Telling A Story Through Podcast Analytics
As our clients start to think about next fiscal year, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to tell the story of each of our podcasts. Analytics can tell an interesting story, but the story often needs to be carved out of the mountain of data. I’ve listed a few of my favorite metrics below.
We often jump to the data because it's what the podcast hosting platforms and channels give us. But first we should back up and ask ourselves - what kind of story are we trying to tell? What goals do we have for this podcast? And who are we telling this story to?
First, Start with the Qualitative (Words)
If you’re reviewing a year’s worth of podcast episodes, I would start with the podcast itself. Any standout episodes this year? What about live tapings or fun events? Were there any controversial episodes or duds? What were some themes your podcast covered? Did you publish more episodes than last year, or less?
If you can, find a way of capturing what people have said about your podcast. Often, the story we get from the data pales in comparison to the story of when you ran into someone at an industry conference and they said “hey, I’ve been listening to your podcast”. Or when someone writes a review about the podcast. Or when the prospective client brings up your podcast episode.
Then, Dig into the Quantitative (Numbers)
When you look at your analytics, there's a lot of numbers, and it's hard to know what they all mean or how they differ from each other. Let’s break it down:
Downloads
Downloads are a starting point. Not the end of the road. It tells you that your podcast is being consumed on some level. More downloads on specific episodes can send you signals about what content resonated, but make sure to ask your marketing team what kind of promotion was put behind each episode. It may be that your episodes with the most downloads simply had a paid campaign behind it. Or it could be that a link was sent to a specific newsletter, and you should keep doing that in the future!
Follower counts
Get them from Apple and Spotify to start, and YouTube if you’re posting your podcast there. If your YT channel is not just your podcast, take the YT followers with a grain of salt since they might be subscribing for other videos you’re producing.
Consumption rate
Expressed as a percentage (that can be over 100%, which is confusing), your consumption rate tells you how much of your episode, on average, people listened to. Consumption rates are very useful on a per-episode basis, since you can see what episodes really tanked and which ones people couldn’t get enough of, but you can also create an “average of averages” to see how listeners mostly behave towards your episodes. One of our producers even creates a color-coded spreadsheet to track completion rates. 90% and up is purple, anything below 50% is red, with green, yellow, and orange in between. It's fun to look at and easy to spot which episodes have performed well!
Listen Time
One of my favorite stats, because it really tells the story of how podcasts compare to other digital content you may be publishing. A short blog post or LinkedIn post might get 1000s of views, and your 300 downloads of a podcast episode might seem small in comparison. But each viewer of your LinkedIn post might have spent 30 seconds of their time with you, while each listener of the podcast spends 20-30 minutes. When you total up the listening time of each unique monthly listener member, you see that your audience is spending DAYS with your brand.
Combine these stats with things like geography, platform (Apple/Spotify/etc), and demographics, and you’ll get a good picture of your show and your audience.
The next (and hardest) part is knowing when to try something new based on what the data is telling you! Sometimes the data tells you that things are generally working. Sometimes it shows you that even though you love the content you’re making, it may be worth tightening it up so your episodes are a bit shorter. And other times, it’ll say hey, DON’T make episodes about one specific topic. If you know what to look for and why that information is important to you, the data can help you draw the road map for your show.