Does Substack Support Google Analytics?

The short answer is no, Substack does not natively support Google Analytics. You can't simply grab your GA4 measurement ID and paste it into your Substack settings. This guide explains why this is the case, what Substack provides for analytics instead, and the best workarounds for creators who need deeper insights into their audience and traffic.

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

The “Why”: Substack’s Philosophy on Simplicity

Unlike platforms like WordPress, Squarespace, or Ghost that give you deep control over your website’s code, Substack is a closed ecosystem. It's built on a foundation of simplicity, aiming to get writers publishing as quickly as possible without getting bogged down by technical configurations, plugins, or third-party scripts. The trade-off for this ease of use is a loss of control and customization.

Preventing third-party tracking scripts like the Google Analytics tag is a deliberate choice by Substack. It ensures faster page load times, a more uniform user experience, and arguably better privacy for readers across their network. For many writers, this is a fair trade. They can focus purely on writing and growing their email list, which is Substack's core function. But for creators who want to run sophisticated marketing campaigns or understand user behavior on a granular level, this limitation can be a significant roadblock.

Getting the Most Out of Substack’s Built-in Stats

Just because you can't install Google Analytics doesn't mean you're flying completely blind. Substack provides its own "Stats" dashboard that offers a solid overview of your publication's health, particularly when it comes to email performance.

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

What You Can Track with Substack Stats

Your Substack dashboard is focused primarily on publication and email engagement metrics. Here’s a breakdown of the key data points you have access to:

• Total Subscribers: See your overall list growth, with a clear breakdown between free and paid subscribers.
• Email Open Rate: For each post you send, you can see a 30-day view of the percentage of subscribers who opened the email. This is crucial for evaluating a post's initial appeal.
• Click-Through Rate: The dashboard shows how many people clicked a link within your emails, giving you a sense of engagement.
• Top Links: You can see which specific links in your emails received the most clicks.
• Traffic Sources: Substack provides a high-level breakdown of where your post visitors came from, bucketing them into sources like Substack, social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), search engines, and direct traffic.
• Post Views: Track the total number of views each article has received on the web over time.

The Limitations of Substack Stats

While useful for top-line insights, Substack Stats lacks the depth and dimensionality of a true analytics platform like Google Analytics. If you're used to GA, you'll immediately notice what's missing:

• No Behavior Flow: You can't see the journey users take through your publication. Which post did they read first? Where did they navigate next?
• No Granular Audience Data: You get no insights into your audience’s demographics (age, gender), geographic location (country, city), or technical specs (device type, browser).
• Limited Source/Medium Tracking: Substack might tell you traffic came from "Twitter," but it can't distinguish between visitors who came from your profile link versus a specific promotional tweet unless you use UTM codes (more on that below).
• No Custom Conversion Tracking: The only conversion Substack tracks is someone subscribing. You can’t track other goals, such as clicks on an affiliate link, downloads of a free resource, or sign-ups for an external webinar.
• No Historical Benchmarking: The dashboard is reactive and doesn't make it easy to compare performance this quarter to the same quarter last year, for instance.

Creative Solutions: How to Get Deeper Analytics Despite Substack’s Limits

For growth-focused creators, relying solely on Substack's native stats isn't enough. Fortunately, there are a few proven strategies to wring more data out of the platform and get a clearer picture of what's working.

Strategy 1: Use UTM Parameters Rigorously

Even though you can't see UTM data in Google Analytics, Substack's "Traffic Sources" dashboard does recognize them to a limited extent. Using UTMs is the most direct way to get more specific information about your marketing efforts.

UTM parameters are simple tags you add to the end of your URLs. The main ones are:

• utm_source: The platform the visitor came from (e.g., twitter, linkedin, email_sponsor).
• utm_medium: The type of traffic (e.g., social, cpc, newsletter).
• utm_campaign: The specific campaign name (e.g., fall_promo, new_ebook_launch).

