big records where each visit came from — the placement you copied the link for, the campaign tags on the URL, and the site that referred it — so you can tell which post, platform, or promo is actually doing the work.

Most of the time you don't set any of that up. You pick where you're posting at the moment you copy the link, and big handles the rest.

Copy a tagged link

Open a link's stats page and find the Copy a tagged link box.

1. Under Where, pick the placement you're about to post to: Instagram bio, Instagram story, Instagram post, TikTok bio, YouTube description, Newsletter / email, X (Twitter), Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or Other.
2. Optionally type a Campaign name — spring-sale, black-friday. Leave it blank if this is just your everyday bio link.
3. Hit Copy link.

What lands on your clipboard is an ordinary-looking big link:

itsjustbig.com/l/k3f9x

No parameters, nothing to explain, nothing that reads as tracking. It sends people to exactly the same destination as the link you started from — the campaign tags are held on big's side and applied when someone clicks. Pasted into a bio or a story, it's indistinguishable from any other big link, and every click through it is filed under the placement you picked.

Copying the same placement again gives you the same link back. big doesn't mint a fresh code each time you hit copy, so re-posting your story every week keeps all of those clicks on one row instead of splitting one placement across five codes. Change the campaign name and you get a different link, because that's a different thing you're measuring.

Tagged links don't clutter up Manage → Links — they belong to the link you made them from rather than standing on their own, and deleting that link removes them with it.

Your destination still sees the tags

The clean-looking URL is about big's link being presentable, not about withholding data from anyone.

When someone clicks, big applies the stored tags on the way through, so the site on the other side receives them as normal utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign parameters. Google Analytics, Shopify, or whatever you're sending people to attributes the visit exactly as it would if you'd typed the parameters yourself. If the destination URL already carries a parameter of its own, its value wins — the full passthrough rules are in Links.

Links sent in DMs are tagged for you

Links that an automation sends in an Instagram DM are recognized by big when they're clicked. There is nothing to pick and nothing to configure — put the plain short link in your automation as you always have.

Those clicks are attributed to Instagram, with a medium of dm, instead of falling into Direct. This is the one place where tagging genuinely can't be forgotten, and it matters because DMs are where a lot of creator traffic actually lives.

Two honest edges:

• It covers links in the text of a message. A link on a button inside a rich card or carousel isn't recognized yet, and its clicks record untagged.
• Recognition lasts 72 hours from when the message was sent. People do open message requests days late; past that window the click still counts, it just counts without the DM attribution.

If you send a tagged link through a DM, the placement you chose wins — big won't overwrite your choice with dm.

What gets recorded

Tags are recorded on three things: link clicks, form views, and form submissions. That last one is the useful part — see From clicks to leads.

Public form links can be tagged too. There's no channel picker on a form link, so you add the parameters yourself:

itsjustbig.com/f/summer-signup?utm_source=instagram&utm_campaign=spring

Channels, not hostnames

Raw referrers are messy. Instagram alone sends traffic from instagram.com and l.instagram.com, which would otherwise sit in your stats as two or three separate rows that all mean "Instagram."

So big classifies each visit into a single channel — Instagram, TikTok, Google, Email, Direct, and so on — using the campaign tag first and the referring site as a backup. One platform, one row.

Direct is not a channel so much as the absence of one. It means big had no signal at all: someone typed the URL, opened a bookmark, or came from an app that strips the referrer. It is not a synonym for "typed it in."

Tagging is what makes it reliable

This is the honest part, and it matters more than anything else on this page.

Attribution from referrers alone is unreliable, because referrers go missing constantly. Links opened inside an app — Instagram's in-app browser, DMs, WhatsApp, iMessage — very often arrive with no referrer at all. Since messaging apps are exactly where creators share links, this isn't an edge case.

The practical consequence: real Instagram traffic will land in Direct if the link wasn't tagged. big isn't guessing, and it won't invent a source it doesn't have.

A tag is a signal you control, so it survives all of that. What's changed is the price of it. Tagging used to mean pasting ?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=bio into your bio — accurate stats in direct tension with a link you'd actually want to show people, and the link usually won. That tradeoff is gone. The tagged link you copy looks like every other big link, so there's nothing left to weigh: pick the placement, paste the clean link, get the right channel.

What this does not mean is that attribution is now automatic across the board. It's automatic for links sent in DMs, and it's handled for you on any link you copy through the picker. A link you share some other way — pasted from your browser bar, forwarded by someone else, copied out of an old post — carries no tag, and Direct will quietly absorb it.

Tagging by hand

Manual UTM parameters work exactly as they always have, and they're still the right tool in two cases: you're sharing the link somewhere big's copy button wasn't involved, or you want a source or campaign the picker doesn't offer.

Add the parameters to the end of the link before you post it:

https://itsjustbig.com/l/abc?utm_source=instagram&utm_campaign=spring-sale

A convention that holds up:

• utm_source — where you posted it. instagram, tiktok, newsletter, podcast.
• utm_campaign — the name of the promo. spring-sale, black-friday, launch-week.

If the link already has a ? in it, join the extra parameters with & instead.

Spell them the same way every time, in lowercase. Instagram and instagram are two different values, so an inconsistent capital letter splits one campaign across two rows and makes both look half as big as they are. Pick a spelling, write it down, reuse it. (This is the failure the picker exists to prevent — it always writes a spelling big recognizes.)

You can also hand-tag a tagged link. Anything you put on the URL beats the tags stored behind it, so adding ?utm_campaign=black-friday to your bio link reuses the placement and overrides just the campaign.

From clicks to leads

Because tags are recorded on form submissions, not just views, you can see which channel and campaign produced actual leads rather than just traffic.

That's the difference between "TikTok sent 4,000 clicks" and "TikTok sent 4,000 clicks and 3 signups, while the newsletter sent 200 clicks and 40 signups." Traffic volume and lead quality rarely rank the same way, and only the second view tells you where to spend your time.

Channel and campaign appear alongside your existing numbers in Form stats — both on the workspace overview and on each form's own stats tab.

Untagged links still work

They just work less well. An untagged visit is classified from the referring site where one exists, and falls back to Direct where one doesn't. Nothing breaks and no clicks are lost — you simply get a coarser answer, and a larger Direct bucket than reality.

What this can't tell you yet

A visitor's source doesn't follow them into their contact record. Attribution is recorded per click, per view, and per submission — it is not yet stitched onto the person. So you can ask "which campaign produced the most leads last month" and get a real answer, but you can't yet open a single contact and see the campaign that first brought them in. That's a limitation of how attribution is stored today, not a setting to switch on.

Attribution is per visit, not a journey. If someone clicks your Instagram link on Monday and submits the form from a bookmark on Thursday, those are two separate records. The submission carries whatever tags were on the URL at the moment it was submitted — which in that example is nothing, so it counts as Direct. big does not model multi-touch attribution.

What's excluded

Bots and link-preview fetchers are excluded here exactly as they are in link stats — the automated fetch an app makes to build a link preview never creates a channel row.

Privacy

big never stores your visitors' raw IP addresses. Campaign tags are marketing metadata — they describe where a link was posted, not who clicked it — so nothing on this page identifies an individual visitor. Everything here is counted from your own workspace's records.

How fresh is this

Attribution is recorded at the moment of the click, view, or submission, and the breakdowns are computed live when you load the page. There's no overnight batch and no precomputed rollup.