Total scans counts every redirect. Unique visitors counts distinct phones in the selected range. The gap between them is people scanning twice, and that gap is normal.
How we count
- Every scan of a dynamic code hits our redirect and is counted once, then sent on.
- Unique visitors come from a one-way hash of the phone's characteristics. It is not stored as an identifier and it cannot be turned back into a person.
- Static codes never touch our servers, so they cannot be counted. Analytics is a dynamic-code feature.
Scans we drop
Link previews (a chat app fetching the page when someone shares the link), crawlers, uptime checkers and command-line tools identify themselves and are skipped. You will still see the occasional preview bot with an unfamiliar browser name; it is a rounding error, not a problem.
Spikes almost always have a human cause: the link was posted somewhere, a newsletter went out, or the code appeared on a screen at an event. Check the Source card and the hour-of-day chart.
Put this to work on your codes
Save a code to your dashboard and you can re-point it after printing, lock it, and watch every scan. Premium is $4 a month.
Still stuck? Search the help center, or contact support and a person will answer.