Tracking, Data & Cookies

LinkCentral is designed with privacy in mind and has tools for full GDPR / CCPA compliance. This page explains how data, privacy, and cookies work when using LinkCentral.

Visitor Tracking

LinkCentral has three types of tracking, depending on your needs:

  • Full tracking – Tracks both total clicks and unique clicks on all LinkCentral links across your website. This requires tracking cookies to identify unique visitors.
  • Basic tracking – Tracks total clicks only (no unique visitor tracking). Only essential, technical session-only cookies are used, and no tracking cookies are set. This means, for example, that no GDPR consent is required.
  • No tracking – Disables all tracking. No data is collected and no cookies are set.

ℹ️ You can set these options in the plugin settings under the Tracking tab.

Cookies

1. Visitor Cookie

  • If the unique visitor tracking setting is enabled, a persistent cookie (lclink_visitor) is stored for 30 days on the visitor’s device.
    • This cookie contains only a randomly generated unique ID (no personal data).
    • It is used to track unique visitors and prevent duplicate click tracking.
  • If unique visitor tracking is disabled, a session-only cookie (lclink_visitor_temp) is stored for the duration of the session.
    • This cookie also contains only a random ID and does not include personal data.
    • It is purely for technical purposes, to help avoid duplicate click tracking caused by caching. Without it, clicks may be logged twice. To prevent duplicates, it checks whether the same link was clicked within the last 8 seconds and only counts it once.
    • Because this is a session-only cookie, it is automatically deleted once the user closes their browser.

2. Link Click Cookie

  • If unique visitor tracking is enabled, a persistent cookie (lclink_click_*) is created the first time a visitor clicks a link.
    • This cookie is empty and contains no personal information.
    • It simply records whether a unique click has already been counted.
  • If unique visitor tracking is disabled, no click cookie is set.

💻 About IP Addresses

  • No IP addresses are stored in the database.
  • IP addresses are only used during run-time in two cases:
    1. To validate against the Excluded IP Addresses list (configured in settings).
    2. To determine the visitor’s country (if the local MaxMind database is enabled).
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