What is medium.com in my analytics?

Why visits show it

Medium profiles come in three shapes, according to Medium’s help pages: the default medium.com/@name, a subdomain name.medium.com that the writer switches on in their settings, and a custom domain that a paying member can connect. Stories follow the same scheme. When a reader clicks your link in a story, the browser passes on the origin of the page they were reading, so you see one of:

• medium.com: a writer or publication on the default address.
• name.medium.com: a writer who has switched on the subdomain. The name tells you whose story it was.
• A domain you don’t recognise: a writer or publication with a custom domain, which replaces the Medium address entirely.

What it hides

Browsers by default send only the origin to another site, not the path. So medium.com tells you the platform and nothing more: your own cross-posted article, a story that mentions you, and a publication’s roundup all look the same. With a subdomain you at least get the writer, but never the story.

That makes Medium hard to judge. A story can keep sending readers for months after it is published, and without the story’s name you can’t tell an old article that still works from a new one that just landed.

How to see which story it was

In stories you write, tag your own links. Tags are part of the address, so they survive whatever the browser sends as referrer:

https://example.com/?utm_source=medium&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=how-we-priced-v1

Use the story’s slug as utm_campaign, so each one has its own row. If you cross-post the same article to several sites, change utm_source per site and keep the campaign, so you can compare them.

For stories other people write about you, you can’t add tags. There, the subdomain (when there is one) is your best clue, and asking new signups where they heard of you fills the rest.

With Nordva Launch

Launch counts medium.com and every subdomain of it as social unless a tag names another channel. A writer’s custom domain counts as a referral, because nothing in it says Medium. A UTM tag that names a channel (a medium such as email or social, or a known source) wins over the referrer. Paying customers by referring site work on every plan once Stripe is connected; grouping them by utm_campaign needs Builder.