Reddit Clicks does not show on the Google Analytics Dashboard
Has anyone noticed the same thing?
I have made some post on Reddit, but the acquisition doesn't show anything like Reddit.
What I noticed is that my direct traffic is very high. I guess it is recorded as direct instead of showing Reddit.
I think @patwalls has been experiencing the same thing too
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Reddit clicks will often show up as “direct” within Google Analytics. I have one website which gets 1000s of visitors from Reddit each month, and I’d estimate upwards of 75% of them are labeled as direct.
Notice this as well a week ago.. had a very popular post on /r/medicalschool subsequently generate a surge of visitors- about 10% showed up on analytics as coming from reddit but the rest did not. Was able to identify the source from the directed page. Was disappointing as we thought maybe we were getting an organic boost from a google update.
Is it possible it could have something to do with the high installation rate of ad blockers by reddit users?
I checked by nginx access logs a few months back after a well-performing reddit post & there was a fair few more unique IPs that were shown in GA.
Google analytics relies on client-side JavaScript. It will be disrupted by a wide variety of ad and tracking blockers (and Reddit is running an ad network very similar to FB's these days). That's why I run all my event analytics from the back-end.
On top of that, you'll may be seeing behavior from
target="_blank"links that just open an entirely new tab. What % of visitors this affects really depends on your subreddit and how likely that group is to be using the Reddit app vs old site vs redesign and how much they customize their preferences.