Story Metrics Dashboard: FAQs – Episode

Story Metrics Dashboard

What is the Story Metrics Dashboard?

It’s a more detailed view that shows you how your story performed over the past 30 days. Clicking on each of the metrics at the top will show a chart with more details for that metric. The metrics we currently support are: Rank, Reads, Gems, Gems per Read.

Why don’t I see the Story Metrics Dashboard for my story?

To unlock the dashboard, your story will need to reach at least 300 reads in the past 30 days. This is due to the data being unstable and unreliable without the volume necessary from this established number. This number indicates that your story has achieved enough reader activity for the trends to be reasonably accurate.

Once the dashboard is unlocked, it’ll stay unlocked!

How do I read these charts?

For all the charts, the important thing to pay attention to are the changes over time. For example, you may notice your charts tend to spike around certain days of the week. That might mean that your readers tend to read your story on those days.

Your chart might rise the same day you released changes for your story (e.g. added a new episode, changed your gem choices, used Early Access, etc.). That means that your changes positively impacted your metrics.

For the stacked bar charts (Reads, Gems), specifically, you can also see a more detailed view for each category in the legend (the section directly below the chart that tells what each block represents). The main chart shows the amount of each category (as represented by a different color), and the total height of each bar is the total Reads or Gems your story earned on that day. To click into a category, click on it in the legend, and you’ll see the chart automatically adjust to show you just the data for that specific category. To exit that view, just click on that category in the legend again.

What does the Rank chart show?

The Rank chart shows your story's position on the leaderboard in the past 30 days. Both the Overall Rank and the Genre Rank are displayed simultaneously so that you can see how your story has performed on both the overall and the genre leaderboards at the same time.

Note that it’s possible for your chart to indicate that no data is available. If you see this, it means that your story has not consistently trended above #20,000 for the past 30 days, which is our threshold for being able to store your ranking data.

What do the Reads charts show?

The Reads charts show how many reads your story earned in the past 30 days via 3 different ways of looking at that data.

By Episode

This chart shows you how many of your reads came from the first 3 episodes you published for your story, and every other episode that you may have since published. This is to help you understand how much of your reads come from new readers versus continuing readers. Read data for your most recently published episode will not appear on this chart, however, it will once you publish a subsequent episode.

You can look at either category in more detail by clicking on it in the legend.

By Completion Rate

These charts show you how many (completed) reads your story earned against the number of times a reader started an episode.

A completed read occurs when a reader finishes one of the episodes in your story. This is the same as a read.
A started read occurs when a reader starts one of the episodes in your story. Started reads do NOT include completed reads, and a different number altogether.

All the started and completed reads that occur in your story on a given day are included in the bar chart. Keep in mind that different readers may take different amounts of time to read your story, which can impact the daily totals.

Completion rate measures the percent of readers that started an episode in the past 30 days also finished it in the past 30 days. If a reader finished an episode, but started it before the 30-day window, their data does not get counted towards the completion rate.

Compared to Other Stories

These charts show you how your story’s completion rates compare to other community stories. Your story is being compared to all community stories across all genres with enough reads to provide a stable calculation of completion rate so that you can get a sense of how your story is doing relative to others.

Specifically in comparing the completion rates directly:

The completion rates shown for “Other Community Stories” are reflective of the average community story.
The completion rates shown for “High Retaining Community Stories” are reflective of the stories with the highest completion rates across the community.

Specifically in comparing total completed reads per day:

The numbers for “Completed Reads from Other Stories” estimate the completed reads of the average community story based on your story’s started reads per day.
The numbers for “Completed Reads from High Retaining Stories” estimate the completed reads of high retaining community stories based on your story’s started reads per day.

What does the Gems chart show?

The Gems chart shows the number of gems used by readers in your story during the past 30 days.

Specifically, you can also see how many of the gems came from different gem features and / or commonly used gem choice categories. Currently, 4 types of gem choices can be recognized in the app: Support the Author, Bonus Content, Points, and Outfits. In order for the app to recognize these gem choice types, you may need to adjust the donacode syntax in your story. For more details on how to do that, see our Gem Choices Zendesk FAQ.

You may also notice an Other / Uncategorized category. This will include all gem choices you do not title with the specific syntax, in addition to a small percentage (about 5% at most) of readers are reading your story on older app versions.

What does the Gems / Read chart show?

The Gems / Read chart shows you the ratio of the number of gems used in your story to the number of reads you've accumulated in the past 30 days.

The value will be 0 if readers didn’t use gems in your story, or if you didn’t earn reads for your story.