My site has 38 free tools and got 24 organic visitors last quarter

The author operates a site containing 38 free developer tools, which attracted 24 organic visitors during the last quarter. The site includes various features such as JSON formatter, JWT decoder, base64 encoder, PDF merger, OCR, background remover, JSON-LD markup, markdown versions of each page, and integration with three analytics vendors.

After thoroughly examining the analytics, the author discovered a bug that erroneously attributed all server-side events to a user named "anonymous". This bug led to inaccurate conversion tracking and inflated traffic numbers. By fixing the bug and implementing proper distinct user identification, the author found that the actual number of unique human visitors was significantly lower than previously estimated.

The author also analyzed the traffic breakdown by country and discovered that a significant portion of the visitors were bots or automated scripts. By stripping out the automation and excluding the phantom traffic, the real number of engaged visitors dropped to under 150 per quarter. The author realized that the site was competing for keywords that were owned by high-authority sites, which made it extremely difficult to rank for those terms.

To address this issue, the author created shareable result cards that encode results into URLs with predefined, non-attacker-controlled parameters. This approach allowed for better distribution and virality of the tools, ultimately generating more organic traffic.