The importance of understanding your podcast statistics cannot be overstated. They offer you a complete reading of your listeners, like who they are and where they’re from. With that insight, you get a clear idea of your podcast’s progress and how to further develop your content; stats function as feedback, encouraging you to keep doing what you’re doing, or pushing you to experiment and improve your process.
The importance of podcast statistics
Detailed statistics are also crucial data to report to ad agencies and sponsors if you’re looking to monetize your content (if that’s the route you want to take, of course – Spreaker offers an easier, more automatic revenue sharing program, too).
Ad providers want to be able to match up products and the audiences they’ll be advertised to as best as possible, and the stats you provide should be leveraged accordingly (for example, they’ll want to be sure that the men’s shaving kits they’re pushing aren’t getting featured on children’s programming). It’s similar in approach to any other type of content monetization. Even bloggers have to provide reports of their readership to their sponsors. Why? Because why place an ad on your page that isn’t likely to get read or paid attention to?
With the help of detailed statistics, you’ll be able to show them the power of your podcast’s reach and the who, what, where, and why of your listeners with one go.
This may sound a little bit overwhelming, but not to worry, Spreaker has got you covered. We are on a mission to provide the most complete, all-in-one podcasting solution out there with our CMS. It’s a professional dashboard that covers editing, feeds, social media distribution, and monetization opportunities (amongst other things) so that you have greater control over your content. Now we’ve ticked one more thing off our list of features: having in-depth statistics on Spreaker’s CMS.
They’re easy to access, and thanks to a beautiful redesign, even easier to read. Plus we’ve added a few extra goodies while we were at it. You’ll have the key to unlocking your audience in no time.
Spreaker’s Podcast Statistics
Lets’ take a deep drive into Spreaker’s statistics
The statistics section of our CMS offers precise and easy-to-read charts at a glance. To reach them, just click on the Statistics icon on the left-hand side of the CMS’ dashboard. From here, you’ll find a few different sections with varying information. Here’s a closer look at what they show:
The Quick Overview provides a general picture of your account’s progress and its plays, downloads, likes, and followers.
Just below are your Overall Statistics, which provide your account’s complete statistics in more detail. You’ll see your plays and downloads, likes, geolocation, demographics, sources, devices, followers, and evolution stats. Toggle their date ranges by days, weeks, months, or customize your own set of dates.
A Rundown of Each Section
- Live Plays and Downloads. The number of times listeners have ever played or downloaded your content. Live Plays happen only on Spreaker when a listener tunes in to a live broadcast. You can change the timeframe and get data for days, weeks, and months, or you can set a customized timeframe.
- Listeners. Listeners are the number of unique listeners aggregated on a daily basis. For example, Listener A listens to an episode of your podcast in 24 hours → 1 download, 1 listener. Listener B listens to two episodes of your podcast in 24 hours → 2 downloads, 1 listener.
- Likes. The number of times listeners have liked your podcast.
- Geolocation A breakdown of the top cities and countries your listeners are tuning in from. See the percentage of listeners from any country by hovering the mouse over the map.
- Sources Where exactly listeners are tuning in to your podcast from, like Spreaker’s website and listening apps, embedded players placed across the web, podcatching platforms, and more.
- Devices This statistic shows the devices listeners are tuning in from— including but not limited to smartphones, tablets, or desktops—and their operating systems. You can get overall account data from the last twelve months, or see the devices linked to any single podcast or episode from the last 30 days.
- Evolution Shows you exactly how your episode performs over the course of its first 30 days of life. Being able to see what happens over time allows you to adjust your release campaigns and drive your podcast to greater success.
While all podcasters will be able to see their plays and downloads, you’ll notice that some statistics only unlock as you upgrade to bigger Pro plans. To get full access to every statistic available, you can upgrade to either the Anchorman or Publisher. Pro users (from Broadcaster and up) get another perk, too – the ability to export data as .CSV files, so that you can more easily share your figures with agencies and sponsors.
