Analytics for product launches: measure what the spike was worth

Launch traffic is loud, short and misleading. A front-page Hacker News post can send thousands of visitors in a few hours, most of them curious rather than qualified; a smaller niche newsletter mention can quietly produce more customers. And by the time you look, the spike is over.

VisitTrack shows launch traffic live (visitors on the site right now, a minute-level chart and a real-time globe), credits every signup and payment to its source, and lets you follow the launch cohort through weekly retention afterwards. Launch-day spikes never break tracking or get sampled.

The launch metrics that matter

1. 1.Visitors per launch source, by hour

   Product Hunt, Hacker News, X, Reddit, newsletters — each one's curve. Switch the chart to hourly or minute granularity to see exactly when each wave hit.

2. 2.Signup rate per source

   Signups divided by visitors for each launch source. It separates communities that want your product from ones that wanted to look at it.

3. 3.Revenue from launch visitors

   If you sell through Stripe, Polar, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle or Razorpay, each payment is credited to the launch source of the buyer's first visit — including buyers who come back weeks later (in standard mode).

4. 4.Launch-cohort retention

   Weekly cohorts in the Retention tab show whether launch-week visitors come back in weeks 2–4. A launch that brings no returning users was a marketing event, not traction.

5. 5.Decay and long tail

   Traffic on day 7 and day 30 from the same sources. Listings that keep sending visitors usually rank or got shared onward.

Questions founders ask on launch day (and after)

How many people are on the site right now?

The live view shows visitors active in the last five minutes and the page each is on; the fullscreen globe makes it a good launch-room screen.

Is Product Hunt or Hacker News converting better?

Filter by referrer (producthunt.com, news.ycombinator.com) and compare signups per visitor.

Did the launch bring paying customers?

The Revenue tab lists payments with their first-touch source; filter by the launch referrers.

Are launch users still around a month later?

Open Retention and read the launch week's cohort row at weeks 2–4.

A launch analytics checklist with VisitTrack

Do steps 1–4 at least a day before launch, and test them on the live site (localhost is ignored by default).

1. 1

   Install and verify

   Tag on every page, then open the live site and check you appear in the live view. Exclude your own and your team's browsers with ?vt_ignore=1 so launch-day refreshes don't count.

   <script defer data-site="SITE_ID" src="https://visitrack.app/tracker.js"></script>

2. 2

   Record signups and payments

   visitrack("signup") after account creation, and the billing webhook connected with the visitor id passed into checkout. See custom events and revenue attribution.

3. 3

   Create goals and a funnel

   Signup as the primary goal, plus a funnel / → /pricing → signup → payment_completed.

4. 4

   Tag the links you control

   Your own posts, newsletter and community announcements get UTMs so they're not lumped into direct traffic. Product Hunt and Hacker News referrers are recognized without tags.

   https://example.com/?utm_source=x&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=launch
   https://example.com/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=launch

5. 5

   Add live social proof (optional)

   Embed the live-visitors badge or "now viewing" widget on the landing page, or share the public dashboard if you're launching in public.

6. 6

   Review at day 7 and day 30

   Revenue by source, the funnel, and the launch cohort in Retention. Ask your assistant over MCP to summarize the launch if you prefer.

Example: a developer tool's launch week

Launched on Product Hunt and as a Show HN on the same day; numbers for the first seven days.

Illustrative numbers for a typical site of this kind, not real customer data.

Hacker News brought the most visitors and the least business; the newsletter mention brought one-thirteenth of the traffic and more paying users than HN. For the next launch, that argues for more targeted newsletter placements and less time refreshing the HN front page.

VisitTrack vs other ways to measure a launch

Third-party details as of October 2026.

Upvotes measure attention on the launch platform; analytics measures what that attention did on your site. See the indie hackers guide for running launches across several projects.

What VisitTrack costs around a launch

A launch month can be several times a normal one; pick the tier for normal months and let the launch spill over.

Every feature is on every plan; the price only follows monthly events (pageviews, custom events and payments, counted across all your sites). Bot and AI-crawler hits and session replays are never billed. Yearly billing is ten months' price for twelve, every plan starts with a 14-day free trial with no card, and there's a one-time lifetime deal from $59.