QR scans and clicks: why you should count them separately

You print a QR code on a poster, share the same link on LinkedIn, and a week later your tool shows 412 clicks. Good news, but what worked? The poster or the post? With a single counter, you can't tell.

Two channels, two behaviours

A scan and a click have almost nothing in common:

• A scan comes from the physical world: a poster, a flyer, a label, a menu on a table. It nearly always comes from a phone, with no referrer, often at the exact moment the person stands in front of your material.
• A click comes from a screen: a social network, a newsletter, a message. It usually carries a referrer (linkedin.com, facebook.com) and splits between phone and desktop.

Add them together and you no longer know whether your print budget pays off.

How Bref tells them apart

Every Bref link comes with its QR code. That QR code does not point exactly to the short link, but to the short link followed by ?qr. During the redirect, Bref records the source (scan or click), removes the marker, then sends the visitor on to the destination. Your site never sees the parameter.

The result: in your analytics, every bar of the chart is split in two, clicks in indigo, scans in orange.

Tip: if you change a link's destination, QR codes already printed keep working. They point to the short link, not the final page.

What you can learn from it

1. Compare your materials. A shop-window poster bringing 40 scans a day may be worth more than an online ad.
2. Pick the right moment. Scans arrive during opening or event hours; clicks follow the rhythm of your posts.
3. Adapt the landing page. Someone who scans is on a phone, standing, in a hurry: the page must be short and readable.

One link per material

To go further, create a different link for each printed piece (/station-poster, /fair-flyer). You'll know not only that traffic comes from paper, but from which paper.

That is the whole point of a short link: it isn't only there to shorten, it's there to understand.