Update: Geolocation
Podcasting is a “Glocal” phenomenon more than ever before. Podcast listeners both all around the world and a few miles from creators are enjoying your content at the same time.
A podcast hosting service needs to be ahead of such trends and be able to provide podcasters specific data. We get it, you want more detailed information about where your listeners are located. Why? Well because the United States is a big country. And maybe you want to know if the majority of your listeners are located in a specific state or city. Well now with Spreaker, you can do that.
As of June 2021, the new Geolocation Stat introduces:
- A new way to get deeper data with three levels: Country, Region, and City. Each shows both Percentage and Totals for Downloads (previously, it was showing only Percentages)
- The map is easier to read and introduces dynamic and clickable navigation
- Each level shows more thanks to a longer item list (in details: 25 for Countries, unlimited for Regions, and 25 for Cities)
Update: Statistics Date Picker.
In May 2021, we also introduced two small but impactful features to Statistics Date Picker.
- Quickly access last year’s data in just one click. Forget scrolling months back to select them all, and use the new “Last 12 months” option in the drop-down menu.
- If you see a download spike for a specific day, now you can see which episode drove the increase. Date Picker now allows 1-day-only selection, when setting the Custom date range, and gives you the “Yesterday” option from the menu.
Update: Listener Evolution
Your Listening Evolution statistics enable you to see your episode’s cumulative plays and downloads over a maximum of 30 days from its release date. This gives a much clearer picture than your daily trending charts which don’t give an overview of your individual episode performance. Also, you can track how well your episodes are being received and therefore make adjustments to release campaigns.
In short, these statistics tell you how your episodes perform over time, which in turn helps you find ways to improve your podcast’s success. This is particularly interesting if you’re using the Spreaker Monetization Program – improving your episodes’ lifespan will also help you increase your revenue.
How Will the Listening Evolution Statistics Help Your Podcast?
Unsure how exactly to use this info? Let’s look at some examples of exactly how tracking your episodes’ lifespan will help you.
Situation 1: You start to notice that on the 5th day after you release an episode your trajectory generally flattens out – what can you do? Starting from the next episode you can set an additional promotional campaign on social media and watch to see if this grants a longer listening life to your episodes.
Situation 2: It becomes apparent that when you talk about specific topics your episodes have a longer lifespan than others. You can start to use this topic to grow your listener figures over time!
Also, you will discover that some episodes are more successful as “evergreen” episodes: you will be able to share these episodes months after their original release and watch their plays and downloads increase.
Situation 3: By comparing the different evolution lines from your different episodes, you can understand whether sending an issue of your newsletter on the 10th day after the episode’s release gives you better performance over promoting the episode with a Facebook ad.
IAB Certification
Spreaker’s statistics are also officially certified by IAB Technology Lab (IAB), which can be found here: http://j.mp/compliant-companies.
But what does that mean?
IAB Technology Lab (IAB) is a nonprofit consortium that develops standards within the digital media world – released podcast measurement guidelines to help streamline policies for providers like us and podcasters like you.
Why are verified readings of my audiences important?
IAB’s guidelines for the podcasting world help ensure everyone in the industry – podcasters, hosting platforms, distribution outlets, ad agencies, and advertisers – “speak the same language” when looking at data.
Spreaker’s IAB certification means your podcast statistics will also be certified. IAB is a trusted brand in the advertising industry. So having compliant statistics and real data at your fingertips can lead to a better connection with potential partners and advertisers.
What does that mean for my podcast statistics?
Adhering to the IAB guidelines helps us deliver clearer insight into the users who listen to your podcast episodes.
Implementing IAB guidelines has improved the way our statistic system detects fake plays and downloads originated by bots. This is a mandatory requirement to achieve IAB guidelines. As a result, our systems are now more efficient in recognizing legitimate traffic.
IAB guidelines require us to focus on users who have really consumed podcast episodes. The counts you see in your statistics now exclude users who have listened to less than one minute of an episode. This distinction means you’ll have a clearer view of your real audiences.
The result: You’ll have a stronger understanding of your listeners, and you can promote your podcast and figures within the industry with total transparency.
