Discord server growth tracking: cost per member, retention and revenue by ad

Why member counts are not growth tracking

Discord shows you the member count and, in Server Insights, how many people joined and left over time. That is enough to see that a launch worked. It is not enough to run paid acquisition, because it cannot answer the questions that decide where the next euro goes: which campaign, ad set and creative brought the members, what each one cost, how many were still there a week later, and which of them went on to buy.

Answering those needs every join tied to the ad click that produced it. Once that link exists, growth stops being one line on a chart and becomes a table you can sort by campaign. Discord conversion tracking explains how Tellmetric makes that link through Discord's authorise step; this guide is about what you do with it.

The five numbers worth tracking

• Joins per campaign. New members attributed to each campaign, ad set and ad. A person who was already in the server is not counted again, and each person counts once per link.
• Cost per member. Spend divided by joins, per campaign. This is the number that replaces cost per click as the measure of an ad's efficiency.
• Click-to-join rate. Joins divided by clicks on the same link. A low rate points at the step between the ad and the server: a mismatch between ad and community, or visitors who stop at the authorise screen.
• Members still there after N days. The share of a campaign's joins who are still in the server after the days you set. It separates campaigns that bring a community from campaigns that bring drive-by joins.
• Revenue per member. Deposits or purchases made by members, credited to the campaign that brought them. For a server that sells access, coaching or a product, this is the number the others serve.

Where each number comes from in Tellmetric

Joins and clicks are recorded by the tracking link for your server. Each click stores the campaign parameters from the ad URL, including campaign, ad set and ad ids from Meta, TikTok and Google, and each join inherits them. The dashboard's results table groups both by campaign, source, link or country, with clicks and joins side by side on each row.

Spend comes from the ad platforms. Connect the Meta ad account and Tellmetric imports daily spend per campaign, ad set and ad; Google Ads spend is imported the same way on Pro. With spend in place, the dashboard and the Meta and Google pages under Ad accounts show cost per join, cost per deposit and return on ad spend per campaign. For other platforms, divide the spend from their dashboards by the joins in Tellmetric's table.

Retention comes from Discord itself. Discord does not notify an app when someone leaves unless the app keeps a live connection to Discord, which Tellmetric does not need. Instead it asks Discord about each member it added once the days you set on Connections have passed: 1, 3, 7, 14 or 30, with 7 as the default. A member still there becomes a Still a member event; one who left becomes Left the server. The setting is shared with Telegram, so both communities are judged by the same rule.

Revenue comes from wherever members pay. Your platform or tracker sends a postback with the click id, or your backend calls the event API, and each deposit or purchase is credited to the click, and so to the campaign, that brought the member in.

Reading the dashboard

• Your Discord servers. One row per connected server: how many people Tellmetric added are still members, how many joined and left in the last day, and how many left in total. A warning appears there if the bot lost its permission or the landing channel was deleted.
• Latest activity. Every click, join, still-a-member and leave as it happens, marked with the community it belongs to and whether it reached Meta. Discord events read as "Joined the server" and "Left the server".
• Telegram and Discord side by side. When a workspace has both a Telegram group and a Discord server, the joins tile splits into Telegram and Discord, a Community filter narrows every report to one of them, and Community becomes one of the ways to group the results table. Comparing cost per member across the two shows where the same audience converts better.
• Members over time. On Pro and Agency, people are grouped by the week they joined, with the deposits they made afterwards. It shows whether newer members are worth more or less than earlier ones, Discord joins included.

A worked example

Say two Meta campaigns promote the same server for a week. Campaign A spends €400 and brings 200 joins: €2.00 per member. Campaign B spends €400 and brings 125 joins: €3.20 per member. On cost per member alone, A wins.

Seven days later the still-a-member check runs. 90 of A's members are still in the server, 100 of B's. Cost per retained member is now €4.44 for A and €4.00 for B. Over the next month A's members make 6 deposits and B's make 14. The campaign that looked more expensive brought the members worth keeping, and because Tellmetric also sends joins and deposits back to Meta, Meta's delivery can learn the same lesson instead of scaling campaign A. The figures here are illustrative; the method is the point.

Feeding growth signals back to the ad platforms

Reports tell you which campaign to scale; conversion events let the platform scale it for you. Each join goes to Meta as CompleteRegistration and to TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit, Spotify and X as their equivalent event, with the identifiers of the original click and never any Discord data about the person. Meta and Reddit also receive the still-a-member event as a custom event, which you can turn into a custom conversion. Deposits go to every connected platform, Google Ads included, as purchases with value. The details per platform are in tracking Discord joins from TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit and other ads and Meta ads to Discord.

Limits worth knowing

• Only people who joined through a Tellmetric link are tracked. Members who arrived through a plain invite, a server listing or a friend appear in Discord's count but not in these reports.
• First messages in the server and role purchases are not tracked yet. They need a live connection to Discord and are on the roadmap.
• The still-a-member check runs once per member, on the day you set. Someone who leaves after that is not counted against the campaign.

Getting started

Discord tracking is on every plan; Free covers one server and 1,000 tracked users a month, and Pro adds the other ad platforms, cohort reports and CSV exports (see pricing). Setting up the Discord app and the first tracking link takes about ten minutes: Discord ads tracking setup walks through every screen. For the Telegram side of the same reports, read Telegram group growth tracking.

Frequently asked questions

How do I calculate cost per Discord member by campaign? Divide each campaign's spend by the joins attributed to it. With Meta or Google Ads spend imported, Tellmetric shows it directly.

How do I know whether members from an ad stay? After the days you choose, Tellmetric asks Discord about each member it added and records them as still a member or left.

Does Discord's Server Insights show which ad brought a member? No. It shows joins and activity over time, not the ad, campaign or creative.

Can I compare a Telegram group and a Discord server? Yes, in one workspace, with the Community filter and grouping.