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Which recipes bring meal-plan subscribers, and which only bring readers.

A recipe site draws large, mostly one-time traffic from search and Pinterest, and earns from the few readers who want a weekly plan or a cookbook. Tally ties each meal-plan subscription and cookbook sale to the visit behind it, so you can find the recipes that turn cooks into customers.

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01How they sell

  • SubscriptionA weekly meal plan with shopping lists, billed monthly or yearly, that renews quietly while the reader keeps cooking from it.
  • One-offDigital cookbooks and themed recipe bundles, often released before the holidays.
  • FreemiumA free sample week of the plan for an email address, then the paid plan from the welcome emails.

02Payments it reads

  • StripeMeal-plan memberships on the blog itself charge through Stripe, usually by a WordPress membership plugin using the blogger's own account.
  • Lemon SqueezyCookbook PDFs sold as Lemon Squeezy products, with a checkout button at the end of related recipes.

What Tally can't read

  • Display ad income from an ad network isn't read.
  • Affiliate commissions on cookware or groceries aren't read; the click away is counted, the commission isn't.
  • Meal plans sold through a third-party plan service that takes the payment aren't read.
  • Cookbook sales at bookshops or online retailers aren't read.

03Where buyers come from

  • PinterestPins bring cooks for one recipe, often on a phone; few subscribe that day, and revenue per visitor shows the gap with search.
  • SearchRecipe searches bring a steady stream of cooks, and the page breakdown shows which recipes' visitors went on to buy a plan.
  • EmailThe weekly recipe email brings back regular readers, and with UTM tags each send shows its own subscriptions.
  • InstagramReels send visitors through the in-app browser, counted by Readable Direct as Instagram rather than Direct.

04What Tally answers

  1. Do subscribers read the recipe post or jump to the card?

    What they read compares scroll depth and engaged time on each recipe page for buyers and everyone else, so you can see whether paying readers read the story, the tips or only the recipe card.

    What they read

  2. Is Pinterest or search worth more in subscribers?

    The breakdowns put revenue beside each source and page, so Pinterest's many single-recipe visitors can be weighed against search by the plans they bought.

    Sources with revenue

  3. Does the sample week lead to paid plans?

    Count the sample-week form as a goal and add a funnel from sign-up to the plan page to payment; the goals view gives completions, conversion and the revenue of those visitors.

    Goals and funnels

  4. Are AI crawlers taking our recipes?

    The crawlers view counts requests from AI crawlers by crawler, operator, purpose and page, apart from visitors, once a server snippet on Next.js, a Cloudflare Worker or Express reports them, since most don't run scripts.

    AI crawlers

  5. Do plans sell on the day people plan their week?

    Peak hours shows sales by weekday and hour; it names the busiest three hours only when there are enough subscriptions to support it.

    Peak hours

05Numbers worth watching

Revenue per visitor
With traffic this large and mostly one-time, revenue per visitor by source is the fairest way to compare Pinterest, search and email.
Scroll depth
How far down a recipe post buyers go compared with everyone else, which tells you where a plan offer will be seen.
Goal conversion
The share of visitors who take the sample week, by source and page.
Renewals
Plan renewals by first source show which audience keeps cooking from the plan.

06An example

Example

Reading time

38s

median per pageview

Scroll depth

59%

average depth, of 27,219 views measured

Read to the end

27%

of measured views reached 90% or more

What they read

29,268 pageviews · last 30 days

Open a page to see how far down people read it, and how buyers read it before paying.

  2. /pricing5,527 views78% scrolled on average58s reading time, median

    58s

    reading time, median per view

    78%

    scrolled, on average

    5,527 views · 5,195 with a measured depth

    How far down they read

    Share of measured views that scrolled at least this far

    1. 25% — reached a quarter of the page:95%
    2. 50% — reached half of the page:84%
    3. 75% — reached three quarters of the page:69%
    4. 90%+ — reached the end of the page:48%

    Buyers before paying vs didn't buy

    • Buyers, before paying149 views · 107 buyers96% scrolled on average,1m 41s reading time, median
    • Didn't buy5,343 views · 3,816 visitors61% scrolled on average,44s reading time, median

    35 views by buyers after paying are left out of both.

    Buyers are visitors whose first sale came after viewing this page; only their views before that payment count.

Reading time runs only while the tab is visible and the visitor is active; it's the median per view. A view with no engagement report counts as 0s of reading. Its scroll depth is unknown, so it's left out of every scroll figure rather than counted as 0%. 27,219 of 29,268 pageviews have a measured depth.

Fig. 1What they read on the example site. For a recipe site, look at where buyers stop scrolling on a recipe page compared with other readers, and place the plan offer above that point.

07Setting up

  1. WordPressAdd the tag through your theme's header; it's about 3 KB and loads with defer, so it won't slow recipe pages beside the ads.
  2. StripeConnect the Stripe account your membership plugin uses; its charges link by email at best, so call tally('identify', { email }) on the sample-week sign-up.
  3. Mark the plan offer box with data-fast-goal so you can see which recipes send readers to it.

08Questions

  • Will Tally conflict with my ad network's scripts?

    It's a single deferred tag of about 3 KB that counts visits and goals; it doesn't touch ads. It doesn't read ad income either.

  • Can it tell me which recipe a subscriber first found?

    Yes. The first visit is recorded with the page it landed on, and each subscriber's journey shows the recipes they read before paying.

  • Our traffic is mostly from phones. Is that a problem?

    No. Device is one of the breakdowns, with revenue beside it. A cook who browses on a phone and pays on a laptop counts as two visitors, but the payment can still link by email if the phone visit was identified at the sample-week sign-up.

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