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 dashboard helps you track and analyze key membership trends, including active members (Free and paid), new members, and cancellations.
- Active members: See a list of your current free and paid members. You can also monitor upgrades and downgrades
- New members: Track membership growth and see how fans are converting into members
- Canceled: Track when members cancel and identify trends over time
You can customize your view with filters like date range, membership tiers, and billing cadence to get the most relevant insights.
For a full breakdown of available insights and how to use them, see the Membership Insights guide.
The data on your Membership dashboard updates every 4 hours.
Shop insights
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 insights
After processing a payment, fees and refunds are deducted, with the remaining amount going to your Creator Balance. This dashboard summarises the flow of funds based on when the transactions occurred.
Earnings insights filters:
Customize your earnings view by:
- Date range: You can view data from past 6 months, Past year (past 12 months), All time, or set a Custom range
- Earnings type:You can filter by All earnings, Membership, or Shop
- Free or Paid member view: Select either the free or paid member view at the top of the dashboard to filter insights accordingly
- Daily or Monthly view : Switch between Monthly or Daily views to track earnings trends over different timeframes
Key sections in earnings insights
The earnings dashboard summarizes the income associated with your Patreon. We organize data by the time transactions occur. The Gross revenue 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.
Refund 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 is 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. |
| Gross revenue |
All of the charges we attempted that month before declines, refunds, and fees. You can click on the drop-down menu next to the amount for a detailed breakdown of your gross earnings by:
|
| Payment Fees | Payment-processing fees cover the cost of processing payments from your paid members. You can click on the drop-down menu next to the amount, to review your earnings by; Payment processing fee and Currency conversion fee. Please visit our article 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 all 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 insights
Reviewing the 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.
Top and latest posts
Switch between the Top and Latest filters to see which of your posts are performing best or to review your most recent updates. The Top view highlights your highest-engagement content, while the Latest view shows recent posts, making it easy to track engagement trends over time.
Posts dashboard glossary
The Posts Dashboard shows how engaged your posts are. 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). |
| Average view duration (Video posts only) |
The average amount of time viewers spend watching your episodet. This metric helps gauge how engaging your video content is based on how long people stick around to watch. |
| Preview views (Video and audio posts only) |
The number of times fans have previewed your episode. Preview views offer insight into how many people were intrigued enough to check out a sneak peek of your content. |
| 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 insights
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, the previous 30 days or you can add a custom range. Hover over points on the graph to see detailed information about specific timeframes and gain insights into traffic spikes or trends. 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 visits | Shows the total number of visits by members and non-members across your creator surfaces (post page, creator page, and shop page). |
| Public visits | Shows the total number of visits from non-members and free members. 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. |
Please note that visits are different from visitors. A single visitor can visit a page many times, so one visit does not equal one visitor.
Surveys insights
Available to all creators, welcome surveys let you better understand what’s motivating paid members to join your Patreon. The welcome survey is enabled for all creators by default. You can turn off the welcome survey by navigating to the survey insights tab and clicking the turn off survey link. Follow the prompts to turn off the welcome survey.
This section is about the welcome survey. You can also analyze exit survey results from your settings.
What will members see?
Immediately after completing checkout, new paid and upgraded members will be presented with a multiple-choice survey, where they can select what about their membership they’re looking forward to most. Once they’ve selected their reason, they can add more details in a free-form response.
Members who rejoin your Patreon or join for free won’t be presented with the welcome survey upon signup.
Previewing the welcome survey
- Navigate to the surveys insights tab
- Click the Preview button to see all survey options
- Click the Next button for the free form option where members can add more details
Since the welcome survey is intended to get insights from members, the multiple-choice options are disabled in the creator preview mode.
Currently, welcome survey customization isn’t an option.
How do I use my welcome survey insights?
You can review survey results by navigating to the surveys insights tab. From here, you can drill into welcome survey results based on the past 30 days, 6 months, Past year, All time or add a Custom range of your choice. You can also use the tier filter, which defaults to all tiers, to better assess trends driving fans to join which tiers.
Hover over points on the graph to gain more information about specific snapshots, giving you a clearer picture of each moment’s impact on your survey results. Additionally, you can view free-form survey responses by clicking the comment link for a multiple-choice response.
Successfully using your welcome survey results:
- You can leverage survey responses to tailor your offering to what fans want most. Understand what benefits resonate the most to adapt your benefits and promotion strategy
- Use aggregated survey responses to spark creative ideas, discover trends, and ensure your content strategy aligns with your fans’ expectations
You can export welcome survey results as a CSV to review individual responses and further analyze responses with the visualization tool you prefer.
Turning off the welcome survey
You can navigate to the surveys insights tab and click the designated link to turn off the welcome survey.