What is out.reddit.com in my analytics?

Why a click says out.reddit.com

Some clicks on outside links on Reddit don’t go straight to the destination. They go to out.reddit.com first, which answers with a redirect to the link. Reddit’s help pages don’t describe this address, so what we say about it is what it does when you request it, not a documented rule. Your site then sees out.reddit.com as the place the visitor came from.

Reddit does count clicks that leave it: its help centre describes a count of outbound clicks that verified publishers can see for links to their own domain in Reddit Pro. That count lives on Reddit’s side. It doesn’t add anything to what your analytics receives.

The other Reddit names

The same kind of visit can show up as:

• reddit.com (or www.reddit.com): a click from Reddit’s website that did not go through the outbound address.
• old.reddit.com: the same, from the older version of the website that some people still use.
• com.reddit.frontpage: the Reddit app on Android, passing on its package name (how app referrers work).

When you move from one site to another, a browser by default sends only the origin of the page it came from, never the path. So none of these carries the post’s address. They all mean Reddit: add them together.

What it hides

Which post, which comment and which community. A launch post in one subreddit, a helpful comment in another and a stranger recommending you in a thread all arrive as the same few hostnames. A visit that arrives with no referrer at all counts as direct instead; see why most of your traffic shows up as direct.

How to see which post it was

Tag each link you post, one campaign per post:

https://example.com/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=r-saas-launch

The full method, from naming campaigns to matching signups with payments, is in how to track which Reddit post brought your signups. Untagged Reddit visits are then posts and comments by other people, which you can find by searching Reddit for your domain.

With Nordva Launch

Launch counts out.reddit.com, old.reddit.com, reddit.com and the Reddit 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, and a utm_medium such as cpc or paid makes it paid.