What X's built-in analytics show, and who gets them

If you post on X and want to know how you are doing, the first question is simply what the platform will tell you. The answer changed in 2024, and a lot of advice online still describes the older setup. Here is what exists now and who can see it.

Two layers of numbers

X gives you numbers at two levels.

The first layer is the stats on individual posts. These are visible to every account, paid or not. Under each post you see replies, reposts, likes, bookmarks and a view count. Views became public on ordinary posts in December 2022; before that, impression counts were mostly tucked away in the analytics screen. On your own posts you can also open a more detailed engagement view that breaks the activity down further.

The second layer is the account dashboard: totals across all your posts for a chosen period, a chart over time, and figures you can't get from a single post, such as profile visits and how many people followed or unfollowed you in that window. This is the part that moved behind the paywall.

The 2024 change

In June 2024 X rolled out a rebuilt analytics dashboard and made it available only to X Premium subscribers. Before that week, any account could open analytics.twitter.com and see impressions, engagement rate, profile visits and monthly summaries. After the switch, accounts without Premium who tried to open analytics got a prompt to subscribe instead.

Coverage at the time, including from Social Media Today, described the new screen as a large bar chart you can switch between metrics, with date ranges along the top. The metrics named in that coverage included total impressions, engagement rate, profile visits, video performance and link clicks, alongside follows and the usual likes, replies and reposts. X adds and renames items from time to time, so treat any list, including this one, as a snapshot.

X sells more than one subscription tier, and the features in each have shifted several times since paid plans began. Before paying specifically for analytics, check X's own Premium comparison page for the tier you are considering, because a cheaper tier has not always included everything the full one does.

What a free account can still see

Quite a lot, if you are willing to look in a few places:

• Follower and following counts on your profile. These are live and public.
• Your post count, shown on your profile.
• Per-post views and engagement. Every post shows its view count and interactions. Your own posts also let you open the detailed engagement view.
• Notifications. New followers, replies and quote posts show up here, which tells you something about which posts brought people in, even if not in a tidy chart.

What you lose without the dashboard is aggregation. You can see that Tuesday's post got 2,300 views, but nothing adds up a month of posts for you, and nothing keeps a history of your follower count. The profile shows today's number only. If you want to know what it was eight weeks ago, you need to have written it down eight weeks ago.

What the dashboard is good for, and what it isn't

If you do pay, the dashboard saves time. Total impressions over 28 days and an engagement rate for the period are tedious to compute by hand. Profile visits are useful too, because they show how many people were curious enough to click through to see who you are. Comparing that with new follows tells you whether your profile and pinned post are doing their job.

The dashboard is less helpful for long-term trends. Date ranges are limited and the view focuses on recent activity. Many people who pay still keep a separate record of follower counts, because that is the number they care about over months, not weeks.

Also keep in mind what the numbers measure. An impression is one display of a post on someone's screen. One person scrolling past your post three times can count three times, and a display counts even if the reader never stopped. Engagement rate is engagements divided by impressions, so a post shown to a small, interested group can have a higher rate than one that went wide.

Third-party tools

Many analytics services connect to X and pull your data for you. Since X sharply raised the price of its API in 2023, these tools tend to cost more than they used to, some shut down, and the free tiers are thin. Connecting one also means giving a company access to your account. That can be fine, but read what permissions you are granting and remove access for anything you stop using. The X settings page under connected apps lists them.

A simple way to keep your own record

If you only need the shape of your growth, a manual log is enough and costs nothing. Once a week, copy three numbers from your profile and your posts:

1. Followers, from your profile.
2. Posts, from your profile, so you can see how much you published that week.
3. Views on your best post of the week, or total impressions if you have the dashboard.

That is what the growth log on our home page is built for. You type the numbers in, it keeps them in your own browser, and it draws the line, the weekly change and a rough projection. Nothing is fetched from X, so it works the same whether or not you subscribe to anything.

Twitter Tracker is an independent site with no connection to X Corp. We describe X's features as they work at the time of writing; when X changes a screen, the numbers you log yourself stay the same.

Picking your next step

If you are deciding whether Premium is worth it for analytics alone, try a month of manual logging first. If you find yourself wanting profile visit counts or a cleaner breakdown of impressions, the subscription may be worth a month or two. If a weekly follower count and a glance at your top posts already answer your questions, you can skip it.

The next guide covers which numbers actually matter for a small account, which helps whichever way you go.

Questions

Can I see X analytics without Premium?

You can still see the numbers under each of your own posts, including views, likes, reposts, replies and bookmarks, plus your follower and following counts. The full account dashboard with totals over a date range has required an X Premium subscription since mid-2024.

What happened to analytics.twitter.com?

The old address now leads into X's newer analytics area. Accounts without a Premium subscription are shown an upgrade prompt there instead of the dashboard.

Is the view count the same as impressions?

Views on a post are X's public impression count for that post: how many times it was displayed. They are not unique people, and a view is counted whether or not anyone actually read the post.