We all know you should be tracking the analytics of your podcast, but what does that really mean? Once you get the download numbers how do you actually use them to improve your show?
I’ll answer all those questions and help use those numbers to grow your show!
Getting the Data.
There are a lot of ways to get the data for your download numbers. Usually, your hosting service provides at least the basic download numbers for 24 hours, 7 days, and 30 days.
You can do a lot of work, and get a ton of information with just these basic numbers. That’s what I will be focusing on in this post.
Third-party analytics providers like Podtrac, PodKite, or PodRover are also very good options as they usually give you more in-depth information about all your download locations.
What Should I Do With It?
Now that you have all of your data, it’s time to put it to work for you.
You can always download those numbers to a CSV file, which allows you to transfer all that data to a spreadsheet (either Excel or Google Sheets).
Once in a spreadsheet, you can organize your episodes by the type of episode it is. You can add a column next to your episode titles providing its topic, if it’s an interview/solo episode, what type of intro/outro you used, etc.
This is where you can get creative, if you’re wondering which type of episode has out-performed other episodes, make sure you mark that as a different identifier.
Where the Real Fun Begins.
Now that you have identified all your episodes you can filter out whatever you want and check how those specific episodes are performing. But, we can take this one step further.
If you want to easily look at which episodes are outperforming others at a glance, you’re going to want to create pivot tables.
These are kind of filters on steroids. You can set it up to find out, for example, “what are the average downloads for the month for all my episodes about mental health”. You can filter so it shows you how many interview episodes were downloaded in California, whatever information you want to know, it’s just down to making sure the correct identifier is connected to the episode and setting that up in the pivot table.
This is all up to your imagination and what you want to learn about your show. You can even download each month’s data separately, create a different page in your sheet for each month, and find out how your downloads change from month to month.
There you have it, that’s my magical solution to squeeze out a TON more information from your data, pivot tables! It’s that simple, but they really are a super powerful tool!
I hope this helped you out in your podcasting journey, and you’re able to skyrocket your show!
If it did, let me know by sending me an email at matt@ieditpodcasts.com or if you’re looking to learn more about how to expand your podcast, schedule a discovery call with me!
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