Ok Patreon Product Team,
You all don’t have a way for us to put tracking code in for our main page or a built in system of your own for it. I already had enough trouble tracking the impact of certain promotional aspects of my Patreon because of this. There’s no information on things such as where people come from when they come to my main page, just -how many- land on my main creator landing page, the % of those that convert, the reasons they are or are not potentially converting, how much do they read, watch, etc.
This is important information to know. It gives me direction…a what to do next…what to do more/less of…
Before, to get around this and get some sort of interpretable data, I used timestamps in the notification feed along with a few …tricks…I shouldn’t have to use…that I’ll explain at the end.
Let’s say I promote my Patreon in some way - perhaps a youtube video or a collaboration with another creator.
I could at the very least beforehand…somewhat conveniently… track the effectiveness of that by looking at the time (specifically hh:mm:ss) a Patron signed up in the notifications feed…I can associate those times with when I did X or Y and get a rough idea of how well something worked. How clustered together are the times to each other? How does the duration between each new Patron sign-up change in relation to when I did X or Y to promote or I tweaked something?
But now in the notifications feed, there are no timestamps. Only DATEstamps. Either something is messed up in the settings in my browser, etc. or the Patreon Product team actually removed the timestamps.
The CSS styling changed on the page in tandem to when the timestamps were removed, which is one reason I thought it could be something on my side…but I don’t think so.
If you removed the timestamps…uh…why?
I’m pretty sure I could continually export a csv of Patrons to get this data again, but it’s extremely inconvenient to do that…especially when you look at the data alot.
As a side note:
Your internal tracking system for posts is a little limited…and…slow.to update…killing some of its practicality. We could do alot more with more insight. That internal system could have been built much better. You could drill down the information it provides for example. You could tell us the actual referring URLs. You could have it not be limited to only x number of recent past posts. You could tell us user flow. I already mentioned having it update faster.
In conclusion,
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Patreon product team please put the timestamps back in the notification feed.
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Please implement a way for us to track things…that is better than the current internal method…especially allow us to track the main creator page/landing page…
Number 2 brings up the tricks I mentioned earlier & was/am forced to use to try to get at least a LITTLE data for the main LP page. I’m sharing these publicly because I hope they bring this issue to light a little more.
I hope I don’t get in trouble for sharing them.
Patreon allows you to put externally hosted images on pages. You can exploit this to get data you otherwise wouldn’t have.
-1 Google Analytics workaround hack. You won’t really find this anywhere else on the internet (i looked very hard), but I just kept trying stuff until something worked and found this. You use an “external image” that pings GA…most.of the time…when a user lands on your page. I found that by using specifically this:
<img src="https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&tid=PUTYOURUATHING
HERE&cid=cid1&t=pageview&cm=campaign&dp=mainpage&dh=patreon">
Your UA thing looks like this
UA-111111111-1
or maybe this
UA-111111111
Google analytics will give you limited (very limited) data for that page. It’s better than before though. You put it in when you switch to code view by the way…seems to work best at the bottom.
You could also put additional images on other places around your Patreon if you want to get fancy/complex with it.
I noticed Patreon has their own GA tags on the page, and this could potentially cause a conflict…tag assistant (the extension) says it will, but that’s all I have to go off of. Be aware of this though. This may also very likely be one reason they don’t have a way for us to put google analytics in to REALLY track things…or havn’t addressed this issue. But I don’t know. It probably is at least a roadblock for them to implement a feature for us to get better tracking data…at least specifically with GA.
i do know they have all the stats internally…they know when users land on your page and when they convert, etc., their GA tracking tags are on every single page.
I can understand not allowing the full tracking code to be placed in something like the page editor, since it uses javascript tags, and javascript could be abused…but there are ways to create a built in system where a user just puts their GA UA id in and your backend spreads it throughout any pages they’d want to track. Youtube does this.
-2nd Method) This is better than using GA in some ways. It’s more accurate at least.
Host a small 1x1 image on a server you have control over and you can see the access logs or “visitor stats” for…like get something at hostgator…
Use the <img src="your image url on your server"> and place it on your main page or anywhere Patreon allows you to put an external image.
Whenever someone loads that external image from your server, your server logs their IP, timestamp, useragent, and some other things. It’s much more reliable imo than the GA hack, but you’ll likely have to export raw logs and use some filtering in excel to get the information in a somewhat useful format.
You could embed another image on your server on the thank you page and match up IPs for when someone converts too…and in that way track conversions as well as the devices (from useragent) that tend to convert.
However, this could require frequent excel work unless you know how to code something that does this for you. You also can’t get important metrics like bounce rate, time spent on page, behaviors, etc. using this method.
I believe I was trying this on posts I made with inline images too…but I think I was having issues…like they had a fetching service that made a cached proxy of the image, but honestly I didn’t try it too much - and I may be wrong.
-3) This is kind of obvious, but if you host your main intro video on youtube you can just see alot of the analytics for that video in youtube if people watch the video at least.
wish they could have added it in with all the new features they put out, seems like a small thing to code in, but lens looks cool if I can get it soon, and crowd casting will help, when I can get access to it as well