What's Your Podcast Really Telling You?

One of the questions I get all the time from podcasters is how do I know that I’m doing well? And the boring truth is - the data. It’s not sexy. It’s not fun but it is incredibly important to create a baseline for your growth. That’s why I want to start out this newsletter with breaking down the different types of analytics to look at and how to make changes that will help you grow your show.

Don’t be a bad date.

You know that feeling when you're talking to someone and can't tell if they're actually interested? That's what running a podcast without analytics is like. These numbers are basically your audience giving you feedback – they're telling you what they love, what makes them yawn, and what keeps them coming back for more.

The most underrated metric (IMO)

Gone are the days where someone will tune into an hour or two hour long podcast. Podcasts are no longer novel, people’s attention spans continue to shrink, and if you can’t finish an episode in the time it takes to run an errand, do a chore, or take a walk - you’ve lost your audience. But as you’ll see below, there’s a nuanced take and why you need to look at your analytics before just taking my word as the gold standard.

The Episode Completion Rate, which can only accurately be found in the Apple Podcast analytics, tells you if people are sticking around or dropping off throughout the episode.

The podcaster responsible for the show below exclusively does interviews in the tech innovation space with tactical tips on fundraising and real life stories about what exited founders are up to. It’s hard to condense this down into shorter episodes and despite the episodes averaging 50 minutes or more in length, they have an average of over 50% completion rate.

When we worked together to shorten episodes, just take a look at what happened. A significant drop in episode consumption. Same content. Same creator. Condensed version. This is an example where listener consumption 🤝 creator desire to have longer podcasts works and why it’s important to look at the analytics for your own show and audience to know what works best.

The TL;DR

Login to your Apple Podcast account and take a look at your episodes. What do you see? Is your audience listening to longer episodes or shorter ones? Are they dropping off consistently at a certain point within the episode?

Reply back to this email and tell me what you found!

Next week I’ll be back talking about the difference between followers and downloads.