Thanks for sharing these stats! What sounds even crazier to me is that at least 72% of upvotes were from people who didn't bother to click. That's assuming everyone who clicked also upvoted. So the 72% figure is probably much higher in reality.
I read this via email and thought it was useful enough to come here and click on the little heart and then realized I wouldn't have actually thought to do that if it weren't for the topic of the post. So I guess that's some evidence that here on Substack, clicks and likes are underestimating impact. But I guess Substack probably tracks opens in email, so maybe never mind. In conclusion, useful post, thank you.
I think you might be missing a pretty big factor (which you shouldn't, as the DDGo founder =): the click number you see in analytics is almost always undercounted due to Ad/tracker blockers.
You know that a lot of people browse with privacy protections (ad blockers, Brave, Firefox's ETP, Safari's ITP, uBlock, etc.). Those don't stop Reddit from counting an impression, but they often block the tracking code/script on the page.
A few reference points:
- Global ad-block usage is around 30% [1].
- Plausible compared its server logs vs GA on Hacker News/Reddit spikes and found ~58% of visits missing in GA for tech-heavy audiences [2].
Just the fact that the biggest chunk of your traffic source is attributed to "direct" is quite revealing.
No, not in this case actually. As someone who runs a privacy company, I'm well aware of the issues around blocking analytics scripts. In this case I believe it is being based off the referrer header, which is generally not blocked by the standard ad/tracker blockers.
I have several other posts that have very little direct traffic but a decent amount of reddit traffic. The only reason it was higher in this case is that it was added to a large (non-substack) email newsletter. I could see this in real time because the newsletter came later, and reddit earlier, and when reddit hit there was little direct traffic but you could see all the traffic from reddit.
Well, I wasn't sure if Substack uses the Referer header. In retrospect, it was dumb of me to assume otherwise. I’m aware that the Referer header is rarely stripped.
Like when you attempt to share (typically via Tumblr bookmarklet), message will say "site does not wish for article to be shared". Sometimes this is a glitch & if you refresh, it will then work. But there are a number of pages on the site where it will not (though your most recent article is OK).
Thanks for sharing these stats! What sounds even crazier to me is that at least 72% of upvotes were from people who didn't bother to click. That's assuming everyone who clicked also upvoted. So the 72% figure is probably much higher in reality.
I read this via email and thought it was useful enough to come here and click on the little heart and then realized I wouldn't have actually thought to do that if it weren't for the topic of the post. So I guess that's some evidence that here on Substack, clicks and likes are underestimating impact. But I guess Substack probably tracks opens in email, so maybe never mind. In conclusion, useful post, thank you.
I think you might be missing a pretty big factor (which you shouldn't, as the DDGo founder =): the click number you see in analytics is almost always undercounted due to Ad/tracker blockers.
You know that a lot of people browse with privacy protections (ad blockers, Brave, Firefox's ETP, Safari's ITP, uBlock, etc.). Those don't stop Reddit from counting an impression, but they often block the tracking code/script on the page.
A few reference points:
- Global ad-block usage is around 30% [1].
- Plausible compared its server logs vs GA on Hacker News/Reddit spikes and found ~58% of visits missing in GA for tech-heavy audiences [2].
Just the fact that the biggest chunk of your traffic source is attributed to "direct" is quite revealing.
---
[1] https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users
[2] https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-adblockers-missing-data
No, not in this case actually. As someone who runs a privacy company, I'm well aware of the issues around blocking analytics scripts. In this case I believe it is being based off the referrer header, which is generally not blocked by the standard ad/tracker blockers.
I have several other posts that have very little direct traffic but a decent amount of reddit traffic. The only reason it was higher in this case is that it was added to a large (non-substack) email newsletter. I could see this in real time because the newsletter came later, and reddit earlier, and when reddit hit there was little direct traffic but you could see all the traffic from reddit.
Well, I wasn't sure if Substack uses the Referer header. In retrospect, it was dumb of me to assume otherwise. I’m aware that the Referer header is rarely stripped.
A lot of your posts are not shareable on Tumblr.
How so?
Like when you attempt to share (typically via Tumblr bookmarklet), message will say "site does not wish for article to be shared". Sometimes this is a glitch & if you refresh, it will then work. But there are a number of pages on the site where it will not (though your most recent article is OK).