Understanding your analytics impact report

Your Impact report is a free analytics report that shows how people interacted with your profile and papers over the last 30 days. It helps you understand which users are interacting with your papers and your profile on the site, and how you match up to other academics that have similar interests and fields of study.

How to access your Impact report

1. In the top navigation, click Analytics. Learn how to find your Analytics page
2. Select the Impact tab.

What you'll see in the report

The impact report is pretty long spanning across 12 different data points, so we'll break it down into separate parts.

Visitors, downloads, and views

1. Unique Visitors: The number of unique visitors that visited your paper or your profile.
   • Note: If a person visits more than once, it's important to note that we only count one.
2. Downloads: The amount of downloads on your papers.
3. Views: The number of views that your paper and profile have gathered in that span. This includes repeat visits from the same people.

Audience geographic location and affiliation

4. Countries: The amount of people from different countries who have viewed your papers or your profile.
5. Cities: The different cities people have viewed your papers or your profile from, and how many from each city.
6. Universities: The universities listed on your readers’ profiles.

Engagement and ranking

7. Research Fields: The most common research interests of the users who viewed your profile or papers.
8. Top % By Views: This displays your percentile on the site in comparison to other users who share your research interests.
   • Example: In our example below, this user is in the top 0.4% of all Academia users in their field. In the research field "18th Century", their view count ranks in the top 1.4%.
9. Job Titles: A list of the positions noted in the main affiliations of the users that have view your profile.
10. Pages Read: The collection of pages read of your papers on Academia. Below it lists the amount of pages read on the site for each individual paper. 

Discovery

11. Traffic sources: How people got to your profile or papers, such as Email (clicking a link in an email we sent to them), Direct (visiting your profile directly from their browser), or News feed (clicking on your paper or profile from their home page).
12. Search: Were you found on a search engine? We'll show you which one here (if we have this information).

FAQ and troubleshooting

My report looks empty

• If you are new to Academia or haven't recently uploaded content, you may not have enough activity in the last 30 days to populate the report.
• Try checking again after you have had more profile or paper activity.

The numbers look wrong

• Unique visitors counts people, not visits, so it will usually be lower than Views.
• Views can include repeat visits by the same person.
• If something still looks off, refresh the page and check again later.