Build audiences from clicks on pages you do not own

Platforms supported out of the box

Pixels are stored once per workspace with a name and an identifier, then attached to as many links as you like from a multi-select in the link dialog. Change an identifier in one place and every link using it follows.

The built-in providers cover the platforms that matter for retargeting budgets today, and a custom option covers everything else. For context: as of August 2026 Short.io supported two retargeting platforms and Cutt.ly nine, while Switchy, the specialist in this category, listed fifteen.

• ✓Meta — Facebook and Instagram audiences
• ✓Google Ads — remarketing tags
• ✓Google Analytics 4 — measurement alongside the ad tags
• ✓TikTok — the pixel most link tools still omit
• ✓LinkedIn — insight tag for B2B campaigns
• ✓X — the former Twitter pixel
• ✓Custom — any HTTPS script or tracking-image URL from any other platform

How the pixel fires without breaking the redirect

A pure redirect never executes JavaScript, so a link with pixels attached serves a minimal interstitial page instead: the tags load, and the visitor is forwarded to the destination immediately afterwards. The page carries the brand attached to the domain rather than ours, and it exists only for links you explicitly gave pixels to — every other link keeps the plain, fast redirect.

The forwarding URL on that page is signed and expires after a few minutes, which means the interstitial cannot be lifted out of context and reused as an open redirector pointing anywhere the sender likes. Social media crawlers are answered earlier in the pipeline with preview markup and never reach the pixel page, so a shared link still renders a proper card and no phantom audience members are collected from bots.

Custom pixels accept the URL of a script or tracking image, not a block of markup. The surrounding code is generated by the platform, and identifiers for the known providers are validated against a strict character set before they are used. That rule exists because the interstitial runs on your clients' domains, and one workspace pasting arbitrary markup must never become everyone else's problem.

Campaigns this unlocks

The clearest case is earned media. A journalist covers your product, you share the article through a branded short link, and every reader who clicks becomes retargetable — the coverage does more than one day of traffic. The same applies to industry reports, comparison pages and any content that persuades on your behalf without living on your domain.

Affiliates and media buyers use it to build audiences from traffic they send to advertiser pages, so the value of a campaign survives the click. Community managers use it on shared resources inside newsletters and chats, where a link is the only piece of infrastructure they control.

Because the pixel is a property of the link, an agency can attach a client pixel to every link created inside that client workspace, and the audiences are collected in the client advertising account rather than a shared pool.

Consent and hygiene

Pixels fire on the interstitial, which means their behaviour is auditable in one place instead of being spread across the pages you link to. Which links carry which pixels is visible in the link list, and every change is written to the audit log with the person and the timestamp.

Pixels are attached per link rather than per domain, so a link that should not build an audience simply has none attached, and no platform-wide toggle can accidentally opt an entire account in. The click analytics on our side stay independent of any of this: they never depend on a third-party tag being present, and disabling every pixel changes nothing about your own reporting.