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Question for @Gargron or other #Mastodon experts: I subscribe to a traffic analytics service called Clicky. For some reason traffic from Mastodon links doesn't seem to show up in their reports. When I inquired, all they could suggest was this. Please advise? Thanks!
#mastodon @Eugen Rochko
This entry was edited (8 months ago)
in reply to Charles Gaba

Eugen Rochko
Eugen Rochko
• •
That’s part of what’s happening. The other part is that traffic from Mastodon apps wouldn’t have a referrer either, and lots of people use apps instead of the browser. Lastly, even if you did get the referrer information it wouldn’t be a uniform value like “Mastodon” it would be up to 20K different domains.
in reply to Eugen Rochko

Charles Gaba
Charles Gaba
• •

Thanks for the speedy response! I knew there would be multiple instance domains, but I checked for the most obvious ones (mastodon.social, etc) and those aren't showing up either.

Your point re. apps vs. the website raises another question--do you know if that also hold true for Twitter, Facebook, Threads etc (that is, people using a link in other apps to visit my site wouldn't show up either)?

in reply to Charles Gaba

Eugen Rochko
Eugen Rochko
• •
I think so. The referrer header is also falling out of favor in browsers themselves. My impression is that it’s not going to be around forever.
in reply to Eugen Rochko

Charles Gaba
Charles Gaba
• •
Hmmm ok, so traffic to my site from various social media platforms is likely somewhat higher than Clicky thinks...but the *total* traffic should still be measured accurately, yes? That is, if it's from a SM app it just wouldn't know where they came from, or might categorize it as a "direct visit?"
in reply to Charles Gaba

Eugen Rochko
Eugen Rochko
• •
Yeah, they'd be counted as direct visits, I believe. Though I'm not sure how Clicky counts visits, for example, I have browser extensions that block third party scripts from loading, so perhaps my visits would not be recorded if Clicky relies on that.

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