Post Insights

Post insights give you visibility into how your work is reaching your fans and growing your audience and business. Knowing which posts are performing well can help you identify what to make more of.

This article will take you through your Post Insights. We'll go over the glossary, metrics, and other definitions, including your reach and engagement. For information about other dashboards, please see our dedicated article on Insights.

Posts Insights Glossary

Your Posts Insights gives you an idea of your posts’ reach and engagement. Below are the most common terms that you’ll find on the dashboard:

Insights components

The dashboard displays data that includes all posts with impressions during a specific time, not just those published within the selected period. Data updates every 1 hour. Please be aware that all the data is shown in the UTC timezone, not your own timezone. You have the following ways of viewing your posts' performance:

• Shows daily or weekly impressions, seen posts, and plays across Patreon, and email and push notifications in a graph format. It’s a nice visual aid to show you which days of the week your posts tend to receive the most impressions, and it helps you measure how many people saw and engaged with your content.

  

• Provides metrics for up to 25 individual posts within your selected timeframe, including total reach for impressions and seen. You can also check performance from email and push notifications, including open rate, email click rate, and notification click rate. You can sort by any column to analyze top or low-performing posts. To see per-post performance beyond 25 posts, select Export as csv at the bottom of the screen.

  You can also access performance on each individual post by clicking the bar graph icon on any given post.

  • Total reach includes performance on and off Patreon. You can check ‘On Patreon only’ to get a view of just the on-Patreon performance for a given post (removing email and push notification data). Now includes a Plays column, showing how many times your post was played or accessed.
  • Email and push notification results includes overall and post-level metrics for:
  • Email open rate: The percentage of emails opened out of the total number delivered. (Should be considered as a rough estimate due to unreliability of how email opens are tracked industry-wide). This can help you understand how some members might be consuming the post directly from their email inbox.
  • Email click-through rate: The percentage of people who clicked on a Patreon link in the email. This helps you understand who took action from your emails, if you included calls-to-action or links. (We don’t yet measure link clicks to other sites.)
  • Push click-through rate: The percentage of people who clicked on a push notification after one is sent to them.

  Media consumption
  With Media Consumption Insights, you can understand how your audience engages with your audio and video posts, both on Patreon and through external platforms like podcast apps and music players.

  Per Post Consumption
  Shows a detailed breakdown of consumption metrics for each post. You can see:

  • Patreon Plays: How many times your content was played directly on Patreon
  • Amount Played: The average percentage of each audio or video that audiences actually listened to or watched
  • Off-Platform Plays: Plays from RSS feeds (podcast apps, music players, and other platforms) Note: Off-platform plays represent RSS downloads, as we can’t track playback on external platforms
    
    

  RSS Integration Creators can now see RSS engagement across all insight graphs:

  • Reach: Includes RSS downloads alongside email notifications and Patreon impressions
  • Views: Tracks RSS downloads as part of the views funnel, alongside email opens and on-platform engagement
  • Plays: A new graph dedicated to showing both on-platform and off-platform plays for a complete view of media consumption
    
    

  Note: Some metrics in the dashboard are only available after certain dates. (Ex: ‘On Patreon’ impressions were 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 page, or views on someone's home feed).

  

  You’ll also see typical email and push notification click rates for creators with your audience size (free and paid members).

  • Within range: Your metrics are healthy
  • Above range: Your metrics are excellent
  • Below range: Your metrics can be improved. See some tips for improving click rate
    
    
    

• With conversions, you can see how your posts drive audience and revenue growth. It  includes data on new free members who joined through a specific post and new paid memberships or one-time sales attributed to a given post.

  New revenue from posts

  Shows earnings from new memberships and one-time purchases attributed across all of your posts. These totals include any currency conversions (from what members paid to yours) and upfront payments for annual memberships.

  

  Post revenue

  Shows earnings at a post-specific level. This is the value of new memberships and purchases driven by specific posts on your library. The earnings refer to new fans who joined your membership through a post, whether on web or the Patreon app. Please note that upgrades are excluded from this data.
  
  We count the member's first payment: first month for monthly membership, and the upfront amount for annual membership. For one-time sales, we count the earnings for purchases of a post.
  
  Keep in mind that if you offer a Free Trial, we’ll count new paid members as soon as they subscribe to your Patreon, but we'll only count the revenue if they convert to pay their first month. Revenue also won't be tracked for per-post creators, instead you'll see the count of paid members, but not membership revenue.

  

  Free member conversions

  Shows how effective a post is in bringing new free members to your community, who you can later convert to paying members. To grow your overall audience on Patreon, try making more publicly available posts.

