This article explains how our Insights dashboards work and how to use them to understand your earnings and membership trends. Here’s what we’ll cover in this article:
Creator earnings funnel
The following chart identifies the four main steps in the process and the associated dashboards that describe them:
Membership insights
Your Membership page is your hub for checking on the health of your memberships — it is a comprehensive breakdown of your current membership count, new patrons, downgrades, upgrades and cancelations.
With your dashboard views (active, new and cancelled), you can toggle the dropdown to select the time range between the past 30 days, 6 months, past year or all time. You can also switch between an Overall view or a Tier view to dig into tier performance over a time range.
callout The data on your Membership dashboard updates every hour.
Let’s break down how each dashboard view works and what insights you can dig into!
Active patrons dashboard view
When you first click on the Insights button from the left sidebar navigation, you’ll land on the Active patrons dashboard of your Membership page.
Active patrons = all patrons with access to your content and membership (i.e. current patrons with payments up to date, this does not include patrons whose membership payment was declined)
Your Active patrons dashboard shows your patron count on a daily, or monthly basis. The default time range is the past 30 days, however, you can toggle the dropdown above the dashboard to expand that time range.
Click on the Active patrons link to be taken to a list of patrons included in the count in your Relationship manager. From your Relationship manager, you can bulk message patrons to deliver benefits or say hello 👋.
New dashboard view
Your New dashboard shows your memberships by join date. You can toggle the time range to view joins in the past 30 days, 6 months, year or all time, which will show you monthly joins. A patron is considered new in a month/day if the patron did not have a pledge to you in the prior month/day.
Click on the New link to get a list of patrons included in the count of joins in your Relationship manager.
Cancelled dashboard view
Your cancelled dashboard view shows your membership cancellations by date. Click on the Cancelled link to get a list of patrons who’ve cancelled in the time range you’ve selected.
Tier activity dashboard
Your Tier activity dashboard shows you the total number of upgrades and downgrades in the time range you’ve selected (30 days, 6 months, a year or all time).
When you click the Upgrades and Downgrades buttons you’ll get a tier-by-tier breakdown of membership changes. The left-hand column lists the original tier, and the right-hand column lists the tier the patron(s) switched to. That right-hand column will include the number of patrons that made that specific change.
| Term | Definition |
| Upgrades | The number of pledges that have increased in value. In the Tier activity section, we’ll show you the number of increases by tier. The left-hand column lists the original tier and the right-hand column lists the upgraded tier and the number of pledges that made that move. |
| Downgrades | The number of pledges that have decreased in value. Click the Downgrades button on the Tier activity section to review downgrades by tier. The left-hand column lists the original tier and the right-hand column lists the downgraded tier and the number of pledges that moved down. |
Membership summary
These numbers estimate your per month earnings and patrons count – this number fluctuates depending on your patron count, adjustments to pledged amounts, declines and cancellations. We display annual pledges as their monthly equivalent (annual pledge amount divided by 12).
While the other dashboards on your Membership page can toggle between time ranges, your Membership summary dashboard is the current estimate.
Patrons by charge frequency
If you have annual memberships enabled, your Membership page will include a Patrons by charge frequency section. This section lets you know the number of patrons who have an annual membership and how many have a monthly membership in the time range you’ve selected (using the time range selector at the top of the page).
Earnings
Once we process a payment, we subtract any fees and refunds, with the remainder flowing into your Creator balance. This dashboard summarises the flow of funds based on when the transactions occurred. The “Declines” column shows the value of all declined payments in a given month, which updates as charges are recovered for you automatically.
This dashboard summarises the income associated with your creator page. We organise data by the time transactions occur. The Attempted amount charged column on your Earnings dashboard may display a different amount than your total pledges calculated from your Relationship manager due to mid-month upgrades and downgrades.
Examples:
- Patron A creates a subscription on 16 February but isn’t charged until 1 March. The earnings from that transaction will appear in March.
- If a refund processes in October for a transaction that initially occurred in July, the refund will appear in October.
| Column | Summary |
| Month | The month in which you received money to your creator balance. |
| Attempted amount charged | All of the charges we attempted that month before declines, refunds and fees. |
| Declines | The value of attempted charges declined this month. This column value will likely decrease as we retry your declined patrons and process them to your creator balance. |
| Total Refunds | The amount of any refunds issued in that month. This column only includes the creator’s share of any refunds; Patreon’s fee, processing fees, and taxes are refunded by Patreon and therefore do not appear here. This also does not include fraud refunds. Here’s an article with more information on fraud refunds. |
| Payment fees | Payment-processing fees cover the cost of processing payments from your patrons. Please visit our article with information about fees to learn more about fees. |
| Platform fees | The sum of Patreon’s platform fee is applied to the pledges. Please visit our pricing page for detailed information. |
| Merch items & shipping | If you use Patreon merch, this column shows each month’s merch cost. |
| Earnings |
This column indicates the net amount you earned after deducting: refunds, Patreon’s fee and processing fees. This is the amount that goes into your creator balance. If you have annual patrons, their payments will populate in the month in which they paid – meaning that in the month we process their payment, we’ll show the total yearly amount. We don’t spread the earnings from an annual membership across the year. |
Posts
Posts view dashboard
This section of your dashboard shows your post views in graph form over the past two weeks. It’s a nice visual aid to show you which days of the week your posts tend to receive the most views.
Recent posts
This table counts views, likes and comments on your 5 most recent posts.
Posts dashboard glossary
Your Posts dashboard gives you an idea of your posts’ engagement. Below are the terms that you’ll find on the dashboard:
| Term |
Definition |
| Views | The number of people who have landed on the post’s page. View counts are limited to when someone visits a post’s URL, and do not include mobile views, views on your Patreon page, or views on someone’s home feed. Please note, that a view count does not indicate that the viewer was able to find the content of the post, only that they visited the page where that post lives. |
| Likes | How many patrons or fans (if the post is public) have liked your post. Likes are a great indicator that people are finding your post. |
| Comments | The number of comments left on an individual post. |
| Traffic sources | Tells you how patrons are finding your post’s page. Traffic sources include Patreon, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and many more. |
| Viewers | Lets you know if patrons versus non-patrons are landing on your post’s page. If you are finding the term “Other,” this means the viewer who landed on your page is not yet a patron. We count “viewers” as people who land on the post’s page. If you have posts locked to patrons, and it is labelled “Other,” don’t be alarmed. This doesn’t mean that people are accessing your content for free, it just means that they landed on the page post’s URL. |
Export engagement data
Click the Export engagement data link to get a monthly breakdown of comments on likes.