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Ask HN: How to find the email distribution list that promoted my site recently?
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.
- DarrenDev 5y agoHave 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.
- gamerDude 5y agoIf 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.
- s-xyz 5y agoFYI, the site that I am speaking of is https://umbrellatoday.app https://umbrellatoday.app (Do I Need An Umbrella Today?). Have you come across this site in an email being promoted, please let me know.
- thelandofrandom 5y agoIt's a great website! I shared it on my newsletter "The Land of Random" https://thelandofrandom.substack.com/p/the-crypto-restaurant-apocalypse https://thelandofrandom.substack.com/p/the-crypto-restaurant...
- pettycashstash2 5y agoIt would be helpful if you provided the resource location…
- Arrezz 5y agoReminds 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!
- mooreds 5y agoI run into this problem too. Some email lists publish archives on the web, so googling might find them. Others do not, and there's no way I can think of, especially in retrospect, to discover them. The same is true, in my experience, with FB and LinkedIn groups.
- truted2 5y agoI’ve searched for my domain on Facebook and LinkedIn and if the group or profiles are public it found the links (mobile LinkedIn search is limited so you need to use the Desktop version)
- colinwilyb 5y agoWhy not drop a temporary popup or form on your page? "How did you learn about Umbrellatoday? [ info box]"
- truted2 5y agoAnecdotally I tried this once and not one of the 50,000 users that visited replied.
- iforgotpassword 5y agoThe trick is to communicate that you genuinely want to interact with the user. None of those atrocious, disrespectful popups that show up 10 seconds after I click on a search result going "hey wanna subscribe to our newsletter?" - "NO ffs, I was searching for a solution to a tech problem but now at least I know your site is complete garbage and I can stop reading" Be honest, put the text directly below the main content, make it unobtrusive and start with something along the lines of "hey, I'm the guy running this site, and I wonder why sometimes I get a lot of visitors ..." With that, if you get any reply, it's probably the most honest one too.
- amelius 5y agoThis would make me close the page.
- acco102 5y agoThis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070369 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30070369
- 5cott0 5y agoI 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.
- truted2 5y agoSimilar 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.
- zufallsheld 5y agoIt was mentioned in the land of random newsletter: https://thelandofrandom.substack.com/p/the-crypto-restaurant-apocalypse https://thelandofrandom.substack.com/p/the-crypto-restaurant...
- tootie 5y agoIt'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.
- bombcar 5y agoGo 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.
- gnicholas 5y agoDo you have an email signup on your site? When we get an influx of interest, I’ll often ping a few new customers to ask where they heard about us.
- thelandofrandom 5y agoHey - 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.
- s-xyz 5y agoHi David, that is amazing to hear! Thank you so much for sharing!