What is indiehackers.com in my analytics?
23 September 2026 · by Nordva, who make Nordva Launch
The short answer
It means someone clicked a link to your site on Indie Hackers, the community where founders share what they are building. Browsers usually pass on only the site's address, not the page, so you know the visit came from Indie Hackers but not whether it was your post, a comment or your product listing.
- Referrer
- indiehackers.com
- What sends it
- A link clicked on Indie Hackers: a post, a comment or a product listing
- Nordva Launch counts it as
- Social
- Also shows up as
- www.indiehackers.com
Why visits show it
Indie Hackers has several places where a link to your site can sit: a post you wrote, a comment on someone else’s post, and a product listing in the products database, which links to the product’s website. A click on any of them sends the visitor to you with Indie Hackers as the referrer.
Some tools show www.indiehackers.com, others strip the www.. They are the same source.
What it hides
Browsers default to a referrer policy called strict-origin-when-cross-origin, so a link from one site to another passes on only the origin (the scheme and host), without the path. So your analytics sees indiehackers.com and nothing after it. The post that did well last week, the comment you left this morning and the listing you made a year ago all land in the same row.
That matters because they are different efforts. A launch post is a one-off. A product listing can keep sending a trickle for months. If you can’t tell them apart, you can’t tell which one is worth repeating.
How to see which post it was
Tag the link before you paste it. Tags are part of the address, so they arrive whatever the browser does with the referrer:
https://example.com/?utm_source=indiehackers&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=launch-postKeep utm_source the same everywhere on the site and change utm_campaign per place: launch-post, product-listing, comment-pricing-thread. A comment link with a tag looks a little odd, so if you would rather not, tag at least the post and the listing, and read the untagged rest as “comments and everything else”.
For the difference between the three tags and how to name them, see the UTM page linked below.
Where it goes in your reports
Most tools that sort traffic into channels have a list of social sites. Whether Indie Hackers is on that list varies, so in one tool it sits under social and in another under referral. Check your tool’s rule once, then read the numbers with it in mind.
With Nordva Launch
Launch counts indiehackers.com (and any subdomain) as social, and so does a link tagged utm_source=indiehackers or utm_source=ih. A tagged link keeps its utm_campaign, so each post shows as its own row in your analytics, and a UTM tag that names a channel (a medium such as email or social, or a known source) wins over the referrer when the two disagree. Paying customers by referring site work on every plan once Stripe is connected; grouping them by utm_campaign needs Builder.
When Launch is the wrong tool
If a handful of visits from Indie Hackers is all you want to know about, any analytics tool shows that. Launch is for when you want to know whether those visitors signed up and paid.
- What is www.indiehackers.com referral traffic?
- How do I track traffic from an Indie Hackers post?
- Which Indie Hackers post sent me visitors?
- MDN: Referrer-Policy (the default policy sends only the origin to another site) (read 23 September 2026)
- Indie Hackers: the products database, where each listing links to the product's website (read 23 September 2026)