I recently saw a huge spike in the traffic on my website based on Google Analytics. When I look at the source, it only says that the main contributor is email, making me assume that someone shared a link to my website in an email distribution list. I would like to find out which list this is, such that I can learn from it and target similar lists given the great conversation rate.
It was mentioned in the land of random newsletter:
<a href="https://thelandofrandom.substack.com/p/the-crypto-restaurant-apocalypse" rel="nofollow">https://thelandofrandom.substack.com/p/the-crypto-restaurant...</a>
FYI, the site that I am speaking of is <a href="https://umbrellatoday.app" rel="nofollow">https://umbrellatoday.app</a> (Do I Need An Umbrella Today?). Have you come across this site in an email being promoted, please let me know.
I am experiencing something similar on the App Store. Apple’s almost completely useless App Store Connect analytics report a significant percentage or occasional spike of unit downloads via web or app referrer with no way to dig into what site or app is linking to the app. I don’t want to add any external analytics for privacy protection though and google isn’t much help anymore.
I run into this problem too. Some email lists publish archives on the web, so googling might find them.<p>Others do not, and there's no way I can think of, especially in retrospect, to discover them.<p>The same is true, in my experience, with FB and LinkedIn groups.
Have you done a search for your app on Twitter, ordered by newness? Quite often you'll find a reference to an email list alongside your app in someone's twitter posts.
Reminds me a lot of an old Desktop widget I had that would tell me if I would need a jacket or not. There is something appealing about simple applications like these!
Similar experience with Instagram. With Facebook I can at least use the search to an extent (if page is public) but Instagram story links have no traceability.
This
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070369" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070369</a>
It's likely not possible. The best backdoor I can think of is that if the email list uses any standard email marketing tools there should be a persistent web hosted version of the newsletter somewhere that you can search for.
Go to your logs and look for ulm tags in URLs and redirects. From that you may be able to work backwards to at least the provider (Hubspot, etc). You might even see refers from the web-based version of the email.
If you had a lot of conversions, why not reach out to some of the people that converted? Talk to them about a range of things to make your product better, one of which would be how they found you.
Hey - David from The Land of Random newsletter here. I shared it on Feb 7. I'm glad to hear you got a bunch of traffic from it! It was the second highest clicked link.