You want to know whether a link in your newsletter, on a poster, or behind a QR code is being used. That does not mean you need a lasting record of each person who opens it.
toa.ee measures short-link clicks without setting tracking cookies or storing visitors’ raw IP addresses in click analytics. You can see useful information about your links while the visitor identifier used for daily unique counts changes every day.
There is still data processing involved. Here is what happens, what we keep, and where the limits are.
What happens when someone opens your short link?
Imagine you put a toa.ee link on a poster for an event. Someone opens it on their phone.
toa.ee sends that visitor to your destination and records a limited visit event. The short-link redirect sets no cookies and writes nothing to the visitor’s browser storage.
The recorded event can include:
The time the link was opened.
An approximate country, when available.
A device category, such as mobile or desktop, and browser type.
The referring website’s domain, when the browser provides one.
Whether the request appears to come from a bot.
A visitor identifier that changes daily.
We keep the referring domain rather than the full referring page address. That avoids retaining its path and query string, which can contain information unrelated to measuring your link.
These details help answer practical questions: Is the poster link being opened? Are most visitors using phones? Is the audience coming from the countries you expected?
The visit record does not give you a visitor’s name or email address.
How can unique visitors be counted without cookies?
When a browser requests a link, its connection provides an IP address and information about the browser. toa.ee uses those inputs with a secret value that changes with the UTC date to calculate a daily identifier. The raw IP address is not saved in the click analytics record.
That identifier helps estimate how many distinct visitors opened a link during a day. When the date changes, the identifier changes too. It is not a persistent cookie that follows the browser from one day to the next.
There are limits. Several people using similar browsers on the same network may be counted together. A person switching networks or browsers may be counted more than once. Adding daily unique counts together does not produce an exact count of different people across a month.
Treat unique visitors as an estimate for comparing activity, rather than a list of identifiable customers.
What “no IP addresses in click analytics” means
toa.ee still receives connection information to handle a request. The IP address is used briefly to calculate the daily identifier and, when available, estimate the country using a database on our server. That country lookup does not require sending each visitor’s IP address to a separate geolocation service.
Security processing is a separate purpose: connection information is also processed briefly to limit repeated requests and prevent abuse. Our privacy notice explains that processing and its retention.
The precise promise is that we do not keep visitors’ raw IP addresses in click analytics. We do not claim that opening an internet connection involves no personal-data processing.
Cookie-free analytics and necessary account cookies
Opening a toa.ee short link or digital business card sets no cookies. The blog and free tools also work without tracking cookies.
When you sign in to manage links, necessary cookies keep your account signed in and protect the sign-in process. If you make an anonymous try-it link, browser storage remembers the information needed to claim it when you sign up in that browser.
Those functions are separate from advertising or analytics tracking. toa.ee does not use tracking cookies, third-party analytics, or advertising on its pages. You can inspect the purposes and durations in our cookies and browser storage notice.
EU hosting, with a clear account of other providers
toa.ee’s hosting and database provider is Zone Media OÜ in Estonia. We do not sell personal data.
Hosting location is only part of the picture. Running an account service can also involve payment processing, emails, error reports, optional Google sign-in, and link-safety checks. Some of the providers listed in our privacy notice process data outside the European Economic Area.
That is why we describe toa.ee as EU-hosted, rather than saying every provider and every processing operation stays inside the EU. Our privacy notice lists the providers, their purposes, and processing locations so you can assess the service for your business.
How long does visit information stay?
Detailed visit records are kept for up to 400 days and removed when the associated link or digital business card is deleted. Daily totals without visitor identifiers are kept while the link exists.
Your plan’s analytics window is a separate question. The Free plan shows the most recent 30 days. Paid plans provide full available history while the link exists, including retained daily totals. A shorter dashboard window does not mean every underlying event is erased at that same point.
Our privacy notice explains other retention periods, including account details, billing records, security data, and backups. Different kinds of information serve different purposes, so they do not all share one deletion date.
What these statistics cannot tell you
Cookie-free click analytics can show activity around a link. They cannot establish who bought something after clicking it, identify every individual, or show an exact journey across devices and days.
The destination website also has its own privacy practices. A toa.ee link does not remove tracking scripts, cookies, or personal information from the page it opens. If you use campaign parameters, keep names, email addresses, and other personal details out of those parameters.
For print campaigns, use a separate link for each placement you want to compare. A link used only on a particular poster gives you a more useful measure of that poster’s activity than one reused in your newsletter and social posts. Even then, requests may include previews or automated activity; a link opening is not proof of a sale.
Privacy-friendly does not mean outside the GDPR
Replacing an IP address with a changing identifier reduces the information retained. It does not justify a blanket claim that all analytics data is anonymous or that data-protection obligations disappear.
The European Commission distinguishes pseudonymised information from truly anonymous information: information that can be connected back to a person may still be personal data.
Your business should assess its own use of links, destination pages, and campaign data. toa.ee’s privacy notice describes our processing; it cannot settle the requirements for every customer’s website or campaign.
Questions customers ask
Can toa.ee tell me exactly who clicked my link?
No. Click analytics do not identify visitors by name or email address. Daily unique counts are estimates based on a changing identifier.
Does toa.ee store the IP addresses of people clicking links?
The click analytics record does not store raw visitor IP addresses. Connection information is processed briefly to serve requests, derive daily identifiers and country estimates, and protect the service.
Does a toa.ee link make my destination website cookie-free?
No. Your destination has its own analytics, storage, and privacy practices. The toa.ee redirect and the destination page are separate parts of the journey.
What about digital business cards?
toa.ee digital business card pages also use cookie-free visit measurement. They can record contact-save actions and which contact button was tapped. The contact details you choose to publish on a digital business card are public; visitor privacy does not make those published details private.
Measure the link activity you need
If you want to compare campaigns without adding tracking cookies to the short-link journey, explore toa.ee short links. Check the current plans for analytics access and destination editing, and read the privacy notice for the full processing details.