NetFloodMeter

You may not really need that much information about your customers

Here's an incomplete list of what you don't need to know:

• What share of your customers is mobile. You already design mobile-first.
• What sources general traffic come from. You don't need the breakdown of organic vs. keyword search vs. direct, for example.
• Where people live, or what languages they speak.
• Where people go when they arrive at your site.
• What people searched for to get to your site.
• What your bounce rate is.
• Your audience's ad-based profile characteristics, like their probable age, gender, income, etc.

You don't need that stuff, and you don't really want it.

In the event of a sudden influx of traffic, you just want to know where you should be paying attention.

You don't just have "customers", you have an audience

You have a following because people are genuinely interested in your content, whether it's through online courses or books.

You may be expanding your audience in a number of ways, such as:

• Writing guest blog posts
• Appearing on podcasts
• Starting a joint venture with another content creator

Each of these methods gives you the opportunity to reach a whole new audience. If you've done your research, then you'll have a good idea whether that new audience is interested in your material.

Are you getting new subscribers from your referrals? Are your landing pages converting?

Sometimes guest blog posts take off after the fact, even months or years later. If you're producing valuable evergreen content, anyone could link to it at any time. Wouldn't you want to know when that happens?

Privacy-respecting referral-flood monitoring

Here's how it works:

1. Your site will request a JavaScript snippet on each page request. Until your traffic reaches a certain threshold, the returned snippet will be blank.
2. Once your traffic reaches the threshold, we'll start to your track your referral headers.
3. If there is a traffic flood from a specific source, we'll send you a push notification (or SMS, email, or any webhook)

That's it.

If someone famous tweets about you, you'll be notified. If your site is at the top of Hacker News, we'll let you know.

If 42% of your traffic is from IE6 (I'm so sorry) you won't hear about it from us, because we are deliberately not tracking anything other than referral headers.

NetFloodMeter is run by Robert Bolender.