Your newsletter dashboard

Every newsletter has its own dashboard, and it answers two questions: how the list is moving, and how the last few issues did. Four cards run along the top, the list growth chart sits under them, and below that are your last ten issues and the links readers actually followed.

Nothing needs configuring for any of it. A newsletter created this morning shows empty states naming the next action, and the figures fill in as people join and issues go out. Until nothing required is left, what is still outstanding from setup sits above the cards and then disappears rather than staying there ticked. A summary of the week also arrives by email on Mondays unless you switch it off, which is covered in the emails Issue Mint sends.

The four cards along the top

The four cards are active subscribers, new subscribers, unsubscribes and average unique click rate. Each one carries the number, a comparison against the period before it, and a small line of the last thirty days.

• Active subscribers is counted live when the page loads, so a list imported this morning appears immediately. The comparison is against the size of the list thirty days ago, because that is the question “am I growing” actually asks.
• New subscribers counts the people who joined in the last thirty days, against the thirty days before that.
• Unsubscribes counts leavers over the same two windows, with the arrow reversed, because fewer is the better direction here.
• Avg unique CTR is the average across your last 5 sent issues of unique clickers over messages delivered. Delivered rather than sent, deliberately: a message that bounced was never a chance to click, and counting it would flatter nobody.

Where a card has nothing to compare against, it says so rather than showing a triumphant rise from zero. Where there are fewer than two days of history, the line says so instead of drawing a single dot.

The list growth chart

The growth chart plots active subscribers at the end of each day, over 30, 90 or 365 days, and opens on 90. A full year arrives with the page and the range buttons slice it in the browser, so switching range costs nothing.

There is one line on it, on purpose. Joiners and leavers are two orders of magnitude smaller than the list itself, and giving them a second axis to fit on is the single most misleading thing a chart can do. They are in the tooltip instead: hover any day and you get the list size, how many joined and how many unsubscribed.

Days are your newsletter’s own days, in its timezone rather than ours, so a Monday on the chart holds your Monday.

Recent issues

The recent issues table lists your last ten sent issues with the number sent, the delivered share, the opened share, the clicked share and the unsubscribes each one cost. Drafts and scheduled issues are not in it.

Delivered is a share of the number sent. Opened and clicked are shares of the number delivered, so a delivery problem shows up as a delivery problem instead of hiding inside an engagement figure. Reading delivery numbers goes into what those shares are worth. Each subject links through to that issue’s own report, which is where the per-link detail lives.

Top links

Top links ranks the ten most clicked links from issues sent in the last thirty days, with unique readers beside total clicks, and the host and issue number under each title.

Links from your intro and your commentary can appear here as well as your curated picks, because every link in an issue is tracked. Scanner and proxy traffic is kept out, which is why these figures are lower than another tool would report and why that is the point. This panel is the one worth reading before you plan the next issue, and what click tracking is for makes the wider case.

When the figures update

Today’s figures refresh every hour, and the days behind today are finalised overnight, once no more clicks or signups can land in them.

The active subscribers card is the exception: it is counted live, every time you open the page. So the card and the last point on the growth chart can disagree by a few hours of activity, and when they do, the card is the more current of the two.

What the dashboard does not show

There are no visitor statistics for your archive website. Issue Mint counts clicks on links in issues and what your subscribers do with them, not page views, so a successful archive page shows up here only as clicks on the links inside it.

Nothing about sponsorship appears on the dashboard either, and there is no per-reader detail: the dashboard is aggregate, and one subscriber’s history sits on their own page in your list.