Understanding Your Stats

Accessing Your Stats

1. Sign in to your Exposure account

2. Click Stats in your dashboard sidebar, or visit /stats

Your stats page shows real-time data about your views, traffic sources, and subscriber growth.

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What’s on the Stats Page?

Summary Cards

At the top of your stats page, you’ll see four key metrics:

• Total Views — Combined views across all your stories and your profile page

• Story Views — How many times people viewed your individual stories

• Site Views — Visits to your profile page and homepage

• New Subscribers — People who signed up for your email updates (if you have subscriptions enabled)

Each card also shows how you’re doing compared to the previous period (e.g., “+12.5%” means you got 12.5% more views than last month).

Best Day

We highlight your best day in the selected time period, so you can see when your content really resonated with your audience.

Views Today

A real-time counter showing how many views you’ve received so far today.

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How Views Are Counted

A view is counted each time someone loads one of your stories.

Here’s what you should know:

✅ What counts as a view:

• Any visitor loading your story page

• Return visitors coming back to read again

• Views from any source (social media, search, direct links)

❌ What doesn’t count:

• Your own views (we don’t count when you view your own stories)

• Bots and automated crawlers

• Preview or staging environments

Views are tracked in real-time, so the data you see is always up-to-date.

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Understanding Referrers

Referrers show you where your traffic is coming from. This helps you understand which platforms and sources are driving the most visitors to your work.

Common Referrer Types

Source	What It Means
Direct Traffic	Bookmarks, typed URLs, email clients, and visits where no referrer is available
Google	Google Search, Google Discover, and other Google properties
Twitter / X	Links from Twitter posts, including t.co shortened links
Facebook	Posts from Facebook, the mobile app, and Messenger
Instagram	Bio links, stories, and post links
LinkedIn	Posts, articles, and direct messages
Exposure	Traffic from Exposure's Discover page or other Exposure sites
RSS	Feed readers like Feedly, Inoreader, NewsBlur, etc.

Pro tip: If you see a lot of “Direct Traffic,” it often means people are bookmarking your stories or clicking links in emails!

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Top Stories

The Top Stories section shows your best-performing content for the selected time period. You can sort by:

• Views — Most-viewed stories first

• Interactions — Stories with the most likes first

Click Load More to see additional stories beyond the initial list.

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Subscriber Growth

If you have email subscriptions enabled, you’ll see a Subscriber Growth chart showing your cumulative subscriber count over time.

Orange dots on the chart mark when you published new stories, so you can see how publishing affects your subscriber growth.

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Optimal Story Insights

Based on your top-performing content, we analyze what photo count and word count tends to work best for your audience.

This feature looks at your top 20 performing stories and calculates weighted averages—stories with more views have more influence on the recommendation.

Note: You’ll need at least 5 published stories with views for this feature to appear. If you’re just getting started, keep publishing and check back!

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Choosing a Time Period

You can view your stats over different time periods:

Period	What You'll See
7 Days	Last week's performance
30 Days	Last month's performance (default)
90 Days	Last quarter's performance
1 Year	Full year overview

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Stats by Plan

Different plans have access to different stats features:

Feature	Pro	Pro Plus	Business
30-day stats view	✅	✅	✅
Top referrers	✅	✅	✅
Top stories	✅	✅	✅
Key metrics chart	✅	✅	✅
Extended time periods (7d, 90d, 1yr)	❌	✅	✅
CSV export	❌	✅	✅
Optimal story insights	❌	✅	✅
Subscriber growth chart	❌	✅	✅
Period comparison percentages	❌	✅	✅
Priority support	❌	❌	✅

Ready to unlock more stats? Upgrade your plan

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Exporting Your Stats

Pro Plus and Business users can download their stats as a CSV file for deeper analysis in Excel, Google Sheets, or any spreadsheet app.

To export:

1. Select your desired time period

2. Click the Export CSV button

Your export includes:

• Daily breakdown of views

• Subscriber counts

• Top referrers

• Summary totals

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Frequently Asked Questions

Why don’t I see my own views counted?

We filter out your own views to give you accurate data about your actual audience. When you’re logged in and viewing your own stories, those views aren’t recorded.

Why are some referrers showing as “Direct Traffic”?

Direct traffic includes:

• People who bookmarked your site

• Links clicked in emails or messaging apps

• Typed URLs

• Any visit where the browser didn’t send referrer information

Many email clients and privacy-focused browsers don’t send referrer data, so these visits appear as “Direct.”

How often are stats updated?

Stats are updated in real-time! As soon as someone views your story, it’s counted.

Why do referrers show all-time data instead of period-specific data?

For performance reasons, referrer data shows your all-time traffic sources. This gives you a complete picture of where your audience comes from without slowing down the stats page.

The “Optimal Story” section isn’t showing up. Why?

You need at least 5 published stories with views for this feature to appear. Keep publishing and building your audience!

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Need Help?

If you have questions about your stats or notice something unexpected, reach out to us at hello@exposure.co. We’re happy to help!

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Need help?

Use the Exposure contact form.