Substack Dashboard Data - 2026 Update
Know your bio profile settings, your dashboard settings and how to navigate the whole lot so you can rest easy knowing everything is ticked off.
Hi folks,
Here we go Substack dashboard explainer - the control room of your Substack and let’s make sure we set it all up the RIGHT way!
Not the most exciting topic I know but you were all super generous with your questions!
People don’t remember brand names without massive advertising budgets. Whereas people do remember your actual name. So make sure that the handle is your name.
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Only use Chat if you feel like you’ve got a really engaged audience in comments and you want to create a more intimate space. Make sure you set the parameters; mine is paid-only because I want you to feel really safe there. Space holding is so important to me.
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I don’t want to hit people with paywalls. If I’m writing to free subscribers, I’m writing to them and I’m always inviting people to do more with me. But that’s exactly it.
Your Ai Summary Thanks Claude
The Substack Back Office: Everything You Need to Know
If you’ve ever felt a little lost navigating the back end of Substack, you’re not alone. The settings panel is long, the layout changes regularly, and most people only dip into it when something goes wrong.
This session was a full walkthrough of the Substack back office, from your profile page all the way through to your publication stats so you know exactly where things live and what they do.
Here’s what we covered:
Your profile vs your publication These are two different things, but they’re linked in ways that can catch you out. Your header image (what Substack used to call your wordmark) pulls through from your primary publication so if you change it in one place, it changes in both. Your profile is also where you manage your handle, bio (160 characters make them count), social links, and which publications are visible.
The settings panel is your control room Everything lives in one long scroll: notifications, welcome emails, drip campaigns, community controls, privacy settings, paywall options, and billing. It’s a lot but knowing it’s there means you can find what you need when you need it, rather than feeling like things are hidden from you.
Subscriber management and targeted emails Inside the Subscribers tab, you can filter your list by behaviour for example, people who’ve viewed at least one post in the last 30 days. Select that group and you can send them a direct email without it publishing to your Substack website. It’s a quiet, powerful tool for reaching your most engaged readers.
Tags are navigation tools, not SEO tags Substack tags group your posts under a unique URL so you can send readers directly to every post on a specific topic, series, or challenge. Think of them like the sections of a digital magazine. You can add them at the point of publishing and link to them from your navigation bar.
The stats that actually help you Inside your dashboard you can see where your audience is based, which publications you overlap with (useful for collaboration), where your traffic is coming from, and which posts drove the most subscribers or highest open rates. It’s worth a look at least once a year and especially when you’re deciding what to write next.
A few newer features worth knowing about Drip campaigns (a nurture sequence for new subscribers not fully rolled out yet), Boost (Substack offers engaged readers a discount on your paid subscription), in-app pricing (Apple charges an additional 30% on subscriptions bought through the app — check your settings), and direct debit payments are all in there now.
The main takeaway? You don’t need to action all of it at once. Set up the essentials — your bio, your welcome email, your handle — and then dip back in when something specific comes up. Knowing where to look is enough.
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