Mixpanel Link Tracking: Short Link Clicks as Events

Mixpanel link tracking in Elido is server-side and one-directional: every time someone clicks one of your short links, Elido posts a link_click event to Mixpanel's track endpoint with your project token. The event carries the link slug, the link ID, the visitor's country and device, the destination they were sent to, and a timestamp. Nothing runs in the visitor's browser, so ad-blockers and consent banners don't touch it.

The catch is identity. Each event is keyed to the link, not the person, which means you can count and segment clicks in Mixpanel all day but you can't follow a clicker into your product from that event alone. I'll show you what it's good for, how to set it up, how to check it in the Events view, and the places where I'd reach for something else.

If you're still deciding what to tag before any of this, the cornerstone guide on tracking UTMs end to end is the better starting point. Mixpanel only ever sees what the link carries.

What Elido Sends to Mixpanel on Every Click

One click, one event. The forwarder builds a single-event batch and POSTs it to /track on the ingestion host that matches the integration's Data residency setting (api.mixpanel.com for US, api-eu.mixpanel.com for EU, api-in.mixpanel.com for India), authenticated by the token inside the properties, which is how Mixpanel's ingestion API expects server-side events to arrive.

Here is the full payload, trimmed only of the token value:

[
  {
    "event": "link_click",
    "properties": {
      "token": "<your project token>",
      "distinct_id": "elido-link-4711",
      "workspace_id": 12,
      "link_id": 4711,
      "slug": "spring-26",
      "country": "DE",
      "device": "mobile",
      "destination": "https://shop.example/spring?utm_source=newsletter",
      "time": 1790000000,
      "ip": "203.0.113.24"
    }
  }
]

That's everything. Short list, and deliberately so.

Two details worth knowing. The destination is the resolved one, so if a smart link sends iPhones to the App Store and everyone else to your site, you'll see both URLs. And UTM tags travel only inside that destination string; there are no separate utm_source or utm_campaign properties, so if you want them as columns you'll need a derived property in Mixpanel. That's the one bit of setup I'd do on day one.

Obvious bots, the crawlers that announce themselves in their user agent, are filtered at the redirect and never reach Mixpanel.

Setting Up the Mixpanel Integration

The whole setup is two fields. To send click events to Mixpanel you need a Mixpanel project and its project token, which lives under Project Settings in Mixpanel; the token is a write key meant to be embedded, so pasting it into a vendor is normal. Don't paste the API secret, which is a different string and is not what the forwarder uses.

1. In your Elido workspace, open Integrations and pick the Mixpanel card.
2. Click Connect Mixpanel, paste the token into Project Token, and pick Data residency: US (the default), EU or India, matching the Data Residency value in your Mixpanel project settings. Save. Elido encrypts the token at rest and never shows it back to you in full.
3. Wait a few minutes. Workspace integration settings are cached briefly on the forwarding side, so the first clicks after saving may not be sent yet.
4. Click one of your own links from a phone.

There's no per-link switch. Once connected, every click in the workspace is forwarded, which suits a team that lives in Mixpanel and doesn't suit a workspace that hosts short links for twenty unrelated clients. If that's you, split the clients into separate workspaces first.

Checking the Events View Before You Trust Anything

What Mixpanel used to call Live View is now the Events view, under Data in the left navigation, and Mixpanel's debugging guide recommends it as the first stop for exactly this job. Open it, filter to link_click, then tap your short link on a phone that isn't on office Wi-Fi.

You should see the event within seconds. Expand it and check three things: slug matches the link you tapped, country is where the phone actually is, and Mixpanel's own city and region are filled in from the ip. If the city shows a data center, your test went through a VPN.

The Test connection button in the integration panel sends one link_click marked elido_test: true and shows Mixpanel's answer under the button. Useful, but not proof: Mixpanel's track endpoint accepts any token and never checks residency, so a green result with the wrong token or the wrong region still means nothing arrives in your project. The event you see arrive from a real click is the only proof I'd accept.

Why distinct_id Is Per Link, and What That Breaks

Here is the identity limit, stated plainly. distinct_id is elido-link- plus the link ID, so every click on spring-26 belongs to one synthetic Mixpanel "user".

Totals work. Breakdowns by slug, country, device and destination work, and so do trends over time. Three things break:

• Uniques on link_click count links, not people. A campaign with 40,000 clicks on two links shows two unique users.
• Funnels that start at link_click and end at your signup event won't connect, because the signup belongs to a different distinct_id.

There's a third one most teams never hit. Mixpanel enforces hot shard limits of 200K events per distinct_id per day, and beyond that the events get renamed to $hotshard_events. A single link that goes properly viral can cross that line, and because the ID is per link, it's that one link that gets hit.

Why not a per-visitor ID? Because the redirect doesn't know who the visitor is, and I'd rather it didn't set a cookie on a domain the visitor never chose to visit. Honest trade-off.

Stitching Short Link Clicks to Users the Workable Way

The pattern that works uses the two halves for what each is good at. Let Elido's server-side event give you the complete click count, including clicks from people who bounce before your page loads. Let the Mixpanel SDK on your landing page handle identity.

Put UTM tags on the destination URL. Mixpanel's JavaScript library tracks UTM parameters by default and records first-touch values on the profile, so when that visitor later signs up and you call identify, the campaign sticks to a real person. The short link click and the landing page view then share a campaign value, not a user ID, and you join them on utm_campaign in a report. It's a campaign-level join, which is coarser than a user-level one, and I think it's the right level for this data anyway.

Want the click totals and the landing-page sessions side by side? Expect them to disagree; short-link clicks versus GA4 sessions explains why the same gap shows up in any analytics tool, Mixpanel included.

If this is the setup you've been missing, connect a workspace and send your next campaign through branded links.

Where It Falls Short Today

Three gaps, ranked by how likely they are to bite you.

The visitor IP travels in every event. With EU residency it goes to the EU ingestion host; on the US default it goes to a US endpoint, and the EU data residency guide covers how to weigh that. For the Mixpanel side specifically, including how to check your project's residency, see Mixpanel EU data residency.

Delivery is best effort. A failed POST gets one retry after a second, then it's dropped, and events carry no $insert_id, so a retry after a slow success can double-count.

There's no referrer or browser in the event, and clicks the redirect flags as suspicious are still forwarded. Check the click analytics dashboard when you need those.

Conversions aren't part of it. Track revenue where your user ID lives.

Related on the Blog

• Track UTMs end to end - the tagging convention the stitching pattern depends on.
• Short-link clicks vs GA4 sessions - why click counts and analytics sessions never match.
• GA4 server-side tracking via redirects - the same server-side idea, pointed at Google.
• Email click attribution for Mailchimp, Brevo and Klaviyo - forwarding clicks to the email side of the stack.
• Mixpanel vs GA4 for link analytics - which tool should hold your click data in the first place.
• Mixpanel EU data residency - the EU and India ingestion hosts and what a mismatch costs.