Turn Podcast Analytics Into A Podcast Growth Strategy

It's time to start reading the story your podcast stats are already telling! In this episode, I team up with Jordan, Buzzsprout’s podcast producer and co-host of Buzzcast, to discuss how you can use download data to understand your listeners, refine your episodes, and level up your podcast.

If you have questions for the Podcaster Success team about your podcast stats, email us at support@buzzsprout.com.

Keep podcasting!

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction: Why Stats Matter
• 2:37 Buzzsprout's Episode Pacing Chart
• 4:50 What 7-Day Downloads Tell You
• 7:10 Using 30-Day Metrics To Level Up
• 8:57 The Power Of 90-Day Insights
• 10:57 Compare You To You, Not Others

Transcript

Cara Pacetti: 0:00

Welcome to Podcasting Q&A, brought to you by the people at BuzzSprout. I'm your host, Cara Pacetti, and I'm bringing you the best tips and strategies to keep you podcasting with confidence. Last time we talked about podcast stats, we were just trying to get a better understanding of how stats are being tracked, both inside of our Buzzsprout account and across the podcast players. But today, I want to take it a step further. So I want to take what we already know about podcasting stats and how we can use that to level up our podcast. Most of all, I want to know where do we really want to put our energy according to what we're learning about our podcasts? So, of course, I have brought in some help to join me on this episode. And you've heard from her before. She is our podcast producer here at Buzz Sprout. She is a co-host of Buzzcast and runs her own podcast called Dreamful. Jordan, thank you again for joining me on Podcasting Q&A. I'm so happy you're here.

Jordan Blair: 0:57

Oh, I love coming on these episodes. I will be on every single one if you want. Love it.

Cara Pacetti: 1:02

All right. So first I want to start with the download numbers. So we track downloads here in Buzzsprout and we provide these really easy to read graphs in your account. You can see your overall podcast downloads. You can see your downloads per episode. And what I want you to think about as you're looking at all this information, I don't want you to look at those large spikes. I want you to look for patterns. And I want you to also think about what you're doing when you're releasing these episodes. And what I mean by that, you're staring at these graphs, you've changed the settings to show your downloads across all time. And you're seeing that when I release those solo episodes every other week, it seems to trend up on my initial downloads. And then when I do those longer interviews that are upwards of 45 minutes on the other weeks, not as high. Let those metrics tell you what your listeners are wanting more of in your podcasts. Jordan, do you have anything to add to that?

Jordan Blair: 1:59

I love the concept of really looking at your stats and trying to find patterns in it, kind of like big picture, top down, because I think a lot of podcasters can kind of get into the weeds when they go into their stats page. I've actually seen people in our community group be like, I want to look at like hour by hour stats. And I think at that point, maybe that's a little too much. And I think that it is not helpful to a certain degree. You know, really your stats, even on a daily basis, might not be as helpful as you think they could be. So I'm really excited that we're gonna talk about this.

Cara Pacetti: 2:37

I totally agree. Another feature within Buzz sprout that's actually really helpful for looking at the big picture is the episode pacing chart. The pacing chart is something that we added within the last couple of years, I think. It can be found on the homepage of your desktop browser. So it's right there at the forefront. And it's such a beautiful graph. Um, on the bottom axis, you can see your days ranging from the first day that you publish the episode all the way up to the first 30 days your episode's been live. And on the other axis, you'll see your total downloads. And you'll see these beautiful lines, and they are going to show you just how your episodes are trending. So it shows your most recent episode in comparison with the most recent three published episodes. And I've found that to be so helpful. The visualization of those lines and seeing how it's comparing is super helpful. So if you haven't checked out that pacing chart, I definitely recommend checking that out. Absolutely. So the pacing chart is based on the first 30 days that your episode has gone live. So you'll find in observing podcasting stats that oftentimes it's recommended we look at the first 730 and 90 days. And when I started reviewing stats, I honestly was a little confused. I'm like, why the first? Why the first 730 and 90? Why not the most recent? Yeah. And it really makes sense what you think about it. So an episode that was just recently published in the last seven days versus an episode that's five years old, if you're comparing the most recent seven days of those episodes, they're gonna be different. They just are. If you're comparing the first seven days, 30 days, 90 days, it's more of the same category. So same metrics, regardless of the age of the episode, if that makes sense.

Jordan Blair: 4:22

Yeah. If you are looking at your first seven days of your podcast dropping, that's gonna be a much more accurate representation of who is currently listening to your podcast, as opposed to looking at the most recent seven days of an episode you dropped like three years ago, whereas the listenership has dropped off, even if it's, you know, evergreen content, it's just not gonna be the same. Absolutely.

Cara Pacetti: 4:44

Yeah. So I want to dive a little deeper into that and kind of what can we gain from that and how can we use it? Love it. So when you're looking at the downloads coming in during your first seven days, one of the things we could gain from this is how engaged your current subscribers are. So your core audience that's maybe getting that notification that a new episode has dropped. Are they clicking play right away?

Jordan Blair: 5:05

Yeah. And what's really cool about that is that as podcasters, you don't really get a clear picture of how many followers or subscribers you have on the podcast apps. So the best guess we have is going to be how many downloads you get in those first seven days.

Cara Pacetti: 5:20

That's a really great point. Yeah, that's a way to track that added benefit. Yeah. That's unknown. Yeah. So knowing that, what can we take away from the downloads that we're seeing in the first seven days of our episode?

Jordan Blair: 5:33

You know what really works well is looking into okay, what promotion or marketing strategies did I try out this week? You know, sometimes if you're looking at it and you're wanting to experiment with your marketing, you could do that where maybe you promote the episode on the day that it's launched or the day before it's launched and see if that made any difference with how many downloads you got within those first seven days. Another thing that you can look at, and this is something that I do all the time, is how are you titling your episodes? And this is just like we're gonna do a quick podcast SEO 101. Your episode titles matter so much. And if you are titling your episodes something fun, like um I always think about is Gimlet's reply all. They always have these really obscure, kind of mysterious titles that are not good for SEO, but they can do that because they're a major network and they're well known. But most independent podcasters don't have that. And so looking at your episode titles is really important and make sure that you are titling them in a way that is going to be found by the search engines within the podcast apps when your listeners are typing in what they're looking for. So it's really good to use searchable terms like ways to do this. You know, just make sure that you're using terms that you want people to find your podcast with.

Cara Pacetti: 6:51

Yeah, that titling really makes a big difference on that discoverability piece for sure.

Jordan Blair: 6:55

Huge difference. And yeah, you can just kind of, again, experiment. Like that's the great thing about podcasting, is you can experiment with things. So this first seven days is a great way to check your experimentation with your marketing, with the way that you're titling episodes, things like that.

Cara Pacetti: 7:10

Yes. Now moving on to the first 30 days. So we've bypassed our core audience. It's been living out there for a while. Um, listeners are still tuning in. So the first 30 days, as you start to see the increase in downloads or the steady rise, or maybe even the fall, um, it will let you know this is your audience beyond your core audience. So this is helping you to determine are listeners sharing these episodes? Are you coming up in those searches when you titled your episode that way? Jordan, let's talk about 30 days. What else can we learn from that?

Jordan Blair: 7:42

Oh, I love that you brought up that this is beyond your core audience. This is beyond the people who follow you and listen every single week. You know, they show up right away when your episode is out. If your downloads are consistently going up within the 30 days, that means more people are finding your podcast. And so maybe these marketing or SEO techniques that you're using are working. Another thing that you can use 30 days for, if you are looking into monetizing your podcast through sponsorships, what brands look for is how many downloads you get on average per episode in the first 30 days of that episode being published. So that's a really important metric to pay attention to if you are looking to get sponsorships.

Cara Pacetti: 8:23

This episode is about leveling up your podcast. So maybe that's the next step for you. You've been doing this as a hobby. Yeah. And monetization is on your radar. So yeah, it's important to pay attention to those 30-day downloads. So is this content that's increasing or maybe remaining steady with 30 days? Jordan, would we consider this evergreen yet? Or does it need to age a little more before you would consider it evergreen?

Jordan Blair: 8:47

I mean, it depends. I think it's all relative, but 30 days you could consider evergreen content, but you might want to look at a little bit later than that.

Cara Pacetti: 8:56

You mean like 90 days?

Jordan Blair: 8:58

Yes, I exactly mean 90 days. Three months feels like a good threshold for evergreen content.

Cara Pacetti: 9:04

All jokes aside, that is the last metric that we're touching on today, which is 90 days. So using your 90-day metrics, you are determining which episodes are having lasting relevance. Uh which episodes are still getting discovered. And so I definitely think this can help shape your future episodes and the way you're going with your podcasts. Would you agree, Jordan?

Jordan Blair: 9:25

Absolutely. And this is a really powerful metric, too, if you are trying to really build that endurance with your podcast, like make sure that you're gonna be getting downloads for a long time. And 90 days is a great way to look back across your podcast episodes and be like, okay, what episodes perform the best? So I'm gonna use Buzzcast as an example. Our episodes that were really unique and we're not just covering like a general topic, but we're actually talking about the people who are listening, the audience members, for us, those went really well way into the future, just still performing great. They're our best performing episodes. That gave us the indicator of, oh, if we include our listenership into the creation process of our podcast content, they're more likely to share it with friends and family and say, hey, look, we've been featured on this episode, or they share it on social media and they say, Wow, thank you so much for including my show in this, right? It's good all around because that's giving us more content. It's giving them an opportunity to market it for us. And those are our best performing episodes because they're special in that way. And so you can really gain a lot of insight in the 90 days to what types of episodes work best, what formats work best, what things do people avoid. So if you're posting recap episodes or greatest hits or reposting things and those aren't performing well, you know, into the 90 days, that's a pretty good indicator that maybe it's time to pump the brakes a bit on that kind of content.

Cara Pacetti: 10:57

I love that. And I feel like through all of this, we're looking at numbers, but if you notice, we're not comparing actual digits. Yeah, like we're not actually telling you that your success or your failure is based on you didn't reach a thousand downloads. Oh yeah. This is literally all comparing yourself to yourself. Like it is all about your podcast. And like we said in the very beginning, using those patterns to tell the story of your podcast. And then you get to decide what where you go from there.

Jordan Blair: 11:25

And you know what I love about our like seven, 30, 90-day stats is that it's a bar graph of the episodes. So you can actually just block out out of sight, out of mind, the actual numbers and just look at the visualization of what is doing better than others. Because if you look at your episodes and you say, well, this one got three downloads more than this one, what does it mean? You're gonna drive yourself insane. Like, yes, nobody needs that. So just look for really, really big differences because honestly, if you get so much as like 10 or even sometimes, depending on your podcast size, like 50 or 100 discrepancy in downloads, it's actually maybe not that big of an indicator. Right.

Cara Pacetti: 12:09

Another thing to consider too is the way that you can compare all of this data is that you have to produce content. So don't pump the brakes. Keep going. The more content you release, the more content you create, you are gonna learn and you're gonna learn how to use those metrics and you're gonna have more to learn from because you're gonna have these episodes aging into the 90-day mark and you'll be able to compare all of that.

Jordan Blair: 12:31

You know what? Everyone goes through seasons, listenership goes through seasons, content creation goes through seasons. So if you start seeing a dip, do not get discouraged. Like I have a podcast that for some reason around the holidays, man, my downloads go down. And then during the summer, they go way up. If you have a podcast on schooling, maybe your downloads go way down the summer because people aren't listening to a podcast about school during the summertime. So just hang in there. It's sort of like going on a hike. There's gonna be times where you're going downhill, there's gonna be times where you're going uphill, but you're still gonna get to your destination. You're still gonna be just enjoying your hike and enjoying the scenery and having fun doing it. So that's the important part.

Cara Pacetti: 13:10

Yes. That's a great Idaho example. So all right. One last point I just want to touch on very quickly. Every podcast has a different baseline to start with, and that your growth is personal. So only compare your stats with your stats and some things to consider when you're looking at your stats. Did the episode outperform my average? What was I doing differently? And how can I repeat that intentionally? And just use those metrics to catapult your podcast up to the next level, whatever that looks like for you. Jordan, thank you so much for being here. It's been so nice having you. I know that our listeners really, really appreciate your insights from many years of successful podcasting. If you have questions about your podcast stats or you need help from the podcaster success team, you can reach us by emailing support at buzzsprout.com. If you have a question you'd like answered on a future Podcasting Q&A episode, just click the send us a text link in the show notes and send in any questions you have. Be sure to join us every Monday to kickstart your week. Thank you so much for listening. And as always, keep podcasting.