A tracked link is one short URL per creator that counts who tapped it and then forwards them to your page. Give creator A one link and creator B another, and at the end of the campaign you know which of them actually sent people to your store. That is the whole mechanic, and it is the cheapest honest answer to the question every brand asks after a campaign.
It is also the answer most brands skip. In the Influencer Marketing Hub Benchmark Report 2026, promo and discount codes lead measurement tool adoption at 45.9 percent among respondents answering that question, with affiliate links at 26.0 percent and native shop features at 25.0 percent. Links come a distant second to codes, which is a strange ordering once you see what each one actually captures.
This post covers the five-step setup, why the link has to live in a specific place on Instagram, what tracked links look like on Qolab, and the three things a link will never be able to tell you.
How do you track sales from an influencer link?
Five steps. Pick one destination page, give every creator their own short link to it, put that link where a viewer can actually tap it, count unique taps rather than raw ones, and read those taps against orders in your own store analytics over the same dates. None of it needs a tool you do not already have.
- Pick one destination. A single product page or a landing page for the campaign. Not your home page, because a visitor who lands on the home page has to find the product again and most will not.
- Generate one unique short link per creator. Not one link for the campaign. The per-creator part is the entire point, because a shared link can tell you the campaign worked without telling you who made it work.
- Put the link where it can actually be tapped. On Instagram that means the story link sticker, the creator's bio for the campaign window, or a DM reply. See the next section for why this is not optional.
- Count unique taps, not raw taps. The same person opening the link three times is one visitor, and any counting method that does not dedupe will flatter the loudest creator.
- Compare taps against orders in your own store analytics over the same window. The link stops at your door. What happens after the door is your website's job, and the two together are what people mean by attribution.
That is the honest version. Everything sold as more sophisticated than this is usually the same five steps with a dashboard on top.
Link or discount code: which one should you use?
Both, if you can. They capture genuinely different populations, and the difference is not a rounding error.
A link captures traffic. Anyone who taps it is counted, including the person who buys at full price and would never have used a code. A code captures intent at checkout. It catches the person who saw the reel on Tuesday, thought about it all week, and typed the code on Sunday without ever touching a link.
Run only codes and you undercount the creators whose audience buys without discounts, which tends to be the creators with the most trust. Run only links and you lose everyone who converted later from memory. This is the same problem we walked through in the four numbers that actually prove influencer ROI, viewed from the tracking side rather than the reporting side.
That third number is the one worth sitting with. The brands increasing their influencer budgets the most aggressively put 69.2 percent of their KPI mix in the upper funnel and only 21.5 percent in the lower funnel, per the same report. The biggest spenders are largely not measuring sales. Teams keeping their budgets flat are measurably more lower funnel, at 29.5 percent. Spending more and measuring less is a common pairing, and a tracked link is the cheapest way to stop doing it.
Why the link has to sit in the story or the bio
This is where most tracking setups quietly fail, and it is a platform fact rather than a strategy choice.
An Instagram reel carries no tappable link. Neither does a feed caption. A link pasted into a caption is plain text that nobody can tap and almost nobody will retype. The only places a viewer can actually tap through are the story link sticker, the link in the creator's bio, and a message in the DMs.
Instagram removed the old 10,000-follower requirement for story link stickers, announced by Instagram head Adam Mosseri, so every creator you book can now put a tappable link in a story regardless of size. That changed the arithmetic for nano and micro campaigns completely, because the smallest creator on your roster can now carry the same tracking as the largest.
So decide the placement in the brief, not after the post goes live. A reel with the link parked in the bio for that week works. A story with the link sticker works better, and it works for about 24 hours. A reel alone, with the link nowhere, produces a campaign report full of zeros and an argument about whether the creator underperformed. Getting this into the brief is exactly the kind of detail our 11-point influencer brief exists to catch.
How tracked links work on Qolab
The brand sets one thing: the destination URL on the campaign, typed into the campaign page as yourstore.com/product, one of the few fields in setting up a campaign that pays for itself immediately. Every creator booked on that campaign then gets their own short link automatically, in the form qolab.in/r/ followed by a seven-character code. Creators see their link on their own campaign screen alongside their drafts, so it is in front of them before they post rather than buried in an email.
Counting is deliberately conservative, because an inflated number is worse than no number:
Once content is live, the destination locks. That sounds like a restriction and is actually protection: a link that has already been posted in a story keeps working, because changing where it points after the fact would break every post already published.
The per-creator taps then flow into the campaign report as the clicks column, and into the composite performance score that ranks creators. We wrote about that report in detail in our breakdown of the seven metrics a campaign report should show, including the panels we treat as decoration.
What a tracked link cannot tell you
Three limits, stated plainly, because a measurement tool that oversells itself is worse than no tool.
It does not measure sales. The report counts arrivals at your door. Whether those people bought, and for how much, lives in your store analytics, and no link can reach across that gap on its own. Qolab's campaign report deliberately shows a conversions figure of zero rather than estimating one, because we do not see your checkout and will not guess at it.
It does not measure influence. The largest group a good campaign creates is people who watched, remembered, and came back later through search or straight to your site. They never touch the link. That group is real, it is usually the biggest one, and it is invisible to every click-based tool in the market.
It records the last tap, not the reason. If a viewer sees creator A on Monday, creator B on Thursday, and taps B's link on Friday, B gets the credit and A gets nothing. With a roster of ten creators posting in the same fortnight, that misallocation is not rare, it is the normal case. Read per-creator taps as a strong signal, not as a ledger.
The setup checklist
Before the campaign goes live, confirm all five:
- One destination URL, a product or campaign page, not the home page.
- One unique link per creator, generated before the brief goes out.
- Placement agreed in writing: story sticker, bio link, or both, and for how long.
- A deduped counting method, so repeat taps and preview crawlers do not inflate anything.
- A matching window in your own store analytics, so taps and orders are read over the same dates.
Get those five right and you will finish the campaign knowing which creators sent real people. That is a smaller claim than most tracking products make, and it is one you can actually defend in a room.
If you would rather not build the links by hand, a brand account on Qolab creates one per creator the moment a campaign has a destination URL, counts unique taps into the report, and holds the payment until the content is live.
