Analytics Overview

Benecaster tracks your audience in three layers: the core dashboard (always on), the optional download proxy, and platform benchmarks (available when you opt into telemetry). An Analytics Dashboard add-on adds deeper charts and trends on top of all three.

Core Dashboard Analytics

The Benecaster dashboard shows the numbers you need most without any configuration:

Active subscriber count with monthly growth/churn delta
90-day subscriber sparkline — daily snapshots of your total active audience
Tier breakdown — active, new, and churned subscribers per tier for the last 30 days
Estimated monthly revenue — active subscribers × tier prices from your membership plugin

These are available on all plans, including free. See Dashboard Overview for a full walkthrough of every panel.

Download Tracking

The download proxy logs every feed request with the podcast app, episode, subscriber tier, date, and approximate location (country and region — see Privacy below). No audio content passes through WordPress — the proxy logs the request and immediately redirects to your hosted file.

Download tracking is off by default and available on all plans including free. Enable it in Settings → Tools. See Download Tracking for full setup instructions.

Subscriber Events

Benecaster records a subscriber event each time a subscriber’s status changes. These events power the tier breakdown on the dashboard and feed the Analytics Dashboard add-on’s growth and churn charts.

Event	When it fires
Joined	A new subscriber token is created
Upgraded	Subscriber moves to a higher tier
Downgraded	Subscriber moves to a lower tier
Churned	Subscription ends or token is revoked
Reactivated	A previously churned subscriber rejoins
Donated	A Listener Support donation is recorded

Events are recorded locally in your WordPress database and are not transmitted to Benecaster’s servers unless you opt into telemetry.

Privacy and Telemetry

Benecaster’s telemetry is opt-in and built around one rule: individual subscribers are never identifiable in any data sent to Benecaster’s servers. The data that leaves your site is always aggregate statistics.

What is always sent

A small set of software metadata is included in the daily license validation ping regardless of opt-in settings. This is not subscriber data — it is version and configuration information:

Plugin version
Active add-on slugs
Active bridge plugin (MemberPress, WooCommerce Subscriptions, etc.)
Show count
Setup wizard completed flag

Base telemetry opt-in

When you opt in at Settings → Privacy → Share usage data, Benecaster adds subscriber and engagement statistics to the daily ping:

Active subscriber count by tier
Churn rate (cancellations as a percentage of active subscribers)
Subscriber tenure distribution in buckets (0–30 days, 31–90 days, 91–365 days, 365 days+)
Geographic audience distribution by country and region — transmitted as totals, not per-subscriber records (e.g. US: TX: 45, CA: 32)
Episode counts and average duration

When the download proxy is also enabled:

Listening patterns by hour-of-day and day-of-week (aggregate distribution)
Podcast app breakdown (aggregate percentages)
Average episode reach rate

Revenue telemetry opt-in

Revenue data is behind a second, separate opt-in because it is more sensitive than subscriber counts. When you enable Share estimated revenue in Settings → Privacy, Benecaster additionally sends:

Estimated MRR in cents — calculated from bridge tier prices × active subscriber counts per tier

This is an estimate, not actual revenue, and is labeled as such everywhere it appears. It does not account for annual billing mix, trials, failed payments, or discounts.

IP addresses

Raw IP addresses are never stored. When a feed request or download arrives, the IP is looked up against a locally-installed geographic database to extract a country code and region code (US state, Canadian province, etc.), then immediately discarded. Only the country and region codes are stored — no city, postal code, or precise location.

Platform Benchmarks

When your site has an active license and telemetry is enabled, the dashboard shows how your show compares to other Benecaster-powered podcasts:

“Your churn rate (3.2%) is below the platform median (5.8%)”

Benchmarks are fetched from Benecaster’s license server and only returned when at least 10 other qualifying sites contribute data to that metric — a privacy floor that prevents any individual show from being identifiable in the aggregate.

If your site has no license, or telemetry is off, or not enough qualifying sites exist yet, the benchmark panel is silently absent — no error or empty state.

Analytics Dashboard Add-on

The Analytics Dashboard add-on ($79/year) extends the core charts into a full analytics interface:

Subscriber growth over time with adjustable date ranges
Detailed churn and reactivation analysis
Per-episode download counts and app breakdown
Geographic audience map
Cohort analysis — how subscriber groups perform over time
Platform benchmarks surfaced in context with your own data
CSV export

The add-on reads the same locally-stored data that the core dashboard uses — there is nothing extra to configure. If you purchase it after your show has been running, it has full historical data from day one.

See benecaster.com/add-ons/analytics-dashboard/ for pricing and availability.