The other day a client who runs the Instagram of a clinic sent me a screenshot that basically read like a cry for help: it was a link like healthclinic.com/booking?id=88213&source=may-campaign-final-v2-ok to paste into a story. She asked, a little embarrassed: "can you make this look nice? And how do I know if anyone clicked?". I hear some version of that question every week — from social media managers, salon owners, people printing flyers. So I decided to stop explaining it over chat and build one tool that handles all of it.
The problem: your links are scattered out there, and none of them tell you anything
If you handle promotion for a business, you've probably lived through at least one of these scenes:
- The huge, ugly link. You need to paste a giant address onto a card, a flyer, your Instagram bio — and it spans three lines, nobody types it right, and it looks awful.
- You have no idea who clicked. You posted it, dropped it in the group, printed it on the brochure. And then? Did five people click or five hundred? On phone or desktop? Nobody knows.
- The UTM (that mess after the ?). Either you don't use it — and Google Analytics dumps everything into one "social" bucket without telling you which post worked — or you use it and type it inconsistently, uppercase here, lowercase there, and the reports turn to soup.
- The QR code that's a black hole. You printed 5,000 flyers with a gorgeous QR code. How many people scanned it? No clue. It could've been a hit or a waste — and you'll never know.
- The "link in bio" chaos. Instagram allows only one link. So you keep swapping it: today it points to bookings, tomorrow to WhatsApp, next to a promo. Whoever tapped it yesterday landed in the wrong place.
Notice the thread running through it: everything is scattered and nothing is measured. You work, you promote, you spend on printed material — and you're in the dark about what actually worked.
The solution: I bundled those five things into one tool
I got tired of watching good marketers make decisions on a hunch, so I built LinkUtils: a free link toolbox, made for people who are not technical. Nothing to install, no jargon. You open it in the browser and use it. Let me go pain by pain.
Shorten the link, build the UTM, and the QR code that finally measures
Shorten the link. You paste that mile-long address and get back a short, clean link that's easy to drop anywhere. You can choose the ending (the "slug" — instead of x7Kp9, make it /book), set a password to open it, and even an expiry date (handy for a promo that ends with the month — after that the link simply stops working).
Build the UTM without memorizing anything. Instead of typing that mess by hand, you fill in a few little fields — "where's it coming from? (Instagram, email…)", "which campaign?" — and the tool assembles the link correctly, always in the same pattern. Then, over in your Analytics, you can finally answer the question that matters: which post brought more clients? The UTM tells you.
Generate a nice QR code — and a trackable one. You create the QR in your brand's color and style and download it as a PNG to send to the printer. But here's the trick: because the QR points to your short link, you get to see how many people scanned it. Remember the 5,000 flyers? Now you'll know whether 30 or 800 people read the code — and whether it's worth reprinting.
A bio page and the numbers behind every link
Solving "link in bio". Instead of constantly swapping Instagram's single link, you create a bio page: one address that opens a neat little list with everything — booking, WhatsApp, menu, this month's promo. Put that one link in the bio and you're done; when the offer changes, you edit the page, not the bio.
And see the analytics for every link. This is the part that changes the game. For each link you can see how many clicks it got, when they happened, where they came from, and on which device (phone or computer). Suddenly that Tuesday post you thought had flopped turns out to be the one that brought the most people — and you only find out because the number is right there in front of you.
You don't need all of it at once. Shortening a link, building a UTM, and generating a QR code can be done without an account, on the spot. The free signup only matters when you want to save your links and track their clicks over time.
FAQ
Do I need to sign up to use it? Not to start — you shorten, build UTMs and generate QR codes on the spot, no account. The free signup only kicks in when you want to save everything and watch the clicks over time.
Does a printed QR still work if I change the link later? Yes, when it points to a short link: you swap the destination without reprinting the material — and you still see how many scanned it.
What's a UTM and why use it? They're tags at the end of a link that say where each visit came from; without them, Analytics lumps everything together and you can't tell which action brought clients. The tool builds them for you.
How much does it cost? LinkUtils is free: shortening, QR codes, UTMs, a bio page and analytics, all at no cost.