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For SEO tools: do free checkers and affiliate reviews bring subscribers who keep paying?

SEO software wins customers with free checkers, guides and affiliate reviews, then sells monthly plans capped by keywords, projects or crawled pages. Tally links each subscription to the visit behind it and follows the renewals, so you can see which free tools and partners bring users who outlast a single project.

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01How they sell

  • SubscriptionTiers by tracked keywords, projects or crawl credits, monthly or yearly; agencies sit on the top tiers with many client sites.
  • FreemiumFree checkers and limited accounts, with the upgrade when a visitor wants full data or a second site.
  • One-offLifetime deals at launch or one-off audit credit packs, which bring a lump of cash and no renewals.

02Payments it reads

  • StripeThe usual billing for tiered plans and credit packs; trial charges, upgrades and refunds are read.
  • PaddleUsed by SEO tools selling worldwide that prefer a merchant of record; renewals and adjustments are read.
  • Lemon SqueezySmaller tools sell plans or credit packs through Lemon Squeezy checkout links, linked by the visitor's id in custom data.

What Tally can't read

  • Lifetime codes sold on a deal marketplace such as AppSumo are paid out by the marketplace, so they aren't read as sales.
  • Commissions paid through an affiliate network aren't read; Tally sees an affiliate's visitors and their revenue, not the payout.
  • Keyword lookups, crawls and reports inside your app aren't counted unless you send them as goals.

03Where buyers come from

  • Free checkersA free audit or keyword tool draws people with one question who may never return; revenue per visitor shows what that traffic is worth.
  • Affiliate reviewsBloggers and YouTubers review SEO tools with affiliate links; tagged links give each reviewer their revenue and their refunds.
  • SearchAn SEO tool's own rankings are its proof; posts that rank bring readers who already trust the method.
  • SEO communitiesForums, Facebook groups and newsletters for SEOs pass links around, and those visits can arrive in in-app browsers or with no referrer.
  • Agency ownersAgencies shopping for the whole team read the agency tier and white-label pages before buying.

04What Tally answers

  1. Do people who run the free checker ever pay?

    Make each run a goal with tally('checker_run', { tool }); the goals view gives completions, converting visitors and their revenue per tool, so a checker that brings payers is told apart from one that only brings traffic.

    Goals and funnels

  2. Which affiliate's customers stay past the first month?

    Lifetime value by first source, with renewals and repeat rate, separates an affiliate whose readers subscribe for one project and cancel from one whose readers keep paying.

    Lifetime value

  3. How often do AI crawlers fetch our guides?

    The crawlers view counts AI crawlers' requests by crawler, operator, purpose and page, apart from visitors. Few of them run scripts, so add the server snippet for Next.js middleware, Cloudflare Workers or Express to see them.

    AI crawlers

  4. Do buyers come back to the free tool several times first?

    Visits before buying and the pages buyers saw are in path to purchase; a checker that turns up again and again in buyers' paths is the one doing the convincing.

    Path to purchase

  5. Was our launch deal worth running?

    If you sold it through your own checkout, every lifetime sale has a receipt with its source, so you can count what the deal brought and from where; codes sold by a marketplace aren't among them.

    Receipts

05Numbers worth watching

Refunds and chargebacks
Refunds and chargebacks by source; a promotion whose buyers ask for money back within days is selling to the wrong people.
Repeat rate
The share of customers who paid more than once, by first source, which catches one-project subscribers early.
AI crawler requests
AI crawler requests per page, to see which guides assistants are reading before they cite anyone.
Revenue per visitor
Revenue per visitor by landing page, the fair way to compare a free checker's crowd with a pricing page's few.

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, buyers against everyone else. For an SEO tool, check whether buyers scroll further through your guides than people who came only for the free checker.

07Setting up

  1. Next.jsIf the site and free tools run on Next.js, put the tag in the root layout and add the middleware snippet, so AI crawlers are counted as well.
  2. Lemon SqueezyAdd the visitor's id to the checkout's custom data when the pricing page builds Lemon Squeezy checkout links.
  3. Send a goal from each free tool when it returns a result, so tool runs can be compared by source and followed to revenue.

08Questions

  • Will SEO crawlers hitting our site inflate the visitor count?

    Crawlers that don't run scripts never make visits, since visits come from the tag running in a browser. AI crawlers that your server reports are counted apart, in the crawlers view.

  • How are credit packs counted?

    Each pack is a one-off payment with its own receipt and source; a customer who buys several shows them all on their row, and the repeat rate counts them.

  • Can affiliates' links be told apart?

    Yes, with a UTM campaign or source per affiliate on their link; each then has a row in the sources breakdown with the revenue of the buyers credited to it.

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