Short answer: you connect the click on your bio link to the sale on your checkout, and the click carries the platform label with it. Two mechanisms do this: UTM tags you set by hand on every bio link, or a link tracker that classifies the platform automatically and forwards the classification onto the destination. This post covers both, with the concrete steps for the Instagram-vs-TikTok question specifically.
Why Instagram Insights and TikTok Analytics don't answer this
Instagram Insights tells you views, likes, saves, profile visits, and bio-link taps for your account. It stops at the tap. Instagram cannot tell you whether the tap led to a sale on your external store, because the sale happens outside Instagram's environment. TikTok Analytics has the same limit: bio-link tap counts on your side, silence on what happened after.
The answer to "did that sale come from Instagram or TikTok" has to be built somewhere in the middle: the redirect that owns your bio link, plus the checkout tool that owns your sale. Both need to know about the same session for the answer to exist.
Path A: UTM tags, one per platform
- Build two versions of your bio URL. One with
?utm_source=instagram&utm_medium=bio, one with?utm_source=tiktok&utm_medium=bio. - Paste the Instagram version on Instagram. The TikTok version on TikTok. Different URLs, same destination.
- Read the UTMs on your checkout. Google Analytics on the checkout page will attribute each sale to
utm_source=instagramorutm_source=tiktokdepending on which URL brought the visitor in.
This works, but it requires the UTMs to survive through your redirect chain. Some checkouts (Stripe, Shopify) preserve URL parameters cleanly; others strip them.
Path B: automatic classification, one URL
A link tracker classifies the platform at the click, without you tagging anything. The mechanism: your bio URL is a tracked redirect. When a visitor taps it, the redirect reads the HTTP referrer and the in-app browser fingerprint (Instagram's webview and TikTok's webview have distinguishable signatures). It labels the click by platform, forwards the label to your destination via a small session parameter, and (if you also connect Stripe or install a small script on the store) follows the visitor through to the sale. linksync's link tracker does this on every plan; revenue attribution is a Pro feature.
The full click-to-sale trace
With Path B set up, the answer to "did this sale come from Instagram or TikTok" comes out of one dashboard. Every sale row includes the platform bucket the click was labeled under. In linksync, that shows up at /app/analytics#platforms next to the revenue for each platform.
The 30-second version
Either tag different bio URLs per platform and read UTMs on your checkout, or use a link tracker that classifies the platform automatically and forwards it to your checkout via a session parameter. The second approach is easier to maintain because you do not have to remember to tag every share.