Hundreds of links. One domain. Real clicks, not noise.

Summary

Loopla is a UK family events marketplace that helps parents find classes, clubs, camps, and days out for babies, toddlers, and children — and helps small local businesses reach families actively searching for what they offer. With a growing content library, a 30,000-subscriber newsletter, and affiliate links, media partner placements, and sponsored content across roughly 100 local businesses and media partners, Loopla needed a way to manage links centrally, brand them on its own domain, and verify performance independently.

Using Linkly, Loopla now runs 100% of its links on a branded custom domain, manages several hundred active links at any time, and tracks over 60,000 link interactions over a 90-day period, with the confidence that the numbers it reports to media partners and local businesses are real, not inflated by bot traffic.

Background: a single place for parents to find what's on

Loopla is a family events and activities marketplace. It helps parents find classes, clubs, and experiences for babies, toddlers, and children, and helps the local businesses who run them reach more families in their area. The idea grew out of founder Sophia Nomicos's own evenings spent searching online and comparing providers — she wanted one place where parents could search by location, age, day, time, and activity type and find what they need in seconds, not hours.

Alongside weekly classes and holiday camps, Loopla features family days out for weekends, and its what's-on newsletter for the city is a standout channel, with 30,000 parents subscribed.

The business side matters just as much. Most are small, local businesses without big marketing budgets. A free listing puts their classes in front of thousands of local parents who are already searching for exactly what they offer. Those who want more reach can pay for a premium layer: featured placement and promotion across Loopla's newsletter and channels that drives qualified local traffic to their own listings and sites. Because traffic and visibility are central to the premium offering, Loopla needs a reliable way to show businesses the value it delivers. Loopla also runs sponsored placements with media partners and uses affiliate links to booking platforms.

That mix of free listings, paid placements, media partnerships, and affiliate links is exactly what made centralized link management mission-critical.

The challenge: links that broke, multiplied, and couldn't be trusted

Before Linkly, Loopla inserted affiliate and media partner links directly into its content. The links were often long and unattractive, and while some platforms offered basic shorteners, the approach simply didn't scale as content and partnerships grew. Three problems compounded as the library expanded:

That last point came to a head with a striking discrepancy. Loopla's newsletter software showed around 110 clicks on a particular link, while the affiliate platform reported roughly 30 across all campaigns. Which number was real?

The solution: branded links on Loopla's own domain, with an independent source of truth

Loopla had used another link management tool before, but its analytics fell short — particularly on traffic quality and click behavior. That visibility gap was a main reason Loopla switched to Linkly two to three years ago, drawn by the promise of more control, custom-domain branding, and the ability to change where a link points without editing it across dozens of articles and campaigns.

How Loopla uses Linkly today

Loopla's core workflow is simple and manual by design — and because every link is centrally managed, the destination can be updated in one place whenever it needs to change.

Solving the discrepancy: seeing the real picture

When that 110-vs-30 click discrepancy surfaced, Linkly cleared it up quickly. A large share of the newsletter clicks turned out to be automated — the scanners and security bots that check links inside emails. It's a well-known characteristic of email click tracking rather than anything unusual to Loopla, and Linkly simply let the team see what was genuine without hours of back-and-forth with the affiliate platform.

Branding on 100% of links

Loopla now runs every link on its own branded domain. For a marketplace whose name needs to stay in front of parents wherever it shares, that consistency matters.

The features that carry the day-to-day

Loopla's reliance is on a focused set of capabilities rather than the full feature surface:

• Custom domains — 100% of links branded as Loopla
• Fast link creation — generating branded links in moments
• Easy duplication — cloning existing links to save time
• Quick editing and updating — changing destinations centrally
• Reliable click tracking — an independent, trustworthy view of performance

The independence is the point. Because Linkly sits outside the affiliate and partner platforms, Loopla treats it as neutral data — a second set of numbers to check them against, especially where those platforms give limited visibility into geography, device, or traffic quality.

Trustworthy numbers: separating real clicks from internet noise

The bot-and-scanner visibility has become one of Loopla's most valued benefits — not for the technical detail, but for the confidence it gives.

That confidence flows directly into how Loopla works with the businesses that pay for reach: when results are reported back to a media partner or local business, they're grounded in figures Loopla actually trusts.

Results

The moment that crystallized the value was a partner switching platforms completely. Without Linkly, that meant updating links by hand across the entire content library. Instead, Loopla changed the destination once, in minutes, and every existing link kept working.

And the time saved is matched by reputational protection — fewer chances for a parent to hit a broken or outdated link, which matters as much as the hours recovered.

Room to grow

Loopla's setup is intentionally focused, and it covers the essentials well. As the marketplace scales, the same Linkly foundation has room to do more:

• UTM parameters for channel comparison. Loopla uses UTMs only lightly today. Should it lean in, the goal would be comparing traffic quality by source — newsletter versus website versus paid campaigns — to direct effort and budget where it works best.
• Link tagging for organization. Loopla maintains a spreadsheet mapping events to partner brands, platforms, and URLs. Tagging links by platform or partner would make organizing and reporting easier; for now, naming conventions plus search handle it well.

These aren't fixes for problems Loopla has — they're headroom, room for the link infrastructure already in place to grow into a richer reporting and segmentation layer as the marketplace expands.

Frequently asked questions