Any newbie podcaster can log into their podcast host, look at the numbers of downloads they got for the last episode, and know roughly how they’re doing. Number go up, as they say.
But galaxy-brain podcasters know there are ways to get more granular information about their podcast performance—information that can help them refine their show to get more listeners, listening for longer.
Here are 3 of those ways.
1. Find out where listeners are dropping off
The key to uncovering many of the granular details you don’t see in your podcast host’s analytics is to use different analytics: namely, Apple Podcasts Connect and Spotify for Podcasters.
You might get better data from one than the other depending on where your audience hangs out—check your host’s analytics to see which app is the most popular for your audience. If they’re pretty close, you’re in luck: each platform offers slightly different analytics that you can combine for some very good intel.
Both platforms tell you your episodes’ average consumption rate, albeit in different ways. This is a really important metric that YouTubers have had the luxury of overanalyzing for years: it tells you how engaging your episodes are, and (in Spotify’s case) where listeners are dropping off to listen to something else.
Apple Podcasts Connect will give you a percentage completion rate per episode. Spotify will give you a little more. For example, here’s a consumption graph for my latest episode on Spotify for Podcasters.
You can see a gradual slope as fewer listeners make it all the way to the end than listened at the beginning—this is perfectly normal. What you want to look for are the steep drops, like the one I’ve got around 16 minutes. What happened there? If you’re playing at home, you might have guessed already: that’s the location of the midroll ad, The dip means that people were skipping over the ad.
But what if you’ve got a drop somewhere else—during your actual content? That’s valuable information. If it happens regularly during a segment you run often (intro banter is a prime target), see if you can tighten up that segment and get to the point a little faster.
2. Learn who your audience is
Knowing your audience demographics is important for all sorts of reasons: it tells you what kind of content will likely resonate with them, what kinds of products and services to pitch for sponsors, even how to speak to your listeners—the daily science podcast I used to host had listeners all over the world, so we knew we had to convert measurements to metric and not assume it was the same season for us as it was for them.
Depending on your hosting provider, you can get a lot of this information without going elsewhere. Most will tell you where in the world your listeners are, at least on a country level, and what devices they’re using to listen. But if you want details like gender and age, you’ve got to use Spotify.
Spotify is in the unique position to know these things about its users because it collects a ton of data on them—maybe not so great for users, but you as a podcaster reap the benefits. So I can know that the majority of my listeners, for example, remember a world before Facebook.
Get this information about your own audience, and brainstorm ways you can capitalize on that knowledge for your own content.
3. Get a rough estimate of how many listeners are new
This one is just a fun trick I learned recently. You don’t need Apple or Spotify for this one, as long as your hosting platform gives you both unique listeners and overall downloads.
For a quick terminology lesson, a download means what it sounds like: it’s when someone downloads your episode. Someone can download your episode multiple times, though, so it doesn’t tell you how many people are listening. Unique listeners are what tell you that: this number, which is always lower than downloads, is an estimate of how many individual people listened to your episode.
Most listeners are going to download your episode once, so those numbers will usually be pretty close together. However, many podcast apps auto-download your entire catalog the minute a new listener hits “subscribe.” So if you see a large gap between your downloads and your unique listeners, like in the graph below when I started my new season in March, that’s a good sign that you’re getting an influx of new listeners. Congratulations!
What are your favorite podcast analytics tricks? Let me know in the comments.
Terrific piece. Helpful and informative.
I had no idea you could see that on Spotify (how weird that you need to go to episode rankings first).
My favourite analytics are on... YouTube, there's so much more granularity there. Podcast platforms need to level up!