Add-on: Analytics Dashboard

$79/year

Running a private podcast without data is guesswork. The Analytics Dashboard changes that.

Know exactly how your show is growing.

Most private podcasters have no clear picture of their own business. They know their subscriber count from their membership plugin — and not much else. Is churn going up? Are subscribers actually listening? How does your show compare to others on the same infrastructure? The answers are sitting in your subscriber logs, but there’s no way to see them.

The Analytics Dashboard surfaces everything: subscriber growth by tier, cohort retention, feed engagement as a proxy for active listeners, episode download counts, email open rates, and — uniquely — benchmark comparisons against the Benecaster platform median. The kind of context that usually requires being part of a podcast network is available here at the individual creator level.

The data has been collecting since day one. Benecaster writes subscriber lifecycle events and daily snapshots from the moment you activate the plugin — whether or not you have the Analytics Dashboard. Purchase it today and your full history is immediately available. There’s no “starts tracking from now” gap.

Every dimension of your show’s growth.

Subscriber growth:

Multi-line growth chart — one line per tier, date-range selectable (7 days / 30 days / 90 days / 12 months / custom)
Tier breakdown table: active count, new subscribers, churn, and net per tier, with a Compare with the previous period option
Tier movement tracking: upgrades and downgrades in the period shown separately
Cohort retention: subscribers who joined in Month X — what percentage are still active?

Revenue and donations:

Revenue by tier, on Benecaster’s built-in membership: what was actually collected, per tier and month, with buy-ups shown separately. Cash collected, not an estimated rate
Listener Support donations on the growth chart, per currency

Win-back:

Who cancelled but is still checking their feed, by tier, podcast app and show, and how many each day. These are the people most likely to come back

Feed engagement:

Percentage of subscribers whose podcast app polled their feed in the last 7 days, per tier
How recently each tier’s subscribers last checked in — active, low, at risk, or never set up, the same bands as your Subscribers screen
A reliable proxy for active listeners — no tracking pixels or app-side instrumentation required

Every time a subscriber’s podcast app checks their private feed URL, Benecaster records when it last checked in. That is what powers the feed engagement panel, showing where each tier stands today — without any client-side instrumentation or tracking pixels.

Download analytics (requires download tracking — see below):

Episode download counts per episode, per tier, per date range
Podcast app breakdown (Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, etc.)
Grouped bar chart: top episodes with bars per tier

Email engagement (requires Email Editor add-on):

Open rate and click-through rate per episode notification send
Per-tier open rate breakdown
Trend vs. prior period

Benchmark comparisons (requires telemetry opt-in):

Your churn rate vs. the Benecaster platform median
Your geographic audience concentration vs. comparable shows
Your episode reach rate vs. platform top quartile

The license server aggregates anonymized data across all Benecaster installs. These benchmarks are the kind of performance context that usually requires being part of a podcast network — available here at the individual creator level.

Analytics Digest — scheduled email reports:

Three independent digest frequencies, each with its own on/off toggle. All default to off.

Daily: net subscriber change today; notable callouts if a threshold is crossed
Weekly: the main report — subscriber total, tier breakdown, top episode, feed engagement, benchmarks
Monthly: comprehensive — full subscriber detail, cohort highlight, year-over-year comparison

Empty digests are never sent. Sections that depend on optional features (download tracking, telemetry) are omitted cleanly if those features aren’t active.

Export: Every panel exports as a CSV, and the whole screen as a PDF — show name and artwork in the header, date range included. The same data is available as sheets in your Your Data spreadsheet. Use the PDF when you’re sharing performance with a co-host, presenting to stakeholders, or just want something that looks like a real report.

A note on server load.

Feed request logging adds a lightweight database write on each feed poll. For most shows this is negligible. At scale — large subscriber counts combined with high polling frequency — it’s worth knowing this is happening. Adjust the retention window in Settings → Analytics to control disk usage; daily rollups are always retained regardless of the raw log setting.

Download tracking is opt-in because it adds real server load. Every episode download becomes an additional WordPress request — during release windows on active shows, turning it on roughly doubles your feed traffic volume. Managed WordPress hosting with Redis handles this well. If you’re on shared hosting with a large audience, review your hosting tier before turning it on. Every Analytics Dashboard feature except download counts works without it.

Context you can’t get anywhere else.

Benchmark data is only possible because Benecaster runs across many independent podcast sites simultaneously. The license server aggregates anonymized statistics — no individual subscriber data, no personally identifiable information — and returns platform-wide medians and quartiles.

Examples:

“Your churn rate (3.2%) is below the platform median (5.8%)”
“62% of your listeners are in the US vs. platform average 48%”
“Your average episode reach (74%) is in the top quartile”

Benchmarks require opting into anonymized telemetry in Settings → Analytics. Data transmitted: subscriber counts by tier, geographic distribution totals (country/region), listening pattern frequency distributions, churn rate. No emails, names, tokens, or individual subscriber activity.

Even More Powerful With

Email Editor — open rates and click-through rates per episode notification appear in the Analytics Dashboard, powered by Email Editor’s tracking pixel. See which episode emails your subscribers actually open.
Sponsor Manager — when both are active, sponsor reports automatically include download counts per episode and CPM calculates without manual math. Turn your Analytics data into a sponsor deliverable.
Community Integrations — a Community panel shows how many of your subscribers have linked their Discord account.

Requires / Works with

Requires: Benecaster, on any plan from Launch up
Feed request logging is always active; raw log retention is configurable in Settings → Analytics
Download analytics require download tracking, switched on per show with Enable download tracking on all episodes in the show’s Details tab, or per episode
Benchmark data requires opting into anonymized telemetry in Settings → Analytics

Name	Set by	What it does	Kept for
`wordpress_logged_in_*`	Benecaster	Keeps you signed in to your Benecaster account.	Until you sign out, or two weeks with "Remember Me".
`wordpress_sec_*`	Benecaster	Secures your signed-in session over HTTPS.	Until you sign out, or two weeks with "Remember Me".
`wp-settings-*`	Benecaster	Remembers your admin screen preferences.	One year.
`benecaster_ls_purchase_sign_in`	Benecaster	Signs you in to your new account on the page you bought from, once your purchase has gone through.	Thirty minutes, or until you are signed in.
`benecaster_ls_cookie_consent`	Benecaster	Remembers the choice you make on this banner, so we do not ask again.	One year.

Name	Set by	What it does	Kept for
`__stripe_mid`	Stripe	Lets Stripe recognise the device across payment attempts to detect card fraud.	One year.
`__stripe_sid`	Stripe	The same fraud check, for the current visit only.	Thirty minutes.