Invite Links: Track Which Channel Actually Brings Guests to Their Photos
TIME&SPACE · Organiser's Playbook
Hand out as many labelled, trackable links to your one event URL as you need. Each one counts its own visits, so you see which channel actually sent people to their photos.
Invite Links: Track Which Channel Actually Brings Guests to Their Photos
In short: An invite link is a named, trackable address that points to your event's one real URL. Create one per channel, WhatsApp, Instagram, an email blast, and each records its own visit count, so you find out which channel actually sent people to their photos instead of guessing.
Your event needs one real URL. That part does not change. An invite link is not a second address for the same event. It is a labelled door into the same room, and the door remembers who walked through it.
The problem it solves
You post the event link on Instagram, send it in a WhatsApp group, and put it in a follow-up email. Three channels, one URL, zero way to tell which one did the work. The QR code at the venue adds a fourth source with the same problem: a single visit count that mixes everyone together.
An organiser deciding where to spend time next year needs to know whether the WhatsApp group of 40 regulars outperformed an Instagram story seen by four thousand people. A single shared link cannot answer that. Four differently labelled links can.
What you actually do
From the event dashboard, create a link and name it: "WhatsApp, VIP table", "Instagram story", "Email, day-after reminder". Pick a channel from a short list, WhatsApp, Instagram, email, SMS, link, or QR, so visits roll up by channel as well as by individual link. Each one gets its own short code and its own URL.
That is the whole creation step. No guest list to build, no email to send unless you want to send one yourself. The link works the moment it exists.
What a guest sees when they open one
A page with the event's name, date, location and cover photo, branded in the event's own colours, with a single way forward: into the event gallery to scan for their photos. It loads without an account and without a password. The visit is recorded the moment the page opens, not on a later click, so the count reflects who actually arrived rather than who merely clicked something upstream.
What the organiser sees back
Per-link visit counts, and the same numbers rolled up by channel, next to how many of those visits have led to someone's photos actually being claimed. Over a few events this turns "I think Instagram works better" into a number you can act on: more effort into the channel with the ratio to prove it, less into the one that only ever produced a line in a spreadsheet.
Why this is not a second public URL
Every event still has exactly one indexed, searchable, canonical page: /e/[your-event]. Invite links are intentionally excluded from search results and from the sitemap. They exist to be shared by you, one at a time or in a batch, to a channel you chose, not to be found by somebody searching your event name six months later. That search traffic belongs on the one real URL, where the event's full description, dates and photographs live for good.
Think of it as the difference between your shopfront and a flyer with your shopfront's address printed on it. Hand out as many flyers as you like. There is still only one shop.
The short version
One real URL stays the single public address for your event. Invite links are a thin, labelled, trackable wrapper around that same address, built so a WhatsApp send, an Instagram story and an email reminder stop looking identical in your analytics. Create one per channel, check the visit counts after the event, and spend next year's effort where the numbers, not the guess, say it worked.
Founder, TIME&SPACE