Get More Detailed Medium Stats By Downloading Your Engagement Metrics
By download the CSV metrics export, you can get more information than is provided directly through the platform
Most Medium users are aware that the platform provides a statistics dashboard which allows you to keep track of your top-line engagement metrics.
If you’re on a journey to increase your inbound engagement and grow your personal brand (this is part of my motivation for posting here), then checking out this part of the platform can be a great way to keep motivated and test whether what you’ve been posting recently is resonating with readers.
This month, mine are trending in the right direction thanks to OneZero picking up my piece about the guy who manages the world time zone database.
Unfortunately, as statistics dashboards go, what Medium presents to users here isn’t wonderful. Or at least, there’s a lot of information that isn’t liberated by accessing the dashboard.
There are a few glaring things that are missing:
- While you can see a 30 day trailing view and read count, you can’t access a year long view/read count. Or even a count since account creation.
- Information about Medium’s new newsletter feature — namely lost and gained subscribers — similarly isn’t presented.
You may have noticed that lurking near the top of that page is a button that reads ‘Audience Stats.’ Here, you will get more granular data on your audience engagement.
Here’s mine:
The final chunk of analytics data that we can access through Medium can be obtained by clicking on “view details” under “Email subscribers”
Here, you can see who those mysterious subscribers actually are.
Email addresses and subscription dates are both presented.
Access Medium Stats Through A Desktop Program To Drill Down Into Those Numbers And Gain More Insights
As I mentioned, from a data standpoint, the numbers that Medium presents in the dashboard aren’t all that useful.
Fortunately, we can run them through a spreadsheet program in order to make them a lot more helpful.
Click on the ‘download CSV’ button next to the Monthly Growth dashboard. (Note: there’s no data export functionality on the main Story Stats page).
As you can see, we’re presented with some information that we couldn’t access through the main dashboard.
Namely, there are columns for:
- Followers lost
- Net follower increase/decrease (gained minus lost)
- Unsubscribes
- Net newsletter subscriber activity (new subscribers minus unsubscribes)
- Information about those you have referred to the network
You can also very easily create graphs from this data.
And you can receive data for a longer period than is shown in the graphical stats presentation.
For instance, I can see that I’ve picked up 36 followers so far this month, but also that 489 of my (at the time of writing) 525 followers have come come from the past twelve months.
That’s 93% of my followers from the past year (I’ve been on the platform since July 2019) and only 48 from the time before that. (If I’m botching the math, please bear with me; I’m a humble writer after all).
Download the export and you’ll be able to tap into more information about how your posting on Medium is creating an audience of followers.
Note: Medium updates their functionality somewhat regularly. The above merely reflects the UI features at the time of the date of publication. If you’re accessing this post at any time after that point, the information presented here may be outdated.
Support This Medium Blog
To reach as many readers as possible every month, I have refrained from paywalling any of my posts on Medium. Nevertheless, you can buy me coffee to help me continue to be able to devote time to the writing process.
