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How to track your earnings with Analytics
How to track your earnings with Analytics
Christina Wunderlich avatar
Written by Christina Wunderlich
Updated over a week ago

In your Steady dashboard, you will find three sections filled with data on your Steady project.

In this article, we explore Analytics, where you can learn more about your earnings.

You may also like to read more about the other sections, in separate articles linked below:

  • Traffic, to see how many people visit your posts and

  • Members, to learn more about who supports your project

Key data

Inside the Analytics section of the backend, which you can find on the left-hand side of the page, you will find your key data at the top of the page. This covers:

  • The most important number: your monthly revenue, along with how much your turnover has changed compared to the previous 30 days, as a percentage.

  • Number of members

  • Number of newsletter subscribers

In the example below, the project earns 1110 euros per month, with an increase of 0.7% over the past month. They have 46 members (a 4.5% jump over the previous month) and 6 subscribers.

Below that, a graph appears that shows your revenue development over the past 12 months. If you move your mouse over a bar, more detailed information about the respective month will be displayed.

Gray: Recurring revenue from existing members

Red: Lost revenue from cancellations

Green: Revenue from new members

You can also filter your revenue data by type, select a specific time period, or download your data as a CSV file.

Please note that revenue sums shown here are not equal to your payout, as taxes and fees will need to be deducted. Payout figures can be found in the monthly statement you receive via email – you can also download them in the Payouts section.

Subscribers and members

Below the section with your monthly revenue, you will find more information, including newsletter and member figures.

With just one click on the arrow next to each heading, you can expand these boxes to get more detailed information.

Newsletter

Additional information about new subscribers and unsubscribes, as well as converted members.

Members

Figures for trial, active, guest and expiring memberships.

Latest news

The progress you have made over the past 30 days, including any new sign-ups, and your conversion and churn rates.

Conversion rate

Conversion is when you gain a new member, i.e. when this person "converts" from non-member to member.

Pay close attention to your conversion rate in two specific groups: among your newsletter subscribers and among trial members:

  • If you open Newsletter Subscribers, you will see how many newsletter subscribers have converted to paying members in the previous 30 days.

  • In the Latest News section, you can see how many trial members have converted to paying members.

Ideally, you will keep up your conversion rates or even better, increase them. This is how you gain new revenue.

There are several ways to convert subscribers into members, but here are a couple quick suggestions:

  1. The simplest, most efficient method is to always mention your membership programme – at least at the beginning and the end of every newsletter you send out, but every now and then also in an extra newsletter and some social media posts.

  2. Shortly before the end of the trial month, you could send a personal email to any guest and trial members inviting them to support your project.

Churn

Churn refers to how many members you lose each month.

You can find this information under the Latest News section. It refers to the previous 30 days and is given as a percentage in relation to your total revenue.

It is quite normal to lose members from time to time. An average Steady project has 2-3% churn per month. At the same time, you will gain new members and may even be able to win back churned members at some point.

Keep a close eye on this rate and monitor changes: If you experience unusually high churn, you can think about what caused it. Often this happens about a year after the start of your membership programme, because that's when many annual memberships will expire. What's equally important is working on strengthening your community to reduce churn.

Long-Term Metrics and Billing Cycle

Click on the arrow next to each heading to expand these boxes.

Average revenue per member

This metric refers to how much a member pays you on average per month. The average value for Steady is around 5.50 euros per member per month.

The higher this value, the better, of course. You can influence this, for example, with the prices and the design of your plans.

Have you noticed that most of your members buy the most expensive plan? Then many of them would probably be willing to pay more, which means that your prices are too low.

Or are most of your members on the lowest plan? Then you might be able to convince them to choose a more expensive plan by offering more attractive benefits in return.

Average lifetime revenue of a member

The average lifetime revenue indicates how much revenue a member brings you in total, i.e. how much a member pays, on average, for the duration of a membership.

We calculate this number by multiplying the average duration of a membership by average monthly revenue per member.

We use Steady-wide data for this calculation if there is not enough project-specific data yet. After all, Steady members are very loyal: the average duration of a membership on Steady is three years.

This metric shows how much more sustainable memberships are compared to individual donations.

It can also help you when spending money to attract members (for example, for advertisements or thank-you bonuses). As a rough guide, we recommend the ratio 1:4: if you spend about a quarter of one member's lifetime revenue to attract one new member, you're in the black.

Billing Cycle

If you offer monthly and annual plans, a pie chart will appear at the bottom right of your Analytics page, showing you the percentage of monthly and annual memberships sold. You can choose to display this information for either the number of members or for sales volume.

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