Understanding Your Analytics Dashboard
Views, completion rate, drop-off curves, follower growth — what each metric means and how to use it.
Where to find it
Click Analytics in the user menu dropdown (your avatar in the top-right corner), or visit /analytics directly. The dashboard shows trailing 30-day performance across all your published stories.
The top stats
Four cards at the top give you the big picture:
- Views (30d): Total story opens across all your work in the last 30 days. Each reader session counts as one view — reloading the same story in the same tab doesn't double-count.
- Completion: The percentage of readers who reached the final page of any story. This is the single most important metric for storytelling quality — if people start but don't finish, the story has a pacing or engagement problem.
- Followers: Your total follower count plus the change this month (+N or -N). Followers get your new stories in their weekly email digest and on their shelf.
- Published: How many of your stories are currently live vs. total (including drafts).
The sparklines
Two trend charts show daily activity over the last 30 days:
- Views — daily story opens. Spikes usually correspond to a new publish, a social share, or an email digest going out on Sunday.
- New followers — daily new follows. Watch for which publishes or social posts drive follow spikes.
Per-story breakdown
Below the sparklines, every story gets its own card with:
- Views (30d): How many times this specific story was opened
- Completion: What percentage of viewers reached the last page
- Avg depth: How far the average session reached, as a percentage of total pages. 100% = they read everything. 40% = they bailed around the middle.
- Favorites / Comments: Engagement signals — readers who cared enough to tap the heart or write something
The drop-off curve
This is the most actionable chart on the dashboard. Each bar represents a page in the story, and the bar height shows what percentage of initial readers made it to that page.
- Bar 1 is always 100% — everyone who opened the story reached page 1
- The bars slope downward — some readers leave at every page
- The steepest cliff between two adjacent bars is where readers are bailing out. FableHatch highlights this in coral and labels it ("47% drop at p4")
What to do with it: If page 4 has a massive drop, go look at page 4. Is it a wall of text? A confusing transition? A low-quality image? The drop-off curve tells you where the problem is — you have to figure out why.
How tracking works
When a reader opens one of your stories, FableHatch creates a reading session and tracks the furthest page they reach. If they read to the last page, the session is marked as "completed." All of this happens silently in the background — readers never see any tracking UI.
Anonymous readers (not signed in) are tracked too, so your view counts reflect real readership, not just registered users.