I have a suspicion that visits from Mastodon sites aren’t counted. Do you want to test this with me? Because the stats have looked off for a while now.
I could follow your itch.io link on Mastodon and poked around both signed in and signed out, then you could check if any visits show up in your analytics. l
They also may be more likely to use Do Not Track settings or similar - not sure how that affects itch metrics. Fediverse peeps tend to be pretty privacy minded.
Also, I doubt either of us gets thousands of impressions on their toots on Mastodon. So I'm not really comfortable in making definite statements about the CTR on Mastodon. I don't have any data to base such statements on. (And for the record, I think the lack of analytics on Mastodon is a good thing because it is a social network, not an advertising platform. I treat it as a platform where I can talk about my games with interested peeps but I try not to think of that as "advertising".)
As I said before. That’s why I’ll test out what Analytics picks up one of these days.
Still, there’s a lean toward moral stances there. Itch.io continues to promote X-Twitter, angered many gamers with its actions last year, and presents ads on download pages.
I figure the lack of posts about Itch.io in the Mastodon areas I hang around are an indicator, too. I post to #Itchio about once a month but seem to be one of the most active users of the tag. But me and server admins are wary of some of the biggest instances.
In the end, tho, there’s not enough info to know.
I agree that maintaining visitor privacy is good, actually.
