18 Comments
User's avatar
Dave Friedman's avatar

Makes you wonder why Substack doesn’t provide better support for this. More paid subscribers means more revenue for Substack…

Raghav Mehra's avatar

Haha yeah perhaps Substack will come around with this sooner!

Karen Spinner's avatar

I think they’re heading there, but it’s taking a while! 😂

Jessica Drapluk's avatar

thank you, Raghav, Karen and Ashwin! the video explaining how to install the plug-in on chrome was super useful!

Raghav Mehra's avatar

Thank you Jessica! A huge credit to Karen for this!!

Karen Spinner's avatar

Thank you! 🙏 Let me know if you have any questions!

Jenny Ouyang's avatar

I'm sooo late to this article! Thank you for this amazing collab team!

Love this extension and absolutely useful :)

Karen Spinner's avatar

You’re very welcome, thank you! 🙏🤗

Raghav Mehra's avatar

Thank you reading, Jenny! :)

Yes, this is a very useful tool that Karen has developed!

Mia Kiraki 🎭's avatar

Yay! Bookmarked this to watch the full vid but I did skim through it.

I love Karen's tool. Although I don't love some of the engagement metrics haha. I've been looking mostly at comments and likes as signal of "engagement" but I've never looked at CTR. Which is weird because I never even thought of it. I don't put that much thought into internal / external linking. And that changed since I installed Karen's tool :)

Thank you guys for this! Awesome collab :)

Raghav Mehra's avatar

Thank you for your reading Mia! Yes, the distinction into what Substack takes as CTR vs. what the actuall click-through is something that Karen has defined well in this tool and in our conversation. It's true I didn't look at a lot of these metrics until I got my hands on this extension.

Karen did an amazing job with the analytics in it! ✨🙏

Karen Spinner's avatar

You’re very welcome! 🤗 Yeah, the only time I had a happy green dashboard was during my launch week! 😂

Dr Sam Illingworth's avatar

Thanks teams, what a collaboration! The engagement-conversion disconnect is the most useful finding here. I have been tracking my own stats fairly obsessively and the pattern holds: the posts that get the most visible engagement are rarely the ones that drive paid subscriptions. Knowing which content converts and which content grows the list are two different questions, and most creators (myself included, for a long time) optimise for the wrong one. Thanks so much for making this clear.

Raghav Mehra's avatar

Thank you, Sam. Some of the takeaways were indeed fascinating and thoughtful. The "engagement vs. paid conversion" dilemma is definitely something to ponder over. As Karen says, its important to keep a balance of posts that cater to both of these metrics.

Karen Spinner's avatar

Yes! In fact, I find some of the content that attracts free subscribers actually repels paid subs. 😂

Sharyph's avatar

All thanks to Karen for doing the heavy lifting.

Raghav Mehra's avatar

The playbook for running the audit on a newsletter and the suggested data points were very complete and useful. Thank you for sharing them @Sharyph!

Karen Spinner's avatar

Your clearly defined methodology made it a lot easier! ✨