LTK Creator Analytics
Clarifying creator performance to drive engagement and confident decision-making (2025)
Context
LTK is a leading creator commerce platform, but creators find the analytics experience unhelpful and lacking guidance, making it difficult to engage. Meanwhile, the business depends on them to use analytics and grow their community on LTK.
Previous design
Problems
Creators lacked the clarity needed to interpret their performance and take next steps. They needed more transparent earnings data, deeper engagement insights, and clear, actionable guidance.
User interviews revealed three core needs:
Earnings clarity
Engagement clarity
Action clarity
Data insights
I surveyed 57 U.S. creators to understand what data drives their business. We found that earnings are the primary motivator across all levels, yet 75% of creators (Bronze tier) earn less than $1/day and must rely heavily on upper-funnel engagement signals to gauge their health. Across the board, creators wanted clear guidance on what to do next.
Key learning from research
1. Earnings are the primary motivator across all creators.
2. 75% of creators are low-tier (Bronze), earn less than $1 per day, and rely on engagement signals to gauge business health.
3. Creators at all levels want guidance on what to do next
Earnings matter Most, but Engagement builds confidence for early-stage creators.
Direction
Goal: Help creators understand their performance and know what to do next.
Hypothesis: If creators are given clear earnings, engagement signals, and guidance, they’ll build trust in the platform and act with more confidence.
Audience:
Primary: Bronze creators
Secondary: Silver+ creators
Success Metrics: Analytics engagement (DAU %), Creator action rate (posting and sharing)
Design explorations
I led broad design explorations, refining concepts through continuous cross-functional reviews. The goal was to balance ideal creator experiences with engineering constraints, ensuring a smooth handoff for our initial release.
Earnings clarity A
Display earnings from all sources to provide transparency and motivate creators by showcasing a larger total, including both commissions and collaboration earnings.
Earnings clarity B
To further improve earnings clarity, I proposed a transactional history view that clearly breaks down earnings, helping creators build trust in the platform.
Engagement clarity A
I recommended surfacing additional engagement metrics right after earnings because for Bronze creators, who make up 75%of the platform, those signals matter a lot when earnings are still zero
Engagement clarity B
Allow users to dive deeper into their engagement data analytics with % change for 7-day/30-day growth tracking.
Introduced a dedicated info page that clearly explains what each metric means.
Engagement clarity C
Show more than high-level numbers; surface which posts are driving engagement and make them easy to share.
Action clarity A
Align with each stage of the creator's journey. Suggest action that would best guide them at that specific stage.
Action clarity B
Surfaced a scalable, contextual prompt that guides creators to a proven next step after viewing key metrics.
Final design direction
After several design reviews, I aligned with cross-functional partners, incorporated feedback from Creator Success, and balanced engineering cost and timelines to finalize the design direction.
For the initial release, we focused on a small but high-impact step. Instead of fully rebuilding the mobile earnings experience, which would require significant engineering effort, we prioritized the core user need. We updated the earnings module to clearly show total earnings, commissions, and collaboration earnings.
We also made the module dynamic, surfacing contextual actions based on where creators are in their journey—shifting the experience from passive reporting to actionable insights.
On the analytics side, we introduced more upper-funnel engagement metrics to better support early-stage creators, along with a deeper analytics view to help them understand growth trends and metric definitions.
To guide next steps, we added a simple banner under post impressions, encouraging creators to take action after reviewing their data. We intentionally kept this lightweight to validate its impact before expanding.
Finally, we surfaced top-performing posts, giving creators clearer insight into what’s working and helping them quickly share high-performing content.
Challenges—Transparency Under Technical Constraints
To address the urgent need for mobile earnings transparency, I proposed an in-app browser solution as a high-velocity fast follow. By optimizing the mobile-web experience rather than committing to a lengthy native rebuild, we were able to provide creators with the clarity they needed without compromising the engineering roadmap.
Impact & Results
The redesign successfully shifted creators from passive reading to active engagement. We saw a lift in overall analytics viewership, but most importantly, the new clarity drove a 28% increase in daily post shares and a 7% increase in daily post creation—proving the design increased behavioral confidence.
↑ 13.7% DAUs viewing analytics modules
↑ ~878 DAUs tapping into earnings section
↑ 28.7% increase in daily post share
↑ 7% increase in daily post creation