You could add an Id attribute to the same links in the email and reference it in the Link Id constraint available in the "Clicked Link in Email" smart list filter for focusing only on a specific link/set of links in the link performance report. For distinct links you can directly reference the email link in SL.

Using the Click link activity filter in the SL would reference data from the activity log; hence, the Marketo data retention policy would apply to the results.
If you want more concise link performance results (and not separated per email like in the ELP report, even though the clicks are summed up in the last row of report), you could use the bulk extract API to query the click activities for people who have clicked that particular link, and filter out the click activities on other links and then come up with a count of link clicks (if I'm not wrong, this would also include multiple click link activities done by a single person unlike if we were to just create and find the # of people in the SL with the clicked link in email filter).
FYR, click email activities are highly unreliable due to email scanners.