Every brand on Instagram has the same setup. A Linktree or Beacons page in their bio, a handful of links pointing to products or their website, and a vague hope that it's doing something useful.
It probably is doing something. People click bio links. The problem is that a standard link-in-bio page tells you almost nothing about what happens after that click. You know someone visited. You don't know which post made them visit. You don't know if they bought anything. You definitely don't know which of your three product links is actually converting.
That gap between "someone clicked my bio link" and "someone bought my product" is where most small brands lose the plot entirely.
What link-in-bio tools actually track
Most link-in-bio tools give you click counts. Linktree shows you how many people clicked each link. Beacons does similar. Some of the paid tiers add geographic data or referral sources.
None of them track purchases. They can't, because they don't know what happens after someone leaves the page. A click on your "Shop Now" link registers in Linktree's analytics, but whether that person bought something, browsed for ten seconds and left, or added three items to their cart — Linktree has no idea.
This means you're making decisions based on click volume alone. The link that gets the most clicks wins, regardless of whether those clicks turn into money. A link to your blog post might get 500 clicks while your product link gets 80, but if 10 of those 80 convert to purchases, the product link is obviously more valuable. You'd never know that from click data alone.
The post-to-purchase problem
Here's the specific frustration. You post a product photo on Monday. Your link-in-bio clicks spike on Monday evening. You get four orders on Tuesday morning. Were those orders from the Monday post? Probably? Maybe? You also ran a story on Sunday that mentioned the same product. And you have a TikTok that's been slowly gaining views all week.
Which piece of content actually drove those four sales? With a standard bio link setup, you genuinely cannot tell. You're left correlating spikes in clicks with spikes in sales and hoping the timing lines up cleanly enough to draw conclusions.
It rarely does. Especially once you're posting regularly across multiple platforms.
Making your bio link actually useful
The fix isn't complicated, but it does require a different approach. Instead of pointing people to a static link-in-bio page, you create tracked links for specific campaigns or posts, then rotate the relevant one into your bio.
Here's what that looks like. Say you're about to post a product reel. Before posting, you create a tracked link through an attribution tool like LinkOwl. That link points to your product page but carries a unique identifier tied to this specific campaign. You put that link in your bio, post the reel with "link in bio," and now every click and every resulting purchase is attributed to that specific piece of content.
When you post something different two days later, you swap the bio link to a new tracked one. Each link builds its own data trail — clicks, conversions, revenue.
What you learn from this
Once you've run this system for a few weeks, you start seeing patterns that click data alone would never show you.
You might find that carousels drive more clicks but reels drive more purchases. Or that posts mentioning price directly convert better than lifestyle shots. One brand I've seen discovered that their "behind the scenes" posts drove zero purchases despite consistently high engagement. Their product close-ups with pricing in the caption, which got half the likes, drove three times the revenue.
That kind of insight changes how you spend your time. You stop optimising for engagement and start optimising for revenue.
Working with influencers and the bio link
This matters even more when you're working with creators. If you give an influencer a tracked link and ask them to put it in their bio, you get the same purchase attribution. You can see not just how many clicks the creator drove but how many of those clicks turned into money.
Compare that with the usual approach: you check whether sales went up during the week the influencer posted and make your best guess. With tracked links, there's no guessing. Creator A drove 14 purchases at a cost per acquisition of £8. Creator B drove 2 purchases at £75 each. Done.
The Linktree question
People sometimes ask whether they should ditch Linktree entirely. You don't have to. Linktree works fine as a landing page — the problem isn't the page itself, it's that the links on the page aren't tracked.
You can keep your Linktree and simply replace the static URLs with tracked links. Every link on your Linktree page becomes an attribution source. Your "New Collection" link, your "Sale Items" link, your "About Us" link — each one tracked independently so you know which pages people actually visit and, more importantly, which ones lead to purchases.
The point isn't to abandon your link-in-bio tool. It's to make the links on it actually informative.
Quick setup
- Pick your attribution tool — something that tracks through to purchase, not just clicks
- Create a tracked link for each destination on your bio page
- Replace the raw URLs in your link-in-bio with the tracked versions
- For specific campaigns or posts, create dedicated links and rotate them into your bio
- Check your attribution data weekly — look at purchases per link, not just clicks
The whole setup takes maybe fifteen minutes. After that, every click through your bio link carries useful data about what's actually working and what's just generating vanity metrics.
Most brands treat their link in bio as a dumping ground for URLs. Turning it into a proper attribution layer is one of the easiest wins in small-brand marketing, and almost nobody bothers.