If your workspace has Shorthand Analytics enabled, you may receive a monthly email from Shorthand showing how your stories have performed during the past month. These emails are generally sent at the beginning of the month, and compare the prior month’s readership with the previous period.
If there are multiple collaborators in your workspace, each person will receive a custom analytics snapshot, showing the performance of the stories they collaborate on. Similarly, if a member belongs to multiple Shorthand workspaces, they may receive an email per workspace.
The analytics email snapshot respects the story sharing permissions set by the workspace members. That is, if a workspace member has not been added to a story, they won’t receive analytics data on that story. The metrics at the top of the email like ‘Stories published’ and ‘Total monthly views’ reflect a global view of the workspace’s story performance. On the other hand, the list of most popular stories is a custom list that is a subset of the total set of stories the email recipient has visibility over — either as an owner, editor, or viewer. These are the stories that received the most views.
Below are the answers to some frequently asked questions about analytics emails.
How do I unsubscribe from analytics emails?
You can unsubscribe at any time through your user profile in the Shorthand app. From the dashboard, click "Settings" in the bottom left, then navigate to "Preferences", under your "ACCOUNT SETTINGS". Then switch "Analytics Email" toggle to the 'off' state, and then click "SAVE EMAIL PREFERENCES" to save this change.
If you wish to re-enable monthly emails in the future, simply reset the toggle to the ‘on’ state, and resave your email preferences.
My workspace has Shorthand Analytics enabled, but I haven’t received an email. Why not?
You won’t receive a monthly email when:
your published stories receive fewer than 10 views in a given month
you have disabled analytics emails using the toggle in the “Cookie & email settings” section of your user profile
a workspace owner or admin has requested that we disable the emails for the entire workspace
There is a discrepancy between the view counts reported in the email and the story views I see in the in-app analytics dashboard. Why?
The view you see when logged into the Shorthand app is customised to your browser’s timezone. That is, midnight on the first/last day of the month is midnight in your locale. In contrast, we are not able to detect and personalise your timezone when sending you an email summary. For this reason, some views on the first or last day of the month may be differently attributed by the email summary versus the in-app view. The email summaries are based on UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) date range cutoffs.
Are views of story previews counted in analytics reporting?
No — only views of published stories are reported by the analytics emails and the in-app analytics dashboard.
How is the median field calculated?
The median view duration tells us how long someone typically views a story for. We use this instead of the average (mean) because it is more robust to outlier views with inflated view durations. These are typically the result of someone leaving the story open while not actually being present, and can produce view durations that span multiple days in some cases.
To calculate the median view duration for the workspace, we take the average view duration of each story on each day of the month and find the value that separates the bottom half of these values from the top half.