On your Substack dashboard, there's three main places you'll want to check to see how your publication is doing: Posts, Subscribers, and Stats.
Posts
The Posts page tells you about individual posts you've published and where your readers came from.
- Total views: The number of views on your post, similar to page views. They include both web, email, or the Substack app.
- Free subscription: The number of people who subscribed to your email list from that post.
- Paid subscription: The number of people who signed up for a paid subscription from that post.
- Shares: The number of people who clicked “Share” from that post.
- Recipients: The number of unique people who received an email or Substack app notification about this post.
- Open rate: The percentage of people who viewed this post after receiving an email or Substack app notification about it.
- Link clicks: The percentage of openers who clicked a given link in your post and the total click count.
- Traffic sources: The top traffic sources that readers found a post from.
Subscribers
The Subscribers dashboard tells you about who’s signed up to your publication and how it's growing.
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All subscribers: Includes free and paid subscribers.
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Paid subscribers: The number of paying subscribers on your list. This includes gifts, complimentary, and free trial subscriptions. To see a more detailed breakdown, click the "Paid subscribers" tab on the graph, which will show you paid subscribers, comps, gifts, and free trials.
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Gross annualized revenue: How much money you make per year, before Substack’s fees and credit card transaction fees (charged by Stripe). This figure is annualized, meaning that we look at your revenue at any given time and figure out what it would look like over the course of 12 months, assuming the mix of monthly and annual subscriptions remains constant.
Stats
The Stats page displays metrics for up to five categories: Traffic, Emails, Pledges, Subscriber report, and Network. The Unsubscribes tab is only visible for paid publications.
Traffic
The Total traffic section tells you about the sum of all visits to your publication across platforms on a specified time period you can pick in the date calendar.
Top sources shows where visitors came from and and how many subscribed.
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Visitors: The number of visitors who've been to your Substack (includes any post, not just your homepage).
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Source: Where your visitors came from, also known as referral traffic.
Under your referral traffic, if you see "about" or "post" in parentheses, such as "facebook.com (post)", it means your visitors came to that type of page on your Substack (e.g. your About page or a post you’ve published). Other websites can pass their own referral information through links, however, so not everything you see in parentheses is something that we track.
Emails
The Emails section provides a table of data for every post you send out, including the title, send date, audience, number of email deliveries and opens, open rate, free and paid subscriptions in 1 day, likes, comments, and shares.
By default, the table is sorted by most recent posts first, but you can sort it by different criteria by clicking on the relevant column header. For example, to see your posts with the highest open rate, click the “Open Rate” header and it will sort from highest to lowest. Click the same header again, and you will see your posts sorted from lowest to highest open rate instead.
Unsubscribes
If you have paid subscriptions, the Unsubscribes section provides you with a list of reasons why previous paid subscribers chose to unsubscribe from your publication. Your unsubscribe stats also include their emails and unsubscribe dates.
Subscriber report
On your Subscriber report tab, you’ll see dashboards for:
- Subscriber retention
- Paid growth rate
- Audience Insights
These metrics can provide insights into the health of your paid subscriptions by helping you understand how your paid audience is growing, the rate that they're staying as paid subscribers, and where your Substack is read.
Learn more here on what your Subscriber report shows.
Network
The Network section tells you how many of your subscribers came via the Substack network. The Substack publication and payment ecosystem makes it simple for readers to find and subscribe to their favorite publications.
If you have payments enabled on your publications, the chart and table break down your paid subscribers into four categories based on how they came to your publication:
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Substack platform features: Readers who subscribed as a direct result of Substack’s platform features, such as leaderboards, recommendations, or promotions.
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Substack saved credit cards: Readers who could subscribe to your publication in only one click because they already had a payment method on file with Substack.
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Substack existing accounts: Readers who could more easily subscribe to your publication because they already had a Substack account.
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Imported accounts: Readers who you imported.
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New accounts: Readers who came directly to your publication.
If you have Podcasts enabled, learn more here about your Podcast dashboard.
