Where readers come from

Knowing that a piece was read is half the story. The other half is how the reader got there. Peakub records this for every read and click, but only a small part of it is shown in the Studio today. This page defines the words, says what is recorded, and says plainly what you can see.

Three words

• Channel: the road a reader took to reach you. In practice there are two: web (they were on the site) and email (they clicked a link in a newsletter). Reading on the mobile app and in widgets is not counted yet.
• Source: how they arrived inside a channel. Peakub tells apart someone who was browsing, someone who followed a recommendation, someone who followed a link that was shared, someone who came from a search (the search term is kept) and someone who came from an email.
• Surface: the part of Peakub the reader clicked from. A surface is a block of a page, such as the feed or Discover, or one of the blocks of your own home page: Top stories, Pinned stories, Popular stories, Members exclusives, Series parts, Rubric stories and the Home news list. For Series parts and Rubric stories, Peakub also keeps which series or which rubric sent the reader.

A related word you will meet in other tools is impression: one time something was shown to a reader, whether or not they clicked. Peakub doesn't record impressions yet, only the clicks and reads that follow, so a click rate (clicks divided by impressions) can't be worked out.

What you can see today

Not much of this is on a screen yet, and it is better to know that now.

• The sentence at the top of a piece's Insights panel names the channel when one clearly leads: "mostly from email".
• The From email figure in the same panel counts the activity that came through a link in an email.
• Nothing in the Studio shows a breakdown by source or by surface yet. Both are recorded, starting 8 October 2026, so a breakdown can be shown later without losing what was gathered in the meantime.

Links you share yourself can carry the usual utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign and utm_term labels. Peakub keeps them when a reader lands on your publication from such a link. They are recorded, not yet shown.

Clicks in your emails

When you publish and your newsletter goes out, the links in it are rewritten. Each one goes through a Peakub address first, which notes the click and then sends the reader on to where the link really points, so readers still end up on the page you linked to. This is how Peakub can tell you what came from email.

Each link is made for one subscriber, and it says three things: which subscriber it was sent to, which send it belongs to (so a click joins back to one particular email) and, when the email template marked it, which element of the email it sat in, such as the footer or the piece itself. Two protections apply:

• The destination is signed. The link only works for the address Peakub put in it. Nobody can build a Peakub link that sends a reader somewhere you didn't choose.
• The reader is signed. Peakub trusts the name in the link only when its signature checks out. Otherwise the click is recorded as an anonymous visitor. This keeps anyone from typing a link that makes it look like another person clicked, or that puts them on a leaderboard.

A click on an email link is recorded as a click. It is recorded without checking the cookie banner choice, because the reader is identified by the signed link; these clicks are counted for the sender's newsletter statistics. Peakub does not record when an email is opened, because opening needs a different tool (a tiny invisible image) that isn't in place. This is why the Email clicks line in Content Performance counts clicks, and why the "Opened" status in a piece's Newsletter tab can't be trusted yet. When opens are recorded, one caution will apply: some mail apps, Apple's Mail among them, load images automatically even when the reader never looked at the message, which makes open counts run high. Peakub will need to deal with that before it shows an open rate.

What this means in practice

• A piece that did well "from email" means readers clicked through to it from a newsletter, not that they opened the newsletter.
• The activity from your own browsing, and from robots, is filtered out of the reader figures. See How views, reads and visitors are counted.
• To compare what two newsletters brought in, use the Insights panel of each piece for now. A per-send view isn't in the Studio yet.