How to automatically create free Reddit account analytics with Make and Google Sheets
Reddit has been around since 2005 now, and it’s moved beyond a niche platform where people go for excellent memes (though it still fulfils that role excellently :) ).
With over 52 million daily active users Reddit has turned into a platform that you can’t afford to ignore.
Apart from it’s loyal userbase, Reddit is also the home of thousands of niche communities where you can connect with highly targeted audiences. As we clearly saw from the GameStop events, Reddit has the power to shape public opinions, drive traffic, create movements and much more. And if you’re a business that knows how to leverage it, you can definitely generate sales from Reddit.
So if you’re not using Reddit as a part of your digital marketing strategy, you probably should. In this post, I’ll explain how you can track the growth of a Reddit account (doesn’t necessarily have to be one of yours, you can track your competitor’s growth as well with this method), so you can measure the efficiency of your marketing efforts on Reddit.
Disclaimer: this article contains affiliate links for Make. This affiliate links gives you 1 month access to their Pro plan, and 10 000 free operations to experiment with. It comes with no extra cost to you, and I might get a commission in the future (if and when you would decide to pay for Make).
Trackable data
With this automation, we will be tracking publicly available data for an account.
We’re not going to log into any account, but rather use a publicly available .JSON endpoint to get our data. The URL we’ll be getting our data from is the following one:
https://www.reddit.com/user/insertusernamehere/about.jsonFor this article, we’ll be using the main Reddit account for demonstration purposes. The Karma can be seen on the profile page:
With this endpoint, we can efficiently collect the following data:
- Total Karma
- Comment Karma
- Link Karma
- Awardee Karma
- Awarder Karma
There are more data points available on this endpoint, but these are the ones that are most interesting to analyze marketing efforts (or account growth).
Karma?
Karma on Reddit is a reflection of how much your contributions are of value to the community. Each post or comment an account makes on the platform can be up- or downvoted by other members of the community. The score (karma) of a submission, is the combined amount of up- and downvotes of that particular submission.
Every time you submit a post or comment, other users can up- or downvote your submission.
With this automation, we’ll track the total amounts of Karma (per subtype) for an account. This means that we’ll be looking at the combined amount of Karma for the account as a whole, and not for individual posts. This will be a topic of a future post.
Types of Karma
As mentioned, we’ll be tracking 5 types of Karma. For clarity’s sake, here’s a drilldown of their meaning.
The basic types:
- Comment Karma: the total score of an account’s comments
- Link Karma: the total score of an account’s posts
- Total Karma: the combination score of all karma types
Special types:
On Reddit, you can also Award posts. Giving awards is a way to show appreciation for an exception contribution to Reddit. You can read more about the mechanism on Reddit’s Help Center.
- Awardee Karma: The total score of Awards received
- Awarder Karma: The total score of Awards given
Let’s get building!
Now that we know the data we’ll be gathering, it’s time to start building out the automation. For this post, we’ll be using Make.com (formerly Integromat) and Google Sheets.
Create a new Google Sheet
Create a new Google Sheet and add the following headings to the columns on the first row (1):
- Username
- Date
- Total Karma
- Link Karma
- Comment Karma
- Awardee Karma
- Awarder Karma
Create a new scenario on Make
Now, go to Make.com and create a new scenario. If you don’t have an account yet, you can create one for free, and run this scenario without any costs. Going forward, I’m assuming you have a basic knowledge of how Make works.
If you don’t know how Make works, or how to create a scenario. You can follow this guide.
When you have created a new scenario, add the HTTP Module & the Google Sheets module to the scenario. From HTTP, add a “Make a request” module. From Google Sheets, add a “Add a row” module.
Your HTTP Module should be the first, and Google Sheets should be the second module.
Configure the HTTP module
Open the HTTP module and add the following configuration:
- URL: https://www.reddit.com/user/reddit/about.json
- Body type: Raw
- Content type: JSON (application/json)
- Parse response: check this box to Yes (this will process the .JSON response so that we can use it going forward.
Click OK to save the settings. Now, right click the HTTP module, and choose “Run this module only”. This will fetch the data from the .JSON endpoint.
If the data was retrieved correctly, you’ll see the output in the module:
Configure the Sheets Module
Now, open your Add a row module and select the Spreadsheet you want to use. Select the Sheet Name (in my case Data). And enter the values in the columns:
For the Data field, we have to get a bit creative, and insert a now variable, and format it to a readable date.
You can find the now variable under the date and time tab. Wrap that in a formatDate() formula to get the date format you want to report.
In my case, I use Day-Month-Year formatting. If you want to use this, you can copy this piece of code directly into the value field:
{{formatDate(now; "DD-MM-YYYY")}}Click OK on the pop-up, and your scenario should be ready to go! Yes, it’s that simple :)
Run the scenario
Now the scenario is complete, you can click the “Run once” button at the bottom. If all goes well, both modules should be green, and you’ll have data in your Sheet:
Schedule the scenario
Now, manually running this is all fine. But we want this data daily right? Well, luckily that’s super easy as well.
On the Make interface, click on the schedule button (red arrow)
In my case, I scheduled the scenario to run daily, at 16:00 in the afternoon. If you’ve chosen a moment, click OK. And active the scenario (the big slide button with ON).
And that’s it! You’ll now get daily karma updates for the account you’ve chosen.
Next steps
Now that you have the daily updates coming in, you can start calcuting metrics with formulas. For example, one of the easiest things to do, is to add a formula that tracks daily changes in the Karma (up or down).
From here, you can also build dashboard in your Sheets and have fancy charts to show your progress.
This way, you know when you had a successful day on Reddit, and can trace down what made it successful, and then do more of that.
How would you improve this automation?
If you’ve made it this far down the post, I want to thank you!
Now comes the inevitable question: How would you further improve this automation? What’s lacking? Are you adding in more formulas to calculate metrics? Please let me know! I’m dying to find out!
If you need help with implementing it, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me through my website.