Custom Domains Without Giving Up Your Analytics

The usual tradeoff with branded links goes like this: use your own domain and you lose the platform’s analytics, or keep the platform’s analytics and your links look like everyone else’s. We didn’t want to make Pro and Enterprise customers pick one.

Setting it up

Adding a custom domain is a DNS change, not a support ticket. You add the domain in your dashboard, point a CNAME record at us, and we verify it automatically — no waiting on a human to approve anything. Once it’s verified, new links you create can use links.yourcompany.com instead of pvtlnk.com, and existing links keep working exactly as they did before.

We don’t require you to move your whole domain over, either. A subdomain is enough, and it’s what we’d recommend — it keeps your DNS changes contained and easy to reason about if you ever need to roll them back.

Why analytics don’t break

The reason this is even a question for most tools is that branded domains and third-party analytics tracking often depend on the same piece of infrastructure — a redirect server that has to see the click before it can log anything. Some setups route custom domains through the client’s own infrastructure, which is great for branding and terrible for keeping analytics centralized.

We didn’t build it that way. Your custom domain still resolves through PVTLNK’s infrastructure — you’re pointing DNS at us, not standing up your own redirect server — so every click still hits the same pipeline as a click on a default pvtlnk.com link. Same hashed IP handling, same aggregated device and geography stats, same dashboard. The domain changes what the visitor sees in their address bar. It doesn’t change how the click gets recorded.

The part people don’t expect

Because the destination URL behind a custom-domain link is still encrypted client-side the same way every other link is, having your own domain doesn’t create a new place where plaintext URLs live. We’ve had customers ask, reasonably, whether branding a link with their own domain means their infrastructure is now involved in the decryption. It isn’t. The domain is cosmetic from a security standpoint — DNS just tells browsers where to send the request. The encryption guarantees underneath don’t change based on whose name is in the URL bar.

If you’re on Pro or above, custom domains are included, not an add-on with a separate bill. We think branding and privacy should be additive, not a menu of tradeoffs.