Show HN: The HN effect on Dictionary Domains (traffic and revenue numbers) (opens in new tab)

(blog.justinthiele.com)

12 pointsthiele12y ago9 comments

9 comments

gk112y ago

> (annoyingly, traffic from Hacker News is counted as ‘Direct’ and not a ‘Referral’ in analytics, so it’s hard to get actual numbers)

You can edit how sources are defined using Custom Channel Groupings. So you can define traffic from HN as Social or Referral. Unfortunately this settings won't be retroactive, but it will work for future traffic.

yahelc12y ago

That's not the issue here. The issue is that Hacker News is on HTTPS, but the link he posted to dictionarydomains.co isn't. Browsers don't pass a referrer on links between HTTPS->HTTP. So, visits from HN don't have a referrer. Custom Channel Groupings won't help in this case, because GA is completely blind to what visits are referrer-blocked HTTPS

I've seen people bypass this by either:

1. Having a HN specific URL (sometimes just ?hn attached to the URL)

2. Just having HTTPS landing pages.

One thing that could help fix this behavior (on newer browsers) would be for HN to explicitly authorize passing the referrer using `<meta name="referrer" content="always">` or "origin"

EDIT: Filed a bug to get this implemented on HN, since Chrome and Safari support it, and Firefox support is ongoing: https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/68

gk112y ago

Thanks for that detailed explanation. I learned something new.

Do you know if it's the same case if the referrer link is HTTP->HTTPS?

1 more reply

thieleOP12y ago

Great tip! I'll set that up.

kbar1312y ago

it's probably a better idea for the browser to handle the scrolling.

thieleOP12y ago

Agreed. The scrolling function was part of the Wordpress theme. I find it kind of annoying as well.

turoczy12y ago

Thanks for writing this up. It's interesting to see how rapidly the traffic trails off these days.

samuelhulick12y ago

Great write-up! What do you plan on doing with your email list?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

9 comments

gk112y ago

> (annoyingly, traffic from Hacker News is counted as ‘Direct’ and not a ‘Referral’ in analytics, so it’s hard to get actual numbers)

yahelc12y ago

I've seen people bypass this by either:

1. Having a HN specific URL (sometimes just ?hn attached to the URL)

2. Just having HTTPS landing pages.

One thing that could help fix this behavior (on newer browsers) would be for HN to explicitly authorize passing the referrer using `<meta name="referrer" content="always">` or "origin"

EDIT: Filed a bug to get this implemented on HN, since Chrome and Safari support it, and Firefox support is ongoing: https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/68

gk112y ago

Thanks for that detailed explanation. I learned something new.

Do you know if it's the same case if the referrer link is HTTP->HTTPS?

1 more reply

thieleOP12y ago

Great tip! I'll set that up.

kbar1312y ago

it's probably a better idea for the browser to handle the scrolling.

thieleOP12y ago

Agreed. The scrolling function was part of the Wordpress theme. I find it kind of annoying as well.

turoczy12y ago

Thanks for writing this up. It's interesting to see how rapidly the traffic trails off these days.

samuelhulick12y ago

Great write-up! What do you plan on doing with your email list?

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse