Understanding your Substack stats

Crunching them numbers

Jun 19, 2023

∙ Paid

Edit: Do note that this article is from June 2023, so a fair bit is out-of-date. There are many more options and features now available. At some point I’ll do an updated version. Many of the concepts in here are still valid.

As a teenager I really hated maths. Anything involving numbers provoked immediate mental shutdown, which is probably a contributing factor to me becoming a writer rather than an accountant.

Yet, here we are.

As part of treating my Substack publication a bit more like ‘a business’1 (ugh), I thought I should take a closer look at some of my stats. It also seemed like something that might be helpful for others.

Native Substack stats

One of the reasons I’ve moved away from Wattpad is its lack of decent analytics. The built-in stats are very limited and there’s no way to connect to external services such as Google Analytics, which always left me in the dark about where readers were coming from (and where they were going).

Substack is very different. I suspect this is due to the platform being developed with paid subscriptions as the #1 priority: Substack wants writers to be professionals and have paid subscribers, because that’s literally how Substack makes money. As such, it provides some really good off-the-shelf analytics.

A recent addition is the dashboard overview. Here’s a snippet from mine:

This is an at-a-glance summary of recent activity. Without delving any deeper, I can immediately get a handle on my publication’s growth (or lack thereof):

Free subscriber growth continues at a steady and strong rate.
Views are down on the previous 30 days, but are still decent. The relative drop is due to my ‘Why I moved from Wattpad to Substack’ article doing unexpectedly well the previous month.
Open rate is hovering around 30%, which is fine for newsletters generally, though I’m aware if lower than many Substacks. This is probably in part due to the 50/50 nature of Write More: some people will only want the fiction, some people will only want the writing stuff.

I didn’t include the specific numbers, but I can also see that my paid subscriptions haven’t budged in the last 30 days. I continue to find it difficult to convert people, especially as I don’t really want to go all-in on paywalling stuff.

Subscribers

The Subscribers tab provides a ton of info, showing growth as well as details on individuals.

Looking at my paid subscriber growth, three things jump out:

I had a small flurry around April 2022. I’m not sure why.
I had a long plateau throughout most of 2022 and 2023.
I’ve had a bit of a flurry (relatively speaking) since April 2023. This coincides with the launch of Notes.

Here’s the free subscriber growth:

That’s a bit more exciting. Couple of things here:

A slight increase around mid-2022. If I recall correctly, this was when Substack launched its recommendations feature.
A significant acceleration in April 2023, when Notes launched. Notes has been the single biggest boost factor for my publication in its history.

Below the chart is a list of your subscribers. Did you know you can filter it by all sorts of criteria?

It’s a great way to gain insight into different cohorts. You can even email a custom segment of your list. For example, you could do this:

This filters the list down to my most engaged free readers. I could then send them a specific message inviting them to upgrade to a paid subscription, or simply to send them a ‘thank you’ for being a regular reader. These emails to custom segments don’t appear on your publication, so they’re more like private communications with your chosen group.

Of course, you don’t want to abuse this power and irritate your most valued readers. Use with restraint!

One other thing: you can click into an individual subscriber to see their activity; specifically, you can see which emails they have opened. I had a paid subscriber halt their subscription recently, and was able to pop into their info to find out what they had been reading. They were clearly a reader of my fiction, having opened every chapter of Triverse, but had not opened a single one of my non-fiction articles on writing.

At some point I should analyse whether my paid subscribers are here for the fiction, the non-fiction, or a bit of both.

Stats

Over on the stats page you get even more juicy detail. Looking at Traffic first, you can adjust the date range. Here I’ve gone to maximum, looking back to the very start of my publication:

I like it when graphs go up. This is showing web traffic to the publication, so is a slightly different way of slicing the data from looking at email open rates.

You can filter the chart based on traffic source, which is quite revealing. Here’s the contribution from Substack sources to my traffic:

That’s a significant chunk. Also, note the leap in Substack-related traffic since Notes launched.