For example, instead of just sharing this link on LinkedIn: https://yourname.substack.com/p/my-amazing-article

You would build and share a tagged URL like this: https://yourname.substack.com/p/my-amazing-article?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=october_push

Now, when you check your Substack Stats, you'll see a specific source labeled 'linkedin' with the campaign name. This allows you to differentiate performance between channels with much more accuracy than relying on Substack’s default bucketing.

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

Strategy 2: Track Outbound Link Clicks from Another Website

This strategy is for creators who have an existing personal website or landing page where they can install Google Analytics. The idea is to use your personal site as a "hub" and track how many people you send from it to your Substack.

Here’s how it works:

1. Make sure GA4 is installed on your personal website (e.g., yourdomain.com).
2. On your site, create a prominent button or link that says "Read My Newsletter" or "Subscribe on Substack," pointing to your Substack URL.
3. In GA4, set up event tracking for clicks on that specific outbound link. GA4's Enhanced Measurement feature often tracks outbound link clicks automatically, but you can create a custom event in Google Tag Manager for more control.
4. Now, you can drive all your marketing traffic (from paid ads, social media, etc.) to your personal site. Inside Google Analytics, you can see exactly which sources and campaigns are driving the most clicks over to your Substack. It's an indirect way of tracking "conversions" for your newsletter.

This method gives you full visibility into the crucial part of your funnel - the traffic you control - before handing the visitor off to Substack's closed ecosystem.

Strategy 3: Export Your Data for Manual Analysis

When all else fails, you can fall back on the tried-and-true method of manual analysis in a spreadsheet. Substack allows you to export your data, including your full posts list, email stats (opens, clicks), and subscriber list, as CSV files.

Each month or each quarter, you can:

1. Download the latest stats CSV from Substack.
2. Import that data into Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel.
3. Create your own charts, tables, and long-term trend lines.
4. Optionally, you can combine this data with information you manually pull from other platforms (e.g., follower counts from Twitter, ad spend from Facebook) to create a more comprehensive marketing dashboard.

This approach gives you total control but comes with a major downside: it’s incredibly time-consuming and manual. You have to repeat the entire process every time you want an updated report, which is a classic reporting bottleneck that keeps you working on your data instead of gaining insights from it.

Graphed

Still Building Reports Manually?

Watch how growth teams are getting answers in seconds — not days.

Watch the Demo

Is Not Having Google Analytics a Dealbreaker?

Whether this limitation matters really depends on your goals as a creator.

For Hobbyists and Pure Writers: If your goal is simply to write, build a direct connection with readers, and maybe earn some subscription revenue, then Substack's built-in stats are probably sufficient. They tell you which of your topics are resonating (open rates) and how many subscribers you have. Focus on your craft, the simplicity is a feature, not a bug.

For Serious Marketers and Businesses: If your newsletter is a core part of a larger business strategy - driving traffic to products, generating leads for a service, or optimizing funnels with paid advertising - then the lack of proper analytics is a serious handicap. Running paid ad campaigns on platforms like Facebook or Google Ads without proper conversion tracking and attribution on your Substack is like flying blind. If this is you, it may be worth considering platforms like Beehiiv (which now supports GA4) or Ghost, which offer far more analytical flexibility.

Final Thoughts

Substack's decision to exclude third-party tools like Google Analytics is a core part of its value proposition: an incredibly simple platform for writers. While its internal stats are valuable for understanding subscriber engagement, they fall short for creators who need to measure and operate a full marketing funnel. By using disciplined UTM tagging, tracking traffic from an external site, and performing manual data exports, you can gain more robust insights that Substack alone can’t offer.

While exporting data to spreadsheets for analysis is a viable workaround, it’s exactly the kind of slow, repetitive data wrangling we built Graphed to eliminate. Instead of spending your Mondays wrestling with CSVs, you could connect your various data sources - like Google Sheets for exported data, alongside live connections to Google Analytics from your main website and platforms like Facebook or Google Ads. From there, you just ask questions in plain English, like "Show me a chart of my Substack subscriber growth next to my total ad spend," and get real-time dashboards instantly. We help you to get back the time to focus on strategy, not spreadsheet-building.