# Audience growth

The Audience dashboard tells you how many contacts you have, how they're subscribed, where they come from and how they grow over time. This page explains every section and metric.

**Language:** en
**Audience:** platform
**Translation key:** platform.insights.audience-growth
**Search keywords:** audience, audience growth, contacts, total contacts, subscribed, subscribers, growth, new contacts, data sources, localization, demographics, segmentation, tags, lists
**Related pages:** /platform/es/insights/audience-growth, /platform/en/insights, /platform/en/audience, /platform/en/consent, /platform/en/insights/messaging-performance
**Docs index (every page):** https://docs.instasent.com/llms.txt
**This zone's index:** https://docs.instasent.com/platform/en/llms.txt
**This page:** https://docs.instasent.com/platform/en/insights/audience-growth/ (HTML) · https://docs.instasent.com/platform/en/insights/audience-growth.md (Markdown)
**Other language (es):** https://docs.instasent.com/platform/es/insights/audience-growth.md

The **Audience** dashboard answers the questions you have about your contacts as a whole: how many there are, how many you can message, where they come from, and how the list is growing. It's always available, with no plan requirement.

It shares the [Insights filters](/platform/en/insights#shared-filters) — period, data source, tags — and adds one of its own: the **date type** that drives the growth chart (registration, import, update, or last seen).

![The Audience dashboard: five summary cards at the top (All-time contacts, Subscribed to SMS, Accepted SMS mkt., Subscribed to Emails, Accepted Email mkt.) with the contacts-per-day growth chart and the data source breakdown below](/platform/en/insights/images/audience-growth--1-audience-dashboard.png)
*The Audience dashboard — the summary cards on top and the growth chart below, here over the All time period.*

## Total contacts

Five cards at the top summarise the state of your audience. Each subscription card shows both a count and a percentage of the total.

| Card                     | What it counts                                                                                         |
| ------------------------ | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
| **All-time contacts**    | Every contact in the project's audience.                                                               |
| **Subscribed to SMS**    | Contacts with a mobile number who are subscribed to SMS — they can receive your SMS and RCS campaigns. |
| **Accepted SMS mkt.**    | Subscribed SMS contacts who have also accepted SMS marketing.                                          |
| **Subscribed to Emails** | Contacts with an email address who are subscribed to email.                                            |
| **Accepted Email mkt.**  | Subscribed email contacts who have also accepted email marketing.                                      |

> **Note**: "Subscribed" and "accepted marketing" are two different things — one is whether the channel is open at all, the other is whether the contact wants marketing on it. See [Consent & subscriptions](/platform/en/consent) for the full model.

## Contacts growth

A line chart of **new contacts per interval** — how many contacts entered your audience in each day or month of the period. The interval adjusts to the range: longer periods are grouped by month, shorter ones by day. The chart is driven by the **date type** filter, so you can plot growth by registration date, import date, update date or last seen.

> **Note**: This chart shows **incoming contacts** — new additions per interval. It does **not** subtract opt-outs or unsubscribes, so it isn't a net-growth figure. To see unsubscribes over time, use the **Performance** dashboard; to see your current subscribed share, use the Total contacts cards above.

## Where your contacts come from

The rest of the dashboard breaks your audience down by different attributes. Each breakdown is a table you can read at a glance.

- **Data source composition** — how many contacts came from each data source (a connector, a CSV import, the API…).
- **Localization** — contacts by **country** and by **city**.
- **Demographics** — contacts by gender, currency and language.
- **Segmentation** — contacts by **tag** and by **list**.

These breakdowns help you understand who your audience is and where to focus. To act on them — build a segment, target a campaign — head to [Audience](/platform/en/audience).

## Next step

Once you know how your audience is shaped, see how your messaging reaches it in [Performance](/platform/en/insights/messaging-performance).

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This is one page of the Instasent documentation. For the complete machine-readable index of every guide and API reference, fetch https://docs.instasent.com/llms.txt — start there for full context.