The short story on how a support request quickly turned into an update to Medium.com and what it means to you.

JotForm’s been somewhat active in our Medium publication. While some articles receive hundreds of views, others reach into the thousands, and still others accumulate tens of thousands. Medium is fun to use and makes writing a joy. It feels good to see your thoughts come together through its interface.

We were perplexed then, as to why the referral traffic wasn’t showing up in Google Analytics. How could a post approaching 50,000 views get zero clicks? Surely at least some users clicked on the links and visited pages on our own site. But we weren’t seeing them.

The questions that keep seagulls up at night

After doing some digging we discovered it’s because Medium serves its pages through a secure connection, and we do not. Apparently, for various technical reasons better described here, the referrer domain is not relayed in this situation. Bummer.

There are three potential fixes:

switch our site to always use a secure connection (https).

use tracking codes in our URLs. This is great, but it also greatly uglifies our links.

contact Medium and ask them to add an additional meta tag on every blog page.

The tag: <meta name=”referrer” content=”always”>

Having worked in web development enough, requesting a change that will affect every user and every page, seemed like a long shot.

I phrased my request citing the huge business benefit to Medium if they implement it.

CEOs, Marketers, and Site Owners will now see the impact of Medium in their Google Analytics.

The Final Result, on Medium.com articles!

It worked. Within days they implemented the fix. So now at least we see referral links from Chrome in our Analytics tools from Medium.com. Thanks to Medium and its agile engineers for continuing to make it the best blogging network available. Perhaps one day other browsers will come to support this meta tag in full as well.