imagine it’s similar.
What this means is that every time someone clicks one of those links they very very briefly hit the company’s servers before getting redirected to the actual destination. This logs a ‘hit’ on the company’s servers, allowing them to track how many times that link has been clicked. There’s a lot of reasons to do this, but almost all link shorteners work this way — the link first hits the company’s servers, then redirects to the actual destination.3
Tumblr doesn’t just not do that. It goes a step further.
Instead of using a normal link shortener, Tumblr uses href.li links throughout the site. Adding https://href.li/? in front of every link obviously doesn’t shorten them, so what’s this meant to do? Well, adding this string doesn’t just not track clicks - it actually breaks the ability for destination sites to figure out where the click came from.
This stops Tumblr from being tracked as a referrer — traffic to a site from Tumblr comes through stripped of any identifying information around where it came from. Most companies use Referrer information in concert with UTM parameters to identify the source of traffic. This decision to block referrer information makes it really hard to use Tumblr the way most companies use Twitter or LinkedIn; a kind of billboard to lure users back to the company’s site. If you use that strategy on Tumblr, you’ll have no idea if it’s working (aside from some work-around options I can get into more detail about in a future post).
For example, here’s the channel mix I can see on my own site:
The channel mix for Jack’s Works skews strongly toward Organic Search
I’m something like 80% certain that Unassigned comes from Tumblr (I don’t share links in that many places) but I can’t say that for sure.
Actual paid advertising on Tumblr doesn’t work this way — I am 100% certain that companies can see how many people click on those links and, if Tumblr is at all a competent advertising platform, that number will be front-and-center. But from an organic perspective, Tumblr is actually protecting your privacy by default.
I have a feeling this has a lot to do with a core ethos around how Tumblr should work and its history as a blogging platform. It’s not a place for people to post teaser links feeding back to their own sites. It’s the place those sites and that content should actually live.
There’s a future post here around the history of UTM parameters and how they fit a pattern around Google’s acquisition and integration of different companies.↩︎
You can see from Twitter’s page that they’re not actually hiding the fact that this lets them track clicks: “Our link service measures information such as how many times a link has been clicked, which is an important quality signal in determining how relevant and interesting each Tweet is when compared to similar Tweets.”↩︎
This includes options like bit.ly↩︎
