Cheat Codes: How Working Class History uses insights to grow
In the Cheat Codes series, creators walk us through their biggest unlocks — tried-and-true tips and tactics — in growing on Patreon, featuring animation by Bryson McBee.
John has been hosting the Working Class History podcast on Patreon for over six years. Even though he’s a full-time creator now, he still uses his background as a data analyst to help him reach his business goals.
“Insights help our Patreon go from static membership to a growing membership.”
Analyzing, predicting, and adapting
John’s documentary-style podcast episodes take anywhere from six months to several years to produce. Given the long production cycles, it’s crucial for him to monitor insights to spot dips or plateaus in memberships. When John noticed a decline in his membership earlier this year, he turned to his member surveys to come up with a hypothesis.
Survey data revealed that while most members joined to support his work, over 35% were motivated primarily by his exclusive episodes. That got John thinking: what if more fans are also driven by exclusivity? So he introduced a new series of member-only discussion episodes alongside his regularly scheduled podcast episodes. Since launching the series last September, he has seen a 20% increase in new memberships — validating his hypothesis and the impact of insights-driven decisions.
Learning what works (and what doesn’t)
There are a few key places John turns to in his Insights dashboard to get a full understanding of his business and membership trends:
Membership tier insights reveal whether fans are upgrading or downgrading, so he can see how tiers are performing in terms of price and value. (0:34)
Traffic data can flag a decline in visits to his creator page, often indicating he may not be reaching his audience when promoting his Patreon on social media. By checking referral sources, John can adjust his approach and experiment with new platforms. (1:10)
Post insights get granular, showing him exactly what fans are listening to most and what’s driving conversation. Taking a long-term view at trends helps him catch big jumps or dips in membership and tie them to specific episode releases or promotions. (1:30)
By regularly checking these insights, John can make sure his membership offering stays strong, his business strategy is helping him grow, and that he’s evolving to meet his community’s needs.
“While my job was as a data analyst, you do not need to be a professional to use this. It's all very simple, very straightforward and very visual especially. And you can just kind of have a play around with it and look through the different pages and see what would be useful.”
Comments (13)
It's a good start, but I still have to read between the lines, assume and infer instead of knowing directly where the traffic came from, (which deeplinks and metadata would provide.) Just having "Google", "Bing", etc without the keywords that drove that traffic isn't very helpful. I can assume that the YouTube or other social media that was posted on a certain day is what caused a spike, but it's not guaranteed. I was more... :)
I agree. Knowing what the search queries were would be tremendously helpful. Also, if there was a way to know what specific sources resulted in a payed membership would be hugely helpful
Not perfect but why why why am I doing this my creator was Timothy Limited so why I am not in patreon for creators
The biggest problem is getting traffic. Because Patreon still allows you to write only 140 characters ridiculous to paywalled posts. I complained about this 100 times . I really can't wrap my around this incompetence. Because of this we can't get traffic from search engines! at least do this, make only attachments paywalled so i can make a regular post and make attachments membership based the best would be free version of post and paywalled version of post. so google could index properly and we could get traffic. also add code formatting already and make post embedded images proper size please
Also, my Upgrades / Downgrades section, which is such great info, is not working at the moment. I'm sure there are details with my 650 paid members and 300ish free members. I get: Upgrades and downgrades Here you'll see the number of active members who have upgraded or downgraded recently. No upgrades or downgrades to show.
This is fabulous. I was BEGGING for insights for so long. The thing I would love the most is to be able to check UTM parameters at Patreon insights. For example, I have a Facebook Group of 100K members and a Facebook Page of 20K members - I share about Patreon often in my Facebook Group, Facebook Page and also pay for Facebook ads. I don't know if my paid Facebook ads are worthy because although I see a lot of traffic (in my Patreon insights) coming to Patreon from Facebook, I'd love if the insights could give me my URL UTM parameter data so I can really see where, on a granular level (Group, Page, ads), I'm getting the most bang for my time and money promotional efforts!
I am interested to rejoin Patreon after I will be coming back to U.S. in few months from homeland Kathmandu, Nepal. Thank you so much for kindly sent email with audio.
Why can we not notify efficiently our members that joined as free members? We can't contact them directly and they don't seem to get notifications on posts that are aimed at them. Most free members don't convert to pay members and I have a feeling that some of them would have been more likely to join the smallest pledge if there was no free option. The ones that do convert from free usually do it instantly and I'm guessing just click the free button to get into the sub field. at least that's what happening on my P page. If there was a way to send messages, notifications to free patrons it would make it a much more interesting experience and closer community. I think more people would become paying members too!!
I'm a free me never of several Patreon pages and I get notifications from all of them; maybe there's a glitch with your page?
I really don't think you can seriously discuss how insights are useful for podcasters without the most obvious and useful metric for podcasters, full rss stats and actual download numbers of episodes.
Hi Benno. Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us, we know that insights and data are important to podcasters and all creators on Patreon. Earlier this year we shared here on Patreon for Creators about new updates for Membership Insights, you can learn more about that here in this post: https://www.patreon.com/posts/120990045?collection=700928 And recently, we've added RSS download data for podcasters to be able to track your podcast performance enabling you to gain insights to data that is not yet available elsewhere. You can learn more about how to view and export these insights here in Patreon's Help Center: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/207346316-Insights-dashboards. Stay tuned as we'll have more updates to come!
I do frequently check my insights. I made my page back in January and only have 1 member. What are tactics you use to grow your members?
Callouts in videos or posts. Promoting your patreon in the content. Etc.. Standard stuff