From Hosting to Insights: How to Use Analytics to Drive Podcast Success
A budding podcaster focuses on identifying the best actions that drive podcast success. The key metrics for podcast success can include downloads, streams, average listening time, audience demographics, social media engagement, and so on.
Are you starting your podcasting career, and you want to know a good measure of understanding your audience? This post will show how the right analytics tools can help you make appropriate, data-driven decisions that will help you achieve the podcast success metrics.
Why Podcast Analytics Matter
Podcast analytics are crucial to the blossoming career of any podcaster. Now, how do podcast analytics work? Firstly, the analytics help you understand your listeners. Basically, they help you answer the questions of “who’s listening”, “what the listeners love”, and “what they are negatively responding to”.
With the ability to answer these questions, you can better understand what your listeners will like, what kind of content, what format, and how they would want to engage with you. Thus, aiding you in creating content that effectively reaches your listeners.
Furthermore, with this valuable knowledge, better content planning, ad targeting, and guest selection are enabled. These are key factors for listener engagement and can help your content thrive.
Start Tracking with Hosting Platform Metrics
A good starting point for podcasters in tracking podcast analytics is by observing some of the core metrics used by the best podcast hosting platforms, such as Hubhopper, BuzzSprout, Libsyn, Podbean, and more.
The key metrics that these hosting platforms keep track of are:
Total Downloads and Streams
Downloads were the original way in which creators used to gauge the success of their podcasts. However, with the addition of streaming, it was added to download as a critical metric to understand a podcast’s reach.
While downloads and streams are both effective podcast analytics metrics to observe a podcast’s reach, the two of them often take vastly different routes to the result. Downloads observe the ultimate reach of a podcast. However, the streaming metrics focus on which episodes are resonating with the listeners and provide an insight into the modern listening trends.
Over Time Episode Performance
Some podcast hosting platforms, such as Spotify for Creators, measure the performance of your podcast episodes over time. This metric tracks how well individual episodes of a podcast perform with the audience over a span of time.
This type of analysis can help creators understand which content resonates the most with the listeners, as well as identify areas for further improvement. This metric has other sub-metrics under it, such as the number of plays over time, average completion percentage of an episode, and the percentage of users completing an entire episode.
Listener Demographics
Listener demographics are crucial podcast statistics. As a podcaster, wouldn’t you like to know what the average age group of listeners logging into your content is, or from which locations your primary audience is?
These metrics help you understand how to cater your content, as well as what kind of ad placements you can use for your podcasts. Knowing what primary demographic your audience is helps you effectively create podcasts to resonate strongly with your listeners.
Episode Drop-off
Episode drop-off data will show you how many listeners are listening to one of your episodes at a specific second. This will help you understand which segments of your episodes are the most engaging for your audience.
With this information, you can either consider how to restructure your episodes or whether or not you should cut out entire segments to tighten your content.
Top Podcast Analytics Tools and What They Offer
Podcast analytics often have some critical computations to make to provide the most accurate data regarding your podcast’s performance. In such cases, you can use analytical tools to meet all your performance measurement needs, or use specific tools for the measurement of different metrics.
Here is a list of tools and what each tool offers in terms of analytical capabilities for listeners:
| Tool | What is it offering | Most suited for |
| Spotify for Creators | Demographic information, retention graph | Spotify-centric metrics |
| Apple Podcasts Connect | Listening duration, subscriber growth | iOS user audience |
| Chartable | Cross-platform analytics, Channel growth tracking | Industry benchmarking |
| Podtrac | Standardized audience measurement | Ad reporting |
Table: Top Podcast analytics tools and what they offer
Insights on Audience Behaviour And Engagement
As a podcaster’s success is essentially dependent on listeners, the ultimate insights that you would need are the ones that are crucial for audience engagement. Here are some of the questions that you need the answers to:
- Who are your loyal listeners?
- Which episodes get shared or replayed most?
- Which guest draws the highest listen spikes?
Moreover, the following table explains the best approaches to directly engage listeners:
| Strategy | Audience Engagement Benefit |
| Quality content creation | Keeps listeners returning |
| Listener interactions | Helps in community building |
| Episode upload consistency | Creates a listening habit |
| Collaboration | Expanding audience reach |
| Marketing | Direct communication with the audience |
| Analyzing data | Guides further interactions and improvements |
Table: Strategies for audience engagement benefits
Summing Up
Podcast analytics is more than about numbers. Podcast analytics will help a new podcaster understand the areas of growth and how to gain and retain listeners. Focus on making your content cater to your audience, make sure your audience is engaged, and develop a loyal listener base.
Use Analytics to Grow Your Podcast Channel Today!
A liberal and smart application of podcast analytics can help you, a budding podcaster, create a lucrative podcasting career today! Know which analytics tools are the most relevant to your content, and make effective data-driven decisions. And become a successful podcaster.