  

• Live allows creators to connect with members in real-time, directly on the platform. It instantly notifies members and includes a chat feature for direct interaction and community engagement. To learn more about it, visit our dedicated article on Live Set Up and Overview.
  Post insights also provide key metrics for Live on Patreon. Please note that the data for Live events is not included in the total reach. You can identify Live events by their name and date. Once selected, you'll have access to all available metrics for that specific live event.

  
  
  

  Metrics definition

  The data available from Live event Insights helps you better understand your audience and their engagement levels. These metrics offer valuable insights into viewer interactions and overall impact, allowing you to refine your strategy for future sessions. Here are the key metrics used to analyze the performance of your Live:

  
  • Total sessions: the total number of times people joined your live
  • Unique viewers: the total number of distinct viewers
  • Peak concurrent viewers: the maximum number of viewers who joined your live at the same time
  • Average view time: the average number of time each viewer spent watching the live
  • Concurrent viewers: graph with the maximum number of simultaneous viewers per minute
  • Chat activity: the total number of messages and the breakdown of messages per minute

• You can access more detailed insights by exporting data as a CSV file. This includes metrics beyond the 25 most recent posts, as well as post likes, comments, and RSS download counts. Use this export to dive deeper into individual post performance and audience engagement.

  For the following additional data, select Export data as CSV at the bottom of the screen:

  • Per post performance beyond your 25 most recent posts
  • RSS downloads
  • Post likes
  • Post comments

Viewing insights on individual posts

You can also view insights for a specific post by clicking the bar graph icon on that post. This opens a Post Insights panel with key metrics including total reach, conversions, activity, and media performance. It’s a quick way to understand how a single post is performing without navigating through the full Insights dashboard.

For a full breakdown of how the Post Insights panel works, visit our dedicated article: View insights for an individual post.

Metric Definitions

Depending on whether it’s email and push notifications or posts on Patreon, the definitions of impressions and seen may vary. See below for a clearer explanation of how the metrics work for these indicators:

How to Improve Performance

• You can use impressions and seen metrics to understand how far your posts are reaching and how engaging they are. If impressions are high but seen is low, it may indicate that titles, thumbnails, or previews aren’t compelling enough to drive deeper engagement.
• Metrics from email and push notifications, such as open rate and click-through rate, help you assess how effective their subject lines or call-to-action links are. Low click or open rates may suggest it's worth testing new wording, timing, or formats in emails and push messages.
• By reviewing per-post performance, you can identify which posts perform best and use those insights to shape future content. Exporting additional data (likes, comments, RSS downloads) allows for even deeper analysis of what resonates most with your audience.

FAQ

• As of April 2023, Patreon switched from tracking views to impressions, so that’s what you’ll see now.

  • Impressions: how many times your post showed up (in feeds, on mobile, etc.)
  • Seen: how many people actually clicked through to view the full post

• Email opens are tracked using a pixel in the email. When the email is opened and the pixel loads, it counts as an open. However, some email apps block tracking or load the pixel even if the email isn’t fully opened. While you look at open rate over time to spot trends, individual open rates should be taken as a rough estimate. This is true for open rates for all email services, not just Patreon.

• In the Post Insights dashboard, select Export data as CSV at the bottom of the screen to get like and comment data.

• In the Post Insights dashboard, select Export data as CSV at the bottom of the screen to get RSS downloads.

• First, keep in mind that click-through rate might not be the right metric if you’re just sharing an update or message that doesn’t require any action (e.g. if the member can consume the post directly from their email). If clicks are your goal, try looking for patterns among posts that have had high click rates.

  Some factors that impact click-through rate include:

  • Audience: Paid members tend to be the most heavily engaged. If you’re sharing a post to free members who aren’t as involved in your community, you may see a lower click-through rate
  • Media type included in the email: Exclusive media, like bonus episodes or polls, tend to drive clicks to Patreon. If you distribute that media elsewhere, like a public RSS feed or YouTube, your click-throughs may be lower since fans are consuming on other platforms
  • Calls to action: Personal calls-to-action, like “Comment with your thoughts” or “Vote here on what I make next” tend to drive higher clicks, as do limited-time offers like discounts
  • Full post vs. preview: If you include the full post in the email rather than a preview, you might see lower click-throughs since fans don’t have to leave their inboxes

• Post revenue shows earnings that came from new fans joining your membership (first month payment for monthly, full amount for annual) or making a purchase through a post, whether on web or the Patreon app. This excludes upgrades, as it’s meant to show you the new value your work is driving.