Tracking Long Term Engagement on Substack
Check out my starter guide to building your own Substack Stats.
I love stats. I should do really as it’s my day job.
I’ve not talked massively about this on here before but I work for the train company that transports people from London to Edinburgh.
It’s my teams job to know all the stats about the railway. What’s our biggest earning train? Which train had the most delays? Which tickets do we sell the most of on a sunny Wednesday in June?
I love all of that.
So taking that passion into my Substack was always going to happen.
But let’s be honest, the stats you get as standard in could be better
told us recently that a churn metric may be on the way which will help but I wanted a way of seeing engagement from the point of view of my community.I want to know if the people who subscribed a year ago are still reading my posts or whether gave up on me a long time ago.
Quite often we focus on post metrics. What percentage of your subscribers opened your last post? This is of course your open rate but you don’t get a feel for whether these are the same people turning up each week or a new tribe who join and then dissipate.
People dip in and dip out
They might go I holiday. They might be sick. They might (get this) have better things to do that week! You might have sent your post out at a strange time where all your engaged subscribers were asleep (interesting in itself but that’s for another post maybe).
If you’re looking to build a newsletter for the long term (See my recent post on thinking long term) you need to focus on long term engagement. Don’t fixate on post to post metrics.
So this is how I flipped these metrics on its head so that I could view long term engagement
I want to know if I’m building rapport with my subscribers over time? I needed a metric that could both give me this information AND be possible to calculate using the data given to us by the Substack platform.
In this post you will learn how to:
Download Your Data
Set up a Bespoke Dashboard
Create a new Engagement Metric
Understand Engagement by Acquisition Channel
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