Understanding GS Analytics

A tour of every panel on GS Analytics — what each number means and how to read it.

Reviewed regularly to match the current app.

Overview

Your GS Analytics page is where you see how your poetry is performing — who’s reading it, what they’re engaging with, and how many keep coming back. This guide walks through every section on the page in plain English.

Top of the page

At the top you’ll see a greeting with your name (“Welcome back, [username]”) and a short line reminding you what the page is for: your poetry’s performance at a glance. If you’re ranked on the site’s Rising Poets list this week, a small badge shows your rank (for example, “#4 this week”) and whether you moved up or down compared to last week.

Below the welcome banner, under the heading GS Analytics, is a row of buttons: 7d · 30d · 90d · 1y · All. These change the time window for every number on the rest of the page. Click 30d to see the last 30 days, 1y for the past year, and so on. On a free account only 7d and 30d are unlocked; 90d, 1y, and All are part of GS Pro and show a lock until you upgrade.

• Refresh. Reloads the latest numbers if something looks stale.
• Export. Saves a copy of your data (CSV/PDF) that you can download.

The five big numbers (KPI cards)

Below the controls, five cards line up in a row. Each highlights a single important number and shows how much it’s changed since last month.

• Followers. How many people currently follow your profile.
• Poems Published. The total number of poems you’ve posted publicly.
• Total Reads. How many times your poems have been opened and read.
• Growth Score. A score out of 100 that summarizes how fast your audience is growing across multiple signals. Higher = stronger growth.
• Engagement Rate. The percentage of viewers who actually interact (like, comment, share, save) with your poems, rather than just reading and leaving.

Each card also shows a percent change versus last month (green if up, red if down) and a small donut ring for visual reference.

Engagement Summary

This is the large panel on the left (or top on mobile) — the heart of the dashboard.

Across the top of this panel you’ll see icons with numbers:

• Total Reads — how many times people opened your poems.
• Comments — how many comments your poems received.
• Total Likes — how many likes people tapped.
• Total Shares — how many times your poems were shared outside the platform.
• Total Saves — how many people bookmarked your poems.
• Previous Week — a summary of last week’s combined activity (for context).
• Engagement — the overall engagement rate expressed as a percentage.

Each number has a small badge showing whether it went up or down since the previous period.

Below the mini-stats is a combined chart. Purple/blue bars are monthly Reads; the yellow line on top is monthly Likes. The X-axis is the last 12 months. The Y-axis shows the count in thousands (so “6.2k” means 6,200 reads). This lets you see at a glance whether your reads and likes are growing together (healthy), whether reads are up but likes are flat (people are finding you but not loving the work), or the reverse (a small audience, but very engaged).

Clicking the three-dot kebab menu on this panel opens a small menu where you can change the time range for just that panel (independent of the page-level buttons): Last 7 days · Last 30 days · Last 90 days · Year to date (the 90-day and Year-to-date ranges are part of GS Pro).

Reader Retention

This smaller panel sits to the right of the engagement chart (or below it on mobile). It answers one question: how often are readers coming back?

A circular gauge shows a large percentage (for example, 67%) and the label “Returning Readers”. This means: of everyone who read one of your poems in this period, what percent had read something of yours before. Higher is better — it means people are coming back for more of your work, not just passing through once.

Below the gauge are three regional entries with a percentage each — for example:

• Brooklyn, NY — 72%
• The Castro, SF — 35%
• Kovan, Singapore — 28%

These show how retention varies by location. A high number means readers in that area are especially loyal; use this to understand where you have a strong local audience worth engaging more directly.

Top Poems

A ranked table of your best-performing poems in the selected time window.

• Poem — the title (click to open the poem).
• Reads — how many times it was opened.
• Likes — how many likes it received.
• Comments — how many comments it generated.
• Category — the colored pill shows its main category (Elegy, Nature, Loss, etc.).

The list is ordered by reads (highest first). Hover a row to highlight it. Use Export to download the table as a file, or View All → to jump to a full list of your poems sorted by reads.

Categories Written

A donut chart breaking down the categories you write in. Each slice is a category (e.g., Loss, Nature, Identity). The center number is your total published poem count. To the right is a legend listing each category with its share (count + percentage). If one slice dominates, your work is concentrated there; a more even donut means you write across many themes.

Poetic Forms

Same idea as Categories Written, but for form rather than subject. Slices are poetic forms (Sonnet, Haiku, Free Verse, etc.), the center shows your total poem count, and the legend shows each form’s count and percentage.

Glossary

A few terms and symbols that show up across the page:

• pp— “percentage points.” The difference between two percentages. If your engagement rate went from 8% to 9.1%, that’s a gain of 1.1pp, not a 1.1% gain (which would mean 8 × 1.011 ≈ 8.09%). “pp” is the precise way to describe the change.
• % — percent change versus the previous period. “+22.4%” means 22.4% more than last time.
• k — thousands. “6.2k” = 6,200.
• /100 — a score on a 100-point scale (used only on Growth Score).
• ↑ / ↓ (green/red badges) — direction and size of change versus the previous period.

When to look at what

Rough guide for different questions you might have:

• Is my audience growing? Followers card, Growth Score, Engagement Summary chart.
• Which of my poems landed? Top Poems table.
• Am I keeping my readers? Reader Retention gauge.
• What do I write most / should I try more variety? Categories Written + Poetic Forms.
• How is this month vs last? The “%” badges on every card.

Features in progress

A few items on the page are visible but not fully wired up yet — some per-card “More” actions (extra drill-down views) in the kebab menus. These will be enabled in future updates. Until then, the controls may not change what you see.

Where to go next

If you have questions about any of these numbers or want to suggest a metric we’re not tracking, contact support. For a broader orientation of the platform, head back to the Getting Started category.