
Show HN: The HN effect on Dictionary Domains (traffic and revenue numbers) - thiele
http://blog.justinthiele.com/hacker-news-effect-traffic-revenue-of-dictionary-domains/
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gk1
> (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.

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yahelc
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](https://github.com/HackerNews/HN/issues/68)

~~~
gk1
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?

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yahelc
No, the only problem case is HTTPS->HTTP.

Default behaviors:

HTTP->HTTP: Referrer

HTTP->HTTPS: Referrer

HTTPS->HTTPS: Referrer

HTTPS->HTTP: No Referrer :(

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kbar13
it's probably a better idea for the browser to handle the scrolling.

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

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

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

