Are you moving away from Twitter and will Mastodon be your new platform to spread your articles, connect to your audience and make impact? Then you should know what your posts on Mastodon generate in terms of traffic and monitor. And that is not possible, or is it? In this post I explain how you CAN track your Mastodon-traffic.
Traffic from Mastodon is unknown
First thing you should know is that every view via the Mastodon-platform is missing information on which you can see the referrer is the social platfomr. Why? Mastodon has chosen to drop the referrer Mastodon.something from the tracking information. They do this by applying the noreferrer-tag on the links.
How to track your Mastodon-traffic
There is a way to track your mastodon traffic by adding so call utm-tags to your links. These parts of the url contain the website-link (utm_source), the medium (for example social) and a campaign (if applied).
An example of the parameters:
?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=socialfeed
When you add these tags to the link, your post will be opened with these parameters in the adressbar. Most analytics-packages will extract and process the utm-tags as values for the source and medium of the view. In this way instead of no source (for example ‘none’) and no medium (for example ‘direct’), you get the source ‘mastodon’ and the medium ‘social’.
