Understanding your Substack stats

Crunching them numbers

Edit: Do note that this article is from June 2023, so a fair bit is out-of-date.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: