34: Understanding Your Podcast's Stats
How many subscribers do I have? What's a good number of downloads? How many downloads should I have by now?
These are questions that are asked in some form or another in various podcast communities on a daily basis.
Here's the secret ... it doesn't matter.
In this episode, I'm explaining why podcast download numbers aren't as important as most people think they are, why you should focus on patterns over numbers when it comes to your podcast's statistics, and how to truly measure the success of your podcast.
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Android Devices | Spotify | iHeartRADIO | RSS
Transcript
Welcome to podcasting for coaches. I'm Britany Felix and I'm a podcast launch consultant who specializes in helping coaches and consultants utilize the power of podcasting as a way to build brand awareness and generate new leads for their business. I realize not every new coach or consultant can afford to hire someone to help launch their show. So I created this podcast as a way to guide you through the process of launching and utilizing your very own podcast to help you grow your business and reach a new audience of adoring followers and potential clients. If you're ready to get your voice and podcast out into the world, head over to podcasting for coaches.com to learn more. Welcome to Episode 34 of podcasting for coaches. In this episode, we are going to talk all about your stats. So a lot of new podcasters. And if you have ever spent any time in a podcasting group, you will notice focus on their downloads, everything is about downloads, what's a good number of downloads after you launch what's a good number a month, then, Hey, I just hit 5000 downloads, I just hit 10,000 I just hit 100,000. I just hit 1 million. So much download talk. Right now, right off the bat, I want to state your numbers are nowhere near as important, as you likely think they are. Yes, it is absolutely fantastic to celebrate milestones, to have certain goals and to celebrate those and reach them can be incredibly motivating. So I applaud that. And I do that myself. However, especially for coaches and consultants who podcast for their business, it is so much more important to gauge your podcast success based off of the engagement you receive from your audience. The people that are signing up for your email list the people who are visiting your website, the people who are joining your Facebook groups, or following on social media, the people who are emailing you or messaging you the people who are becoming your clients, because they found you through your podcast, or they bonded with you through your podcast. That is how you measure your podcast success. With that out of the way. Let's dive into the numbers a little bit because they actually can be beneficial. They just are not the end all be all when it comes to your podcast success. So to start off with there is something called the IAB, the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The IAB is just what it sounds like. They deal with marketing and advertising. And they have set some standards that they want media and marketing industries, as they put it, to follow some guidelines that they want them to follow whenever they are tracking measurements and data and metrics and statistics and all of these things in terms of sponsorship, and placing ads and those kinds of things. Now, because there is not one set way to do anything in podcasting, really, the podcasting industry has adopted these IAB standards when it comes to their own measurements and data and statistics and metrics. So for this reason, with whatever you use to keep track of your statistics, you want to make sure they're IAB compliant, because those are honestly the most strict and the most accurate. The good news is that most of the major podcast hosting platforms are IAB compliant, including Lipson and blueberry. So now to get into the number one question that every podcaster will ask, at some point in time unless they are shown the light and know that this doesn't have a simple answer is how can I tell how many subscribers I have? The very short answer is, you can't, I'm just going to put it bluntly, there is no one specific way to tell the exact number of subscribers that your show has across every single platform. There is however, a little trick that I like to do. That gives you at least a general idea most likely of how many subscribers your show has. When someone subscribes to your show, they automatically receive your new episodes every time when it's released. Now, most platforms count that episode showing up on your device in your app as a download. So in theory, if every time you release a new episode, you're getting at least 50 downloads every single episode across the board, you're getting at least 50 downloads, then it's probably a safe bet that you have at least 50 subscribers, because those 50 people are getting that episode as soon as it's released, and it counts as a download. And when you're looking at this you want to look on the day the episode has released not 24 hours later, not a week later, not 30 days later, because that doesn't exactly rule out the people who have just randomly found your show or listening for the first time. Now I want to say that there are a couple of caveats to this. If you have a new subscriber to your show, it automatically puts every single one of your available past episodes onto their device. And those are counted as downloads as well. So if you've released 30 episodes, and someone new subscribes to your show, that's gonna be an automatic 30 more downloads for you. So again, it's a very general, basic way to have a decent idea of how many subscribers you have. So you've heard me use the word download a few times. Now, let's talk about that for a second. A download does not mean that someone on their device is saying, hey, this looks like an interesting episode. Why don't I download this really quickly, and then play it, that's not what it