Why Substack Stats Feel “Off” (Compared to Traditional Email Platforms)
Substack doesn’t measure the way traditional email platforms do. Once you understand why, your numbers start to make sense
If you’ve ever looked at your Substack stats and thought:
What am I even looking at?
Same.
Nothing like opening our dashboard, seeing numbers that don’t match our expectations, and wondering if we broke something. We didn’t. Substack just isn’t measuring the same things we’re used to with other email platforms.
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Substack Isn’t Just Email
On platforms like Mailchimp, your content lives inside the inbox. Someone subscribes, you send an email, and they either open it or they don’t. Clean, contained, manageable.
Substack does two jobs at once. You publish a post (aka a newsletter or article) and two things happen at once:
1) It’s emailed to your subscribers and
2) It’s added to your public Substack site, making it searchable.
This is huge! It means your content travels. People can read your post without opening the email, clicking a shared link, or finding it later through search. Which is great… until you expect your stats to behave like email stats.
They won’t.
Why Open Rates Don’t Tell the Whole Story
Open rates used to be the metric, yet even in email marketing, they’re not as reliable anymore. Privacy protections have made open tracking less precise, which Mailchimp explains here.
Now layer in Substack’s public posts, and it gets even messier. Someone can read your entire post without ever “opening” the email. Another person opens it, skims, and leaves. Someone else finds it days later through a share.
All of that counts as readership; only one of those shows up as an open in analytics. So if your open rate feels off, it’s not necessarily your content. It’s the system.
A Simple Example, Promise
Let’s say you send a post to 500 subscribers and 200 open it. On an email platform, that’s the story. On Substack, that same post might get shared around, and maybe another 200 people read it without touching the email.
Now your reach is closer to 400, but your open rate still says 200. So you sit there thinking, “Cool, half my readers don’t exist.” Great. 😬
They do, though. They just showed up in a way our email brains weren’t trained to expect. So it’s about adjusting our expectations.
Views Are About Reach, Not Just Email
Substack behaves more like a blog than people realize. Views include tracked email opens PLUS website visits, social clicks, and search traffic. Substack explains how posts can be indexed and discovered here: Substack SEO guidance:
The job of the SEO title and SEO description is to talk directly to search engines and suggest how they might display your post in search results.
So when your views exceed your opens, that’s not a mismatch — it’s your content doing its job. It means your post didn’t stay neatly inside your subscriber list. It got out and found people, maybe flirted a little.
Email metrics are like tracking who opened a letter you mailed. Substack is tracking that, plus who later found the same letter posted on a bulletin board.
Different paths, same content. Only one of them shows up as an “open.” Tricky.
Why This Matters for Growth
If you read Substack metrics the same way you read email newsletter metrics, you’ll convince yourself nothing is working, tweak subject lines, rewrite intros, question life choices.
Meanwhile, your post is out there — getting shared, indexed, and read by people who didn’t know you yesterday- the difference between visibility and discoverability.
Visibility is your existing audience seeing your work.
Discoverability is new people finding you.
Substack gives you both; it just doesn’t package them into one neat number.
The Trade-Off
Substack blends email analytics with website traffic and distribution. That makes the data feel less controlled. If you want everything contained and predictable, platforms like Mailchimp or Kit may feel easier to read.
If you want your work to live beyond your list and keep working after you hit send, Substack makes that happen. We just don’t get perfectly tidy numbers.
What To Watch Instead
Instead of staring at the open rate as if it personally offended you, look at patterns.
Are views increasing?
Are people finding your posts outside your list?
Is your subscriber count growing?
Are people engaging?
These are more indications that you’re moving in the right direction for growth, instead of one number on one post on one day when you were already in a mood.
If You’re Using Mailchimp, MailerLite, (Or Kit)
If you’re on a traditional email platform like Mailchimp or Kit, your metrics are more contained, but even there, open rate isn’t the most useful number. Click rate matters more because it shows action. Mailchimp breaks down campaign reporting here: Mailchimp campaign reports:
Open means they saw it.
Click means they cared.
Click-to-open rate tells you how effective your content is once someone opens it. If people open but don’t click, your subject line worked. Your content didn’t. Annoying, but fixable.
And then there’s subscriber list growth. The least exciting metric and the most honest one.
TLDR: If more people are joining than leaving, you’re moving in the right direction.
The Dreaded UnSubscribes
As your Substack grows, your unsubscribe numbers will usually grow too. Unsubscribes are a pretty normal event. When they suddenly spike, perhaps something in that email didn’t land. That’s data, not a personal attack.
In the beginning, most subscribers are your biggest fans. As you reach a wider audience through Recommendations, Notes, Chat, shares, and search, some people will discover you’re not quite what they’re looking for and leave. The important number isn’t how many people unsubscribe. It’s the percentage.
If you have 1,000 subscribers and lose 5, that's 0.5%. If you have 13,500 subscribers and lose 50, that's only 0.37%, even though the raw number looks (and feels) much larger.
More unsubscribes don’t necessarily mean you’re doing anything wrong. Often, they simply mean you’re reaching more people.
A Clarification on Subscription Options
People often think that if they turn on paid subscriptions, free readers will lose access to their publication. Not true. You can create a paywall if you want to, but you don’t have to.
I don’t. Everything I publish is free. The paid option is simply there for readers who want to support my work. So why turn on paid subscriptions if making money from subscriptions isn’t your goal? Because some Substack features require it.
If you want to appear on a leaderboard, you must have paid subscriptions enabled. To qualify for sponsorship opportunities through the new-ish Creator Kit program, you need at least 100 paid subscribers and to be on a leaderboard.
If neither of those matters to you, there’s no reason to turn paid subscriptions on.
The goal isn’t to keep everyone — it’s to attract more of the right readers than you lose.
The Bottom Line
Substack and email platforms are measuring different behaviors. One tracks what happens inside the inbox. The other tracks how your content moves once it leaves it.
Neither is wrong, but if you expect them to behave the same way, the numbers will always feel off. Once you understand what’s being measured, the data becomes much more useful and much less frustrating.
Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Please share below!
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The truth is simple. Most authors don’t fail because their writing isn’t good. They struggle because readers never get the chance to find them. Let’s fix that.
I agree to this completely. And somehow Substack analytics give us so much high value information… we just need to be able to interpret them properly.
I bet this helps a lot of people!
This is absolutely perfect timing! Well done again @BadRedhead Media (Rachel) wjth spot in advice, I have just posted a note about this exact thing, why my articles only average 30% open rate 😁