This article explains how our Insights dashboards work and how to use them to understand your earnings and membership trends.
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 insights give you a comprehensive breakdown of your current membership count, new members, downgrades, upgrades, and cancelations.
Drilling down your membership data
When you first click into the membership insights, you’ll see your membership data for the past 30 days. The default of the membership insights offers a great summary of your membership activities. You can drill down into the data to analyze different aspects of your membership insights:
- Date range: The date range will be set to the past 30 days when you first visit your dashboard. You can click on the date dropdown to select from the past 6 months, year, or all time.
- Free or Paid member view: At the top of the membership dashboard, you can select to view your dashboard for free or paid member growth.
- Overall or Tier view: You can toggle the visual graph between an overall view of your membership or a tier breakdown view to see how specific tiers are trending.
- Active: When you click on the Insights button from the left sidebar navigation, you will land on the Active Members dashboard of your Membership page. “Active members” refers to paid members who have not canceled. Click on the Active members link to view the list of paid members in your Relationship manager. From your relationship manager, you can send bulk messages to communicate with members.
- New: The New members view of the dashboard shows your memberships by join date. You can adjust the date range to view joins in the past 30 days, 6 months, year, or all time, which will show you monthly joins. A paid member is considered new in a month/day if the member did not have a membership in the prior month/day. Click on the New link to get a list of members included in the count of joins in your Relationship manager.
- Canceled: The canceled view of the dashboard shows membership cancellations by date. You can adjust the date range to view joins in the past 30 days, 6 months, year, or all time, which will show you monthly cancellations. Click on the Canceled link to get a list of paid members who’ve canceled in the time range you’ve selected.
The data on your Membership dashboard updates every hour.
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 member(s) switched to. That right-hand column will include the number of members that made that specific change.
| Term | Definition |
| Upgrades | The number of memberships 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 memberships that made that move. |
| Downgrades | The number of memberships 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 memberships that moved down. |
Membership summary
This summary includes your total member count, including free and paid members. These numbers estimate your per month earnings and members count — this number fluctuates depending on your paid member count, adjustments to membership amounts, declines, and cancellations. We display annual memberships as their monthly equivalent (annual 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.
Paid members by charge frequency
If you have annual memberships enabled, your Membership page will include a Members by charge frequency section. This section lets you know the number of paid members 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).
Shop
The Shop dashboard shows up for creators selling digital products with Commerce on Patreon. Commerce enables creators to sell digital products like downloadable videos, images, and other files directly to customers, whether they are paid members or not.
If you are using Commerce, you can learn more about how to use Shop insights in this guide.
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 summarizes the income associated with your Patreon. We organize data by the time transactions occur. The Attempted Amount Charged column on your Earnings dashboard may display a different amount than your total memberships calculated from your Relationship Manager due to mid-month tier switches and refunds.
Example:
- Paid member A joins your community on 16 February but isn’t charged until 1 March. The earnings from that transaction will appear in March.
- If a refund processed 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 members 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 paid members. 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 memberships. 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 paid members, 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 dashboard
This section of your dashboard shows your post impressions 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 impressions.
Recent posts section
This table counts impressions, 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 |
| Impressions |
The number of times your post was seen across Patreon on web and mobile. This includes when the post is displayed on its direct URL, your Patreon, and member's home feeds. Impressions was introduced in April 2023 as an expansion on the previous Views metric, which captured the number of people who have landed on the post's page (but did not include mobile views, views on your Patreon, or views on someone's home feed). |
| Likes | How many members or fans (if the post is for Everyone) 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 members are finding your post’s page. Traffic sources include Patreon, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and many more. |
Export Engagement Data
Click the Export Engagement Data link to get a monthly breakdown of comments on likes.
Traffic
The Traffic dashboard is still in the testing phase, so it may not be available for all creators. Access to this feature will gradually roll out over time.
The Traffic dashboard can help you better understand where your visits are coming from and how often they occur, all presented in a visual graph format. You can view traffic data for the past 24 hours, the last 7 days, and the previous 30 days — Please note that this data is displayed in GMT/UTC.
Here are the key terms you'll encounter on the Traffic dashboard and their definitions:
| Term | Definition |
| Total visitors | Shows the total number of users that visited your Patreon, members and non-members. |
| Public visitors | Shows the number of users that visited your Patreon but don’t have a membership with you. This is useful for you to understand how external promotions are bringing in new users and contributing to your membership growth. |
| Overall | The graph offers a general overview of your Patreon's traffic without going into specific traffic sources. |
| Sources |
The graph provides a detailed breakdown of your traffic sources, offering insights into the specific platforms that contribute the most to your overall traffic volume. Traffic sources include Patreon, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and many more. When checking Sources from Total visitors, you might notice that the Patreon percentage is significantly higher. This is because Total visitors include members and non-members, and this is likely why you might see elevated traffic from Patreon. Within sources, you might also see Direct traffic: This is defined as the traffic that has arrived on your website with no source or data, e.g., a user typing in the URL directly or using Incognito mode |
