Understanding click events

Every click on an Elido short link generates a single click event in ClickHouse. Knowing what's in the event — and what isn't — is the difference between fast dashboards and frustrated support tickets.

What we record#

For each click, we store:

• Link ID — which short link was clicked.
• Workspace ID — for multi-tenant isolation in queries.
• Timestamp — UTC, microsecond precision.
• Country — derived from the visitor's IP via MaxMind GeoLite2. The IP itself is not stored.
• Device class — desktop / mobile / tablet, derived from the User-Agent.
• Browser family — Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc. No version-level granularity by default.
• Operating system family — Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android.
• Referrer host — t.co, linkedin.com, etc. Just the host, not the path.
• UTM parameters — utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content, utm_term if present in the destination URL or appended to the short URL.
• Bot flag — true if the User-Agent matches our bot list (Slackbot, Twitterbot, security crawlers).

What we don't record#

• Full IP address — discarded after the geo lookup.
• User-Agent string verbatim — we extract the family fields and discard the raw string.
• Click coordinates / mouse movement / dwell time — we're a redirect service, not a heatmap tool.
• Cookies on the redirect — we don't set any.

The pipeline#

1. The edge POP (Hetzner FRA / OVH FRA / OVH SGP) handles the redirect in under 20ms.
2. The click event is fire-and-forget into Redpanda — the redirect doesn't block on it.
3. click-ingester consumes the topic and batches inserts into ClickHouse (~5s lag in steady state).
4. The dashboard's analytics tab queries ClickHouse via analytics-api.

This means a click you just made won't appear in the dashboard for a few seconds. If you're testing and don't see your click immediately, wait 30 seconds and refresh.

Retention#

Click events are retained for 365 days by default. Pro+ workspaces can configure shorter retention (60 / 90 / 180 days) for GDPR data-minimisation. Business workspaces can extend retention to 7 years for regulated industries.

After retention, we delete the row entirely — there is no "soft-delete" or aggregated archive that still ties events to a user.