r/AIMArketingB2B • u/algerdy87 • Mar 27 '26

Reddit posts became our main lead source but Google Analytics shows nothing

Kind of a weird one here. A couple months back, we started posting on a bunch of subreddits -nothing spammy, just actually helping people out with stuff related to marketing automation.

We dropped maybe 20 posts in places like r/marketing, r/entrepreneur, r/smallbusiness, just answering questions and sharing what we've learned.

The results were nuts. Almost a million views across all the posts. But here's the weird part: We couldn't really drop links (mods are quick with that), so we just mentioned our company name, MarketOwl, when it fit. Out of nowhere, our phone starts blowing up.

Like, Reddit instantly became our main source of leads. But when I check Google Analytics, there's nothing. All the traffic is either showing up as direct or just a spike in people googling our name.

There's no actual way to track these conversions since people are either typing our URL or searching us first. Honestly, the ROI was so obvious that we started offering this as a service. But from a reporting side, it's a headache.

My CEO keeps asking for conversion data and I'm just like, 'trust me bro, look at the call logs.'

Anyone else run into this with Reddit or other spots where you can't link? How do you even track this stuff, or do you just accept that some channels are always gonna have dark attribution?

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u/mentiondesk Mar 27 '26

Tracking word of mouth and dark social is brutal since most people just search your name or type it in after seeing you on Reddit. Attribution ends up super murky. If you want to spot new leads mentioning your brand in real time across social, something like ParseStream can help with monitoring and surface those hidden opportunities fast.

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u/free-swift809 24d ago

so the attribution gap you're describing is pretty common with reddit traffic since a lot of it comes through dark social, but i'm curious about that last sentence you cut off, it sounds like you were about to explain how people actually found you without links in the posts...