Understanding Podcast Analytics
Are you wanting to grow your show? Or maybe you just want to provide more valuable content for your listeners? Either way, understanding podcast analytics is important. By analyzing your stats, you can determine what's working and what's not. But with so much data to sift through, which metrics should you focus on? Depending on what you are looking to do with your show what you want to gather could differ. In this article, we'll explore the different podcast stats and which ones you should pay attention to.
What is Podcast Analytics Beneficial For
Are you wanting to grow your show? Or maybe you just want to provide more valuable content for your listeners? Either way, understanding podcast analytics is important. By analyzing your stats, you can determine what’s working and what’s not. But with so much data to sift through, which metrics should you focus on?
Depending on what you are looking to do with your show what you want to gather could differ. In this article, we’ll explore the different podcast stats and which ones you should pay attention to.
What is Podcast Analytics Beneficial For
There are a few reasons you would want to look at your podcast analytics
To see how far you’ve come. You are able to see where you’ve been and how much you’ve grown since starting. It can be a good motivator if you are starting to burn out or get podfade.
If you want to land sponsors. You will need to know your analytics when reaching out to sponsors and once you land them to be able to report on how your episodes are doing.
To improve. Not only are you able to see how far you’ve come but you can see what you can get better at. You can figure out which episodes performed well, which ones fell short, and even spot the potential to expand a topic into a whole new series. Additionally, you can use these insights to see which guests and topics your listeners enjoyed the most and make necessary adjustments to cater to their interests.
The above reasons are certainly enough reason to want to begin understanding podcast analytics, but which specific metrics should you focus on?
Stats to Pay Attention to
We like looking at stats on your hosting platform (such as Captivate, Buzzsprout, or Libsyn), Chartable, and then Apple (or Spotify) whichever your listeners are on more or both if you want to compare the performance of the platforms.
Downloads – look at your downloads for the first 7 days, the last 30, 90 days, and all time. And do this by episode as well.
7 days: are downloads that took place in the first 7 days of the episode launch
30/90 days: and it’s in the name, these are the downloads 30 and 90 days after the episode has gone live.
Total/All-Time downloads: Look at how many times your podcast has been downloaded overall. You’ll want to aim for at least 5-10% of growth for your show, according to Jeremy Enns
Average episode download: the average number of downloads your episodes receive.
Listener stats! It’s crucial to look at your listeners’ stats to know who your listeners are and their preferences as that helps make your show run (and what makes them come back for more!)
Listener demographics: This helps give insights into your listeners’ age, gender, location, and interests.
Listening Duration: This gives you an idea of how much of each episode your listeners are listening to. Are they listening all the way through or is there a point in which they cut off? This is good information for you to know!
Referral sources: Get an idea of where your listeners are coming from and where you should be spending more of your marketing energy! It could be search engines, social media, or other websites.
Popular episodes: See which episodes are the most popular (and even least popular) to understand what content your listeners love. It could be a topic, a guest, the way your title is written, or how you marketed it. This is all information to take into account and to look at continuing to do or adding more content similar to it into your show.
Ratings/Reviews: This stat isn’t as important but we find it’s helpful for your morale and motivation for your show. Plus, ratings and reviews can help bring in new listeners (we discuss this more here.) So, we like to include it but it’s not going to have as much weight as others.
Subscribers/Follows: Keep track of how many new subscribers you get.
Conversion Rates: If you are using your podcast for your business, you’ll be looking to see how many listeners are converting into products/services. So, you’ll want to set up the tracking to know who is going from listening to buying that way you can see how many are coming over and if not – why not? Are you not making a clear enough call to action in the episode, do they not know where to go or maybe the product is not for your audience? As always, review, revise, and compare again.
Social media: I am going to include this because for many social media is a huge part of your podcast marketing plan. So, it’s good to know how your social media stats are doing for your podcast. Take a peek at the engagement on the posts for your social media such as likes, comments, shares + saves but most importantly, to how many are going from your social media to listen. It’s good to know how engaged your audience is and if they actually listen to the episode from there.
All of these stats depending on your goals can be important to pay attention to but it can feel really overwhelming. So, here are some examples of stats you would want to track:
Monetization
If your goal is to monetize with sponsors some areas you would want to track:
Affiliate marketing if you are doing it and other conversion rates
All the download numbers
Social media numbers could be good to include as well especially if you have an engaged audience.
Grow your listeners
Track download numbers
Listener stats
Subscribers/Follows
Referral sources
Podcast Analytics Tracking
Understanding podcast analytics is good, but tracking them, writing them down, and comparing them over time is even better.
I personally use a Google Sheets page to track our monthly stats, which makes it easy to add data and share with clients for further discussion. We do like to give strategies 3 months to see if they are working. But checking in on your stats every month allows you to make slight adjustments to your strategies and see how they are currently performing.
If you’re looking to improve your show or want more tips on podcasting, be sure to check out our blog!
Aleea
