When a post about your site takes off, the numbers jump, and you are left guessing which link did it. Mentions closes that gap. Every 20 minutes trckable looks for your site in a few public places, and ties each thing it finds to the visitors that arrived from it.
Open Mentions
On the Briefing's chart a Mentions chip says how many there are. The page is a feed you can filter by place and by period, with what each one said and how many people it brought. You can also reach it from the ⋯ menu.
Until something is found, the page is a calm "No mentions yet" with a live "Watching" dot, the words being watched, and the places trckable looks. Nothing is broken: nobody has written about you yet.
Know what is watched
trckable searches for three kinds of words:
- your site's address, always;
- its name, when the name is distinctive (it holds the address's own label, or is two words or more), because a lone ordinary word would find everything but your site;
- up to 10 words you add yourself in Settings → Mentions: a product name, a handle, anything people call your site.
It looks on Hacker News (stories and comments), in news and blogs, and on Product Hunt. Product Hunt needs a developer token from the server's owner; without one that place is simply hidden. In a news article, your word has to be in the headline, the summary or the address to count.
Read what a mention brought
Each mention keeps a link, a short title, the sentence that named you, the author's public handle, the platform's own numbers (points, comments, front page) and the time. Click one and a panel shows the traffic it sent on top of your usual traffic, what those visitors read and where they are from.
The visitors are the ones who came from that place in the ten minutes before the mention was posted and the two days after. Each visit belongs to one mention: when a place has several, one ends where the next begins, so the same traffic is never counted twice.
Good to know. On big shared sites such as Reddit, GitHub or Medium, a visit from the site says nothing about one post, so only a visit that came from the post's own page counts. When a mention's address cannot name its page, it shows no visitors rather than a guess.
See it where you already look
A mention shows up in more places than its page:
- the main chart marks it, and a site with a fresh one shows Talked about in the list of all your sites;
- Live shows "From Hacker News now" while one is sending people, and the chip opens Mentions;
- Replay says it when a jump is explained: a line such as "posted on Hacker News, 212 visitors came from it" (see Replay).
To be told without looking, open Settings → Alerts and switch on Mention. It is off until you turn it on, and it sends a message when one brings 20 or more visitors or reaches the Hacker News front page. How alerts reach you is in Live view and surge alerts.
What leaves your server, and how to stop it
To search, trckable sends your site's address, name and the words you added to Algolia (Hacker News), Google News, GDELT and, with a token, Product Hunt. Nothing about your visitors is sent. What comes back is public: a link, a title, a handle and a time, kept with the site and removed with it. On a server you run yourself, TRCKABLE_MENTIONS_EVERY=0 turns the search off.
Try it in trckable
Open Settings → Mentions, add the name people use for your site, then watch the Mentions card under your chart. Not on trckable yet? Install it first, it takes a few minutes.
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