means. A download can count whether or not someone has ever clicked the play button. The same person can also give you two downloads for the same episode if they start on one device, and pick up listening on another. So downloads can be very deceiving, which is why we need to not place so much emphasis on them. They are great for showing patterns, but not for showing the minute details. So now let's get into some of those patterns that can actually help you when it comes to your statistics and makes them valuable to you still, I've already made it pretty clear, I don't want you to harp on your specific number of downloads. Yes, milestones are fantastic. They're fun. But what I do want you to pay attention to with your downloads is that they are increasing each month. If they are continuously increasing each month, that means you're showing your audience and your reach is in general growing. No, it may not be growing by 1298 downloads each month, but it's still growing. And so you know that you're doing something right, more people are discovering your show, more people are subscribing. More people are interested in what you have to say something with the formula is working. If your downloads are going down, or they're staying pretty stagnant, you've hit a barrier that lets you know that there's something that's not working, maybe you need to do more social media outreach, maybe you need to really engage with your guests and try to get them to share the episodes more. Maybe you need to run some contests, to really put new life into the thing and get your audience re excited about the show. Maybe the people listening are finding something that's turning them off, maybe the audio quality is not that great. Maybe the guests aren't that interesting. I know that's hard to hear. But these are good things to know. And paying attention to the trend with your download numbers is a way to tell whether it's working or not. In general, here's some things that your stats can also tell you. And I am basing this off of the Lipson advanced stats plan. Because I love Lipson I've made no secret about that they are my preferred platform. I've hosted three shows with them over three years. Even though I have experience with other platforms through my clients. With their advanced stats, here are some things that we can find out where in the world your audience is located. So for most people, this is going to be the United States. That's not it's pretty simple and easy. You can even break it down by state, which can also help you if you want to host live events. If you want to have an in person meetup for your audience, maybe look and see where the vast majority of your downloads are coming from. If 80% of your downloads are coming from New York, maybe you go to New York for an event, you're more likely to have higher turnout. But this also comes in handy in kind of a unique situation I have with one of my clients. There are two co hosts on the show ones in the US and ones in Australia. They both have large followings in their own countries, but they host the show together. So what has been interesting is when I helped these clients relaunch their show after they took a long hiatus, we catered our release time, based on the time zones here in the US because that's who had the majority of the audience, that's where the majority of the downloads are coming from was the US. However, over the past year, the Australian audience has actually grown and it's now the more popular one, this podcast is more popular in Australia than it is in the US. So that lets my clients know, maybe we should tweak a few things so that this works better for the Australian audience because we're gaining more traction there. This is the kind of data that you can get from looking at these metrics. You can also look at your individual episode downloads. Again, let's not focus on the specific numbers here. But look for the patterns. Is there a particular episode that just skyrocketed beyond all of the rest that has two or three times the downloads that all of your other episodes do? If so, maybe take a look at that. Did you have a guest who was especially popular and influential? Did they share that episode with an extremely large audience? Or did that topic just really resonate with your audience? Did people share it like crazy did it go viral? Those types of things are what you need to look out for. Similarly, if you rotate between solo episodes and interview episodes. compare those to each other. Do your solo episodes, almost always get more downloads than your interview episodes? If so, that means the audience is connecting with you. That means they're connecting more with your solo episodes, your voice, your thoughts, they would rather hear from you than your guests. Now, does this mean you should immediately scrap your interviews? No, not necessarily. But again, it's just things to consider. Again, looking at your specific episode, statistics say that 10 times fast will give you an idea about whether or not certain formats length of time topics, gas, those kinds of things really resonate with your audience more than others. Another thing that your podcast ads will tell you is what platform people are listening to you on the most. Now for the vast majority of podcast listeners. So 60 to 70% typically ever downloads. They're going to be on Apple podcast, which is Apple's mobile app. Of course, there are outliers to this, some people have a huge Spotify audience, some people have a huge YouTube audience. Google podcasts is of course, gaining in popularity, oddly enough. And this is the only situation where I have ever seen this personally happen. My number two download source. And it's actually even overtaken Apple podcasts as my number one source is my Alexa skill. Not my podcast on Alexa devices through the tune in app, not that my actual skill. So I don't even advertise this, you probably never heard me even talk about this here on the podcast. But just out of curiosity sake in case