You posted in three subreddits, the thread did well, and now someone wants to know what it did for the game. The honest answer for most studios is "no idea" because Steam tells you almost nothing about referrers by default. Here's how to set up tracking before you post so you can actually attribute wishlists, not guess at them.
Why Steam Makes This Hard On Purpose
Steam is not Google Analytics. There is no real-time visitor log on your store page, no per-referrer session view, and the numbers you see in Steamworks are batched and delayed. If you want to measure Reddit traffic to Steam in any reliable way, you have to tag the link before it leaves your hands once a redditor clicks a bare store URL, that visit is anonymous forever.
The second complication is timing. A redditor rarely wishlists in the same session they arrive. They open your page, read the description, maybe watch the trailer, then bounce and wishlist two days later from the Discovery Queue or a search. So the click and the conversion are decoupled, which breaks naive same-day attribution.
Tag Every Link With UTM Parameters
Steam reads standard UTM query strings on store URLs and surfaces them in the Traffic Breakdown report inside Steamworks. This is the single highest-leverage thing you can do, and most studios skip it. Append parameters to your app URL like this: store.steampowered.com/app/000000/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=launch_week&utm_content=r_pcgaming.
The trick is discipline. Use a consistent naming scheme across every post so the report stays readable instead of turning into forty one-off campaign strings. Keep source as the platform, campaign as the beat, and content as the specific subreddit or post.
- utm_source always "reddit" (don't mix in "Reddit" and "reddit_organic")
- utm_campaign the beat: "demo_drop", "next_fest", "launch_week"
- utm_content the subreddit so you can compare r/IndieGaming vs niche subs
- utm_medium "organic" vs "ads" to separate paid Reddit traffic cleanly
- Keep a shared spreadsheet of every tagged link you've ever published
Read The Steam UTM Dashboard The Right Way
In Steamworks, go to your app's Traffic page and switch the breakdown to UTM. You'll see visits, and crucially, the wishlist actions and purchases attributed to each tagged source over the selected window. This is where Reddit either earns its slot in your plan or doesn't. Look at the visit-to-wishlist conversion rate per subreddit, not raw visit counts a niche sub sending 300 highly-relevant clicks often out-converts a big sub sending 3,000.
Expand your date window to at least 7 14 days after a post. Because of the wishlist lag described above, a same-day snapshot will badly undercount what a thread actually produced. Pull the report a week later and you'll usually see the wishlist tail keep climbing.
Cross-Check With The Wishlist Curve
UTM data is your primary source, but it leaks link shorteners, mobile app clicks, and people who copy-paste an untagged URL all show up as "untracked." So corroborate with the raw wishlist graph in the Wishlists report. Note the exact date and time of each Reddit post, then look for the step-change in net daily wishlist adds against your normal baseline.
If a post drove real interest, you'll see a visible bump that decays over 24 72 hours. If the line is flat, the thread got upvotes but no buyers useful intelligence that vanity metrics on Reddit will never tell you. To translate those daily adds into a launch forecast, run them through the Steam Wishlist Calculator so a spike becomes a number you can actually plan around.
- Log post timestamp, subreddit, and the tagged URL for every post
- Compare net daily wishlists to the trailing 7-day baseline, not zero
- Attribute the 24 72h window after the post, not just the same day
- Treat upvotes and comments as reach signals, not conversion proof
Build A Repeatable Measurement Loop
Once a couple of campaigns are tagged and logged, you stop arguing about whether Reddit "works" and start ranking which subreddits, post formats, and beats convert for your specific game. That feedback loop is the entire point kill the sources that send empty clicks, double down on the ones that move the wishlist line, and bring real data to your next launch instead of screenshots of upvote counts.
If you'd rather have this instrumented and read for you across a full campaign, our Reddit Launch Support service handles the tagging, posting, and weekly attribution reporting so you can keep building the game. Either way, set up your UTM scheme before the next post goes live that's the step you can't add retroactively.