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 provides a detailed breakdown of key membership metrics, including total members, new members, downgrades, upgrades, and cancellations. This guide will help you navigate and analyze your membership data efficiently.
When you access the Membership Insights dashboard, it will automatically display data from the past 30 days. The default view offers a comprehensive summary of your membership activity, but you can drill down further to explore specific details:
Your insights view
You can customize the insights view by:
- Date range: By default, data is set to display from the past 30 days. You can adjust the range to view data from the past 6 months, year, or all time using the dropdown menu
- Free or Paid member view: Select either the free or paid member view at the top of the dashboard to filter insights accordingly
- Overall or Tier view: Toggle between an overall membership summary or a detailed tier breakdown to see how specific membership tiers are performing
Key sections in membership insights
The following sections will be available depending on whether you are viewing data for free members or paid members.
- Active members: Active members refer 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 paid members
- Free members: Free members refer to members that currently have a free membership on your page and that have not canceled. Click on the Free members link to view the list of free members in your Relationship manager
- 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. Click on the New link to get a list of members included in the count of joins in your Relationship manager
- Upgraded to paid: You can easily see how many free members upgrade to paid in total, giving you an accurate representation of new paid memberships
- 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 members who’ve canceled in the time range you’ve selected
The data on your Membership dashboard updates every hour.
Tier activity dashboard
The Tier activity dashboard displays total upgrades and downgrades for your selected time range (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 who made that 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. |
Free member activity dashboard
The free member activity dashboard tracks free members who upgrade to a paid tier for your selected time range (30 days, 6 months, a year, or all time).
The right side of the report shows the number of free members who have upgraded and the specific tiers they’ve chosen. This helps you track how many free members are becoming paying supporters and which tiers are most popular for upgrades.
Reviewing the 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.
Checking paid members by charge frequency
If annual memberships are 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 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.
This 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.
Recent posts section
This table counts impressions, likes, and comments on your 5 most recent posts.
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). |
| 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, 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 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, 60 days, and all time. You can also use the tier filter, which defaults to All tiers, to better assess trends driving fans to join which tiers.
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.