What is l.instagram.com in my analytics?

Why you see l.instagram.com

Taps on outside links in Instagram are commonly seen passing through l.instagram.com on the way to your site, and your analytics records that address as the referrer. Instagram’s help pages don’t name it. Instagram is part of Meta, and Facebook’s link shim, which works the same way from the outside, is documented by Meta’s engineers: it checks outgoing links for spam and malware and tells the site the visit came from Facebook without revealing where on Facebook. See the l.facebook.com page for that one.

You may also see instagram.com itself, and taps in the Android app can arrive as com.instagram.android, the app’s package name (how app referrers work). All of them mean Instagram.

Bio links and stories

For most accounts there are two places a link lives:

• The bio link. Instagram lets you add websites to your profile, up to five. They stay until you change them.
• The link sticker in a story. Instagram opened this to all accounts in October 2021; new accounts and accounts that repeatedly break its Community Guidelines don’t get it.

Both arrive as the same referrer. Only a tag tells them apart.

What it hides

Whether it was the bio or a story, which story, and whether it was your account at all: another account linking to you in its own bio looks the same.

How to tag them apart

Give each place its own link:

https://example.com/?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=bio
https://example.com/?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=story-launch-day

Keep campaign=bio on the profile for good, and use a new campaign name for each story that carries a link. Untagged Instagram visits are then someone else’s link.

Where it goes in your reports

Tools that know these hosts put them under social. Tools that don’t list l.instagram.com as a separate website under referrals. Read it as Instagram.

With Nordva Launch

Launch counts l.instagram.com, instagram.com and the Instagram Android app as social. A tagged link keeps its utm_campaign, so your bio link and each story show as their own rows in your analytics. A UTM tag that names a channel (a medium such as email or social, or a known source) wins over the referrer when the two disagree. An fbclid in the address isn’t taken as a sign of an ad, since Meta adds it to ordinary links too: tag your ads with a utm_medium such as cpc or paid and they count as paid.