What does discord.com mean as a referrer in my analytics?

Why it says discord.com and nothing more

Discord in a browser lives at discord.com, and every server, channel and message is a page under it. With the browser’s default referrer rule, a click from one site to another sends only the origin, the scheme and host (MDN). So the address of the channel is dropped, and what reaches you is https://discord.com/.

Other forms of the same thing:

• android-app://com.discord (or com.discord): the Discord app on Android (package com.discord on Google Play) passing its package name on. The Gmail app referrer page explains where that form comes from.
• discordapp.com: Discord’s old domain. Discord moved to discord.com on 4 May 2020, so you’ll see this one mostly in older reports.

Link click or login?

If you offer “Sign in with Discord”, some of your discord.com visits aren’t new people at all. Discord’s login is a round trip: your site sends the person to an authorisation page on discord.com, and after they approve, Discord sends them back to your site. The page they land on then has discord.com as its referrer. Why that happens, and how to stop it stealing credit from the real source, is covered in why login providers show up as a traffic source.

A quick way to tell them apart: look at the landing page. Visits from a link in a server land where the link pointed, usually your home page or a post. Returns from login land on your app’s callback or first page after sign-in.

What it hides

The referrer never says which server, which channel or who posted the link. A mention in a server with a big audience and a link sent to one friend look the same.

How to see which server it was

Tag the link before you post it. The tags are part of the address, so they arrive whatever the browser does with the referrer:

https://example.com/?utm_source=discord&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=makers-server

Use one utm_campaign per server, or per channel if you post in several.

With Nordva Launch

Launch counts discord.com, discordapp.com and the Discord Android app as social. A UTM tag that names a channel (a medium such as email or social, or a known source) wins over the referrer, so a tagged link is credited to the campaign you named. Launch’s script treats a return within a live session as the same visit, so a signup after a Discord login keeps the source the visit started with. Without cookies there is no session to go on, and a return from Discord login is then counted as a visit from Discord.