As a Substack creator, understanding how readers discover your posts is crucial for optimizing your content strategy and growing your audience. Substack provides detailed traffic source analytics, giving you a clear picture of the paths readers take to access your writing.

Accessing Your Post's Traffic Sources:

1. Log in to your Substack account.
2. Go to your "Posts" tab.
3. Click on the specific post you want to analyze.

On the post details page, you'll find a performance summary, including a section labeled "Where did readers of this post come from?". This section breaks down the traffic sources for that particular post.

Example:

Understanding the Traffic Sources:

Substack categorizes traffic sources into a few key groups to help you understand the primary channels through which readers are finding your posts:

• Email:

  • Definition: Readers opened and viewed your post from a newsletter email sent through your Substack publication.
  • Significance: This data reflects the engagement and activity of your email subscribers. A high email open and read rate indicates that your email content is appealing and relevant to your subscribers' interests.
  • Optimization Tips: If the email source percentage is low, consider optimizing your email subject lines, preview text, and send times to improve open and read rates.

• Direct:

  • Definition: Readers typed your publication's URL directly into their browser and clicked on your post, or when the source is unknown, such as when a reader is browsing anonymously.
  • Significance: This data reflects your brand awareness and reader loyalty. A high direct traffic volume suggests that readers are familiar with your brand and proactively visit your content.
  • Optimization Tips: Consistently publish high-quality content to enhance your brand's influence and encourage readers to make direct visits a habit.

• Other:

  • Definition: Sources that account for less than 1% of views are categorized as "Other."
  • Significance: This typically represents fragmented, less significant traffic sources.
  • Optimization Tips: While this portion of traffic is small, it's worth looking to see if there are any potential channels worth exploring.

• Popular sites:

  • Definition: You or other readers shared your post on social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Twitter), and readers clicked on those links to land on your Substack post.
  • Significance: This data reflects the reach and popularity of your content on social media.
  • Optimization Tips: Actively share your posts on social media and encourage readers to share and retweet. Tailor your post titles and summaries to the specific characteristics of each social media platform to improve click-through rates.

A Broader Perspective with Integrated Data:

Beyond Substack's built-in analytics, consider incorporating data from other platforms to gain a more comprehensive understanding of your audience and content performance:

• Google Analytics: By adding Google Analytics tracking code to your Substack publication, you can gather more granular visitor data, such as user demographics, device types, and session duration.
• Social Media Analytics: Utilize the analytics tools provided by platforms like Facebook and Twitter to track shares, retweets, comments, and other engagement metrics for your posts, further assessing content virality.

Conclusion:

By carefully analyzing the traffic source data provided by Substack and integrating it with data from other analytics platforms, you can gain deeper insights into how readers are finding your posts. This knowledge empowers you to refine your content strategy, increase your posts' visibility, and ultimately maximize audience growth and content value. If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to ask!