it was a service I wanted to offer to my clients, I created a skill for this podcast for Alexa devices. And that is actually giving Apple podcasts a run for its money on where my downloads are coming from. Now I have a couple theories, because this does seem extremely odd to me that maybe it's because I have one episode a week. And people generally do their flash briefings with Alexa devices in the morning, as they're getting ready for work. So it's a daily thing. So maybe my weekly episodes are getting played on a daily basis via the skill. And so maybe that's why it has more downloads. Once I get a little bit more time, I'm going to test this by creating a completely separate Alexa skill with some little tidbits designed to provide daily tips. Again, that's a future project. But looking at these statistics, and this data, lets you see these kinds of things. It lets you know, hmm, I'm actually picking up a lot of downloads from this app, and I've never paid any attention to it before. Maybe I should start really hyping that up clearly my audience is listening to me on there. Clearly they use this platform, why don't I start promoting it a little bit heavier. Now, I do want to say as you go through and look at where your downloads are coming from these places are called a user agents. And they have some crazy frigging names. Most of them, you're not even going to know what the heck they mean, a lot of them, I don't even know what they mean. And I reached out to top people at Lipson, and they can't even tell me what they mean. Because the specific source creates the name for whatever their user agent is. So there are some who are fairly popular, that are kind of a mystery. We're not exactly sure what this platform is, whether it's a bot that's just crawling for RSS feeds. But I am going to have a link in the show notes to a fantastic article by James Cridland at pod news, where he breaks down a lot of these user agents and explains where these downloads are actually coming from, to go and take a look at that and really have a better understanding of where your downloads are coming from. Just go to my website podcasting for coaches.com. Click on the podcast tab in the main menu, and then go to this episode, which is number 34. in the show notes, I will also have a post to an article on lipsense platform where they really do an in depth explanation of all of the stats available in their advanced stats plan, which go beyond even the ones that I've included here. Now there are two other things that I want to touch on really briefly. And that is that Apple podcast in their podcast Connect account, which is the account you have to use to submit your podcast to them. They have some statistics in there as well. I do not place pretty much any weight on these statistics. And I may be in the minority there. But the reason why is because a these statistics just don't seem to add up to me. They don't make any sense. One of the statistics that they provide is the consumption rate. So the percentage of the podcast episode that has been listened to, which is great in theory, because it lets you know if people stop listening after a certain point, however, some of my episodes and some of my client episodes have had a 0% consumption rate zero minutes or listened to, even though in their Lipson account, it very clearly shows that they are getting downloads from Apple podcasts. And that that was a real listen to. So if you think about it logically of 60 to 70% of your downloads come from Apple podcast, and this particular episode has a few 100 downloads. Or a few 1000? Does it really make sense to think that no one's listened to a single minute of that episode? No, it doesn't. And another thing to note here is that they are only tracking their users who are listening via the apple podcast app on devices that have iOS 11, or hire installed. That's it. They're not tracking anything prior to that. So again, your statistics there, even if they are accurate, for that specific segment of their users, is very heavily skewed. And not really representative of all of your Apple podcast downloads or your downloads in general. And the last thing that I really want to mention is that there are a few different third party services that provide podcast statistics as well. And you can get into these if you want, you can do some research and find out about them. Some are IAB compliance, some aren't. However, if you have the advanced statistics plan, with Lipson, you're pretty much good enough to go in order to do what you need to do with your podcast. As far as your stats go. If you are very, very interested in the exact specifics of your download numbers, then yeah, you can try some of these out and see if they make sense. More often than not, I think they're just another tool to get caught up in and get distracted by. So again, the specific numbers of your statistics is not what you should focus on. Focus on the patterns both good and bad. And then measure your podcast success by the engagement you receive from your audience and the new clients that you gain. Thank you so much for joining me. I want to invite you to come back next week where we are actually going to have part two of my interview with Sophia Parra from Coach social, and she's going to tell us all about how you should be promoting your podcast episodes on a weekly basis, and how you should be repurposing your old podcast episodes. Thanks again have a fantastic week. And that wraps up another episode of podcasting for coaches. If you'd like to connect with me further, get additional free resources, receive updates on this podcast and connect with other coaches and consultants who are using a podcast for their business. I'd like to invite you to join the podcasting for coaches community on Facebook. You can either search for podcasting for coach's community on Facebook to find it, or you can use the link that's in the show notes for every single episode of this podcast on my website podcasting for coaches.com