If you want to see something truly pitiful, switch to the ‘Social’ view:

What I find interesting here is that social has never been consistently useful for bringing eyes to my publication. Outside of a few spikes (probably related to specific content), it’s only ever been a pathetic trickle. Bear in mind this chart goes back to 2021, so it’s long before Musk arrived and destroyed everything.

I basically stopped using Facebook and Twitter to promote my work at the end of 2022. You can’t even see the difference in the chart. In other words, for me at least, social media is mostly worthless and kinda always has been.

Check this out, though:

This is ‘Search’ traffic. It trundled along in a negligible way for 2021 and 2022, but this year has started growing significantly. I suspect it’s for a combination of factors:

I have a lot of content on my publication now
Write More has been going for a while, long enough to be noticed by Google
I have several articles that are strong on the SEO front. My Quickstart Guide for Substack Fiction Writers was intended to be genuinely helpful, but was also a semi-calculated move. Anyone interested in writing fiction on Substack is going to find it in a Google search.
Substack itself as a platform is continuing to grow.

On the topic of that Quickstart guide I wrote, check out this Google search result:

Boink.

It’ll vary depending on your location and search signal context, but there’s my article, appearing above Substack itself, as a featured snippet. Nice.

One interesting note is that the source on that snippet shows as ‘Substack’, rather than the name of my publication. I don’t think there’s anything I can do about that. Hopefully nobody mistakes the article for official documentation.

Substack email data

The Emails tab is where you can examine the performance of individual emails. The useful thing here is being able to sort by different columns. Sorting by ‘free subscriptions’ gives me an idea of which posts have convinced people to subscribe to the newsletter.

Apparently people really liked my Wattpad article! Also good to see the Triverse prologue and the ‘How to read’ articles showing up. Of course, what I don’t have is some kind of mega-viral article driving hundreds of sign-ups - but, also, I don’t really write that kind of material. These stats are still a useful way to see which posts are engaging people.

One interesting thing here is how the Prologue has so few email deliveries - it was very early on in my publication’s life! My list has grown a lot since then.

Subscriber report

The location report amuses me, with its two options: US Map and World Map. No Europe focus, or Asia, or Africa, or South America.

There is the world, and there is the American world. Then again, over half of my readers are in the US, so maybe they have a point.

Audience overlap is an interesting one:

That I overlap with the likes of

The Elysian

Future Thief

and

Fictionistas

is no great surprise - though I perhaps would have expected the overlap percentage to be larger, if anything. That my overlap with Fictionistas is only 8% I think is an indication of how large and diverse the potential readership on Substack really is.

Also, I’m going to have to try to not be intimidated by the knowledge that 8% of my readers also read George Saunders’ newsletter. No pressure.

Network effects

The network report has always fascinated me. It’s a quick way to compare overall, lifetime network benefits to your current situation. Set to ‘lifetime’, the impact of Bookfunnel promos on my subscriber base is clear:

That grey bit is ‘import’, which demonstrates how I’ve used Bookfunnel promos of Triverse to build my newsletter subscription readership. This is also why my open rate is a little lower than some other fiction Substacks, who haven’t gone so hard on the promo path.

Compare that all-time graph to the last 30 days, though:

That grey import slice has got a lot smaller! The benefits of the Substack network engine are driving subscriptions without me having to do much. I still run promos, but less intensively than before. It’s almost got to the point where I don’t need to run them at all - but I don’t want to put all my eggs in the Substack basket just yet.

Still, the key takeaway here is that the passive benefit of simply using Substack as your publishing tool is huge.

If you’re looking for some new fiction to read, here are a couple of giveaways I’m taking part in:

Other tools

This post is really long! Such is the wealth of useful info at your fingertips without needing to even venture beyond the Substack platform.

In the bonus bit for paid subscribers I’m going to take a look at a couple of external tools, namely Search Console and Google Analytics 4. Both can be useful at plugging some of the gaps in Substack’s own stats, especially around understanding how people find you and where they come from.

Thanks for reading, as ever! I’d love to know more about your data tips and tricks down in the comments, or over on Notes.

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