Want to see how your posts are performing on Substack? This article provides a comprehensive guide to quickly viewing key stats like views and subscriber engagement directly within the Substack app. We'll also offer tips on interpreting this data to understand reader behavior and optimize your content strategy.
Quickly Viewing Your Post Stats
You can access your latest post stats in two ways on the Substack app:
- Home Screen Banner: A stats banner appears on the Home screen for the first two days after publishing.
- Post Page: Navigate to the specific post within the app and tap the "View stats" banner under the post title.
💡 Tip: To remove the banner from the Home screen, press and hold the banner notification and tap "Dismiss."
Understanding the Performance Tab
The Performance tab provides a detailed breakdown of your post's performance:
- Engagement: See how many likes, comments, restacks on Notes, and shares your post received. Tap the first three icons for a deeper dive into each engagement type. Understanding engagement helps you gauge the popularity and resonance of your content.
- Views: Track total views, view growth over time, and compare performance to your average views per post. Monitoring view trends can reveal insights into factors influencing your post's visibility.
- Revenue (Paid Subscriptions Only): If you have paid subscriptions enabled, see the estimated revenue increase from this post, its growth over time, and a comparison to your average revenue per post. Analyzing revenue data helps you assess the monetization potential of your content.
- New Subscribers: See the number and profiles of new subscribers gained after reading the post (profile links are shown only for subscribers with profiles set up). New subscriber growth is a key indicator of your content's appeal.
- Subscriber Sources: View the number of new free and paid subscribers from each source, ranked in order. The “Substack” category includes platform discovery surfaces like Notes, search, leaderboards, and other recommendations. Understanding subscriber sources helps optimize your promotional strategies.
- Traffic Sources: See the number of views from each source, such as email or Google, ranked in order. Analyzing traffic sources can pinpoint your most effective promotion channels.
Exploring the Discussion Tab
The Discussion tab reveals how people are engaging with your post on Substack through comments, restacks and quotes on Notes, and links to your post.
Image: Post discussion data example
Video and Podcast Specific Stats
For video or podcast posts, you'll also see:
- Video Plays: The number of times your video was played for at least 5 seconds. If one person watches a video five times, that counts as five plays.
- Video Watch Time: The total number of hours people spent playing the video. If sixty people watch for one minute each, that counts as one hour of watch time.
- Podcast Downloads (for episodes distributed to podcast feeds): The number of times at least 60 seconds of the episode was downloaded to a unique device.
Learn More About Substack Metrics
We hope this guide helps you better understand and utilize your post stats on the Substack app!