“How many downloads will it take for my podcast to be successful?” — A new podcaster somewhere, probably

When you’re new to podcasting, there are bound to be a lot of questions. That’s especially true if you’re not familiar with the technology behind podcasts such as RSS feeds.

A great place to get answers to your questions are some of the various online communities built around podcasting. Regardless of where you go to get answers, it won’t take you long to catch on that downloads are the key metric that everyone tracks to determine the success of their show.

Okay, not everyone.

Still, communities are littered with questions like, “If I have 100 downloads after a month, is that good?”

Time and time again, veteran podcasters will remind those new to the space that downloads are just a number. That’s not how you determine success. Then they’ll often go on to explain that true success is some vague metric:

How happy are you when podcasting? Are you getting good engagement?

There’s almost never a tangible answer to what defines success. That can be, and is, very frustrating to someone just starting out.

And I think a big reason for that is because of podcast hosts.

If it’s important, you track it

Any business owner will let you know that if there’s something of importance, you should track it.

Sales numbers, P&L, KPIs, SEO data, time and project management…the list goes on.

Even outside of business, the same rings true. On social media, people track engagement such as followers, likes, shares or comments. On YouTube, content creators track views and subscriptions.

If it’s important, you track it.

Podcast hosts are telling us what’s important by what they’re tracking

I haven’t used every podcast host out there, so I won’t attempt to speak about any one in particular. However, of those I have used or seen screenshots of their dashboards, a huge majority of them focus their analytics around one key number: Downloads.

Most podcast hosts focus on overall downloads. Source: https://blog.podbean.com/category/statistics/

When you’re new to podcasting and you log into your host and everything is about downloads…what are you supposed to think is the important thing to track?

What about advertisers?

Talk about advertisers and sponsorships only confuse things more. It’s about downloads and hitting that magical 5,000 per episode in the first 30 days of its release.

One of the best sources for stats in the overall industry comes from VP of Podcaster Relations at Libsyn Rob Walch on The Feed. If you’re a podcaster, you should subscribe to that show. At the end of almost every episode, Rob shares some stats for you to compare your show against.

For example, Rob might say if you have over 150 downloads in 30 days then you’re better than half the shows out there.

Editor’s Note: 150 is a sample number; listen to the latest episode of The Feed to get real, up to date numbers.

As a new podcaster, what would your takeaway from that be? Well, if 150 downloads makes my show better than half the shows out there, then isn’t that a measure of success?

“Total Downloads” (top right) are prominently displayed for a lot of podcast hosts. This can cause confusion around the importance of tracking downloads. Source: https://blog.libsyn.com/2017/09/18/libsyn-stats-overhaul-need-know

To confuse matters even more…

Don’t get me wrong, I love listening to The Feed. I love hearing the stats, stats, stats! I love the data.

However, most podcast hosts (that I’ve seen) do not track stats the way we’re told is important on The Feed. For example, Libsyn (screenshot above) still prominently displays the “Total Downloads” on their dashboard. If it’s more important to track the trend of each episode for the first 30 to 45 days after its release, why not show that prominently?

Simplecast was the only host I’ve used who surfaced this sort of information (first week downloads for your last ten episodes) well. There’s probably more out there. And to be fair, most podcast hosts you can usually download raw data into a CSV to get whatever numbers you want — but most people don’t want to (or won’t) do that.

What does that mean?

I’ve worked with enough UX geniuses in my career to know that the information you make easily accessible is going to be what most people see first. When overall downloads is the most prominently displayed statistic, it’s only natural that that is what people will start to track.

New podcasters are going to think overall downloads are the key metric to track in podcasting. Why? Because it’s what podcast hosts focus on showing up front.

It is what’s being tracked. So, it must be important.

Why is this?

While I’ve never worked at a podcast host, I do have a background working for an online content delivery company. Analytics are difficult to work with when you’re dealing with a platform you don’t control from start to finish.

Thanks to RSS feeds, analytics in podcasting are tough to track.

You can’t expect to get the same numbers from a podcast host that you can from YouTube. The reason for that is because podcast hosts deliver content from their servers, but you might listen to that podcast on any number of apps — Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and so on.

Your podcast host can’t see the playback information unless the developer shares it with them. And, realistically, most of them don’t. That’s why you get some great information from Apple’s Podcast Connects Analytics, but it’s only applicable to people listening on Apple devices.

Podcast hosts don’t control everything from serving up the content to where you watch it, like YouTube does. You don’t upload a video to YouTube then use Vimeo’s video player to watch it. Even embedded videos hosted on YouTube will use their player — that player can track your playback information regardless of what website you’re on when you watch it.

What does this mean?

Your podcast host can’t share information for how your podcast long your podcast was played on Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts until Apple and Google agree to share that playback information — so we’re left with the information they can track: Downloads.

They’re a tangible metric that everyone (usually) understands.

Even now, decades after podcasting has been a thing, the industry is only just now starting to get onto the same page for what a “download” actually means. See: https://www.iab.com/guidelines/

What about engagement? Happiness? Those are abstract concepts that vary way too much to grasp. There’s no way a podcast host can hope to show you those stats.

Or, can they?

There isn’t one kind of podcaster…and analytics dashboards should reflect that

There’s a lot of great tools to show details about those downloads — what app they come from, where they come from (provided a VPN isn’t being used), and so on.

But, what if downloads aren’t the metric you want to track for your podcast? Not everyone cares about getting advertisers for their podcast. Not everyone that wants to get sponsorship even cares about how many downloads they get — 100 downloads in a niche subject can be more valuable to some sponsors than 100,000 downloads in a more general subject.

Instead of forcing downloads as a metric for everyone in the industry to adhere to, what if podcast hosts offered you the tools to customize your analytics?

For example, many podcast hosts have the ability to build a custom website. Many others have the ability to build a custom app.

If listener engagement is more important to you than downloads, then perhaps the stats dashboard when you log in should focus on how many people contacted you through their app. Provided, of course, you’re using the host’s website and custom app.

If you’re not? Maybe a WordPress plug-in that tracks engagement such as shares or likes for your custom website and displays that on your stats dashboard.

What’s the solution?

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t have all the answers. There are much smarter people out there who do this sort of thing for a living.

In my mind, a solution would be some form of creator profile that lets you determine what the metrics are that’s important to your podcast. Sort of like how Google Analytics lets you customize your dashboard to show the data that’s important to you.

It wouldn’t be a far leap to then have a setup wizard to figure out what’s important for your podcast. Based on your responses, analytics might surface an overall download priority. When you login, you’ll see something similar to what you already see today.

But, maybe your responses to the setup indicate you care more about engagement.

For this profile, you might see “Total Engagement” instead of “Total Downloads” when logging into stats. This could potentially open up the ability to hook together data from other services to let you focus on engagement over downloads, if that’s what you choose.

For example, I love the destinations Libsyn’s destinations feature. They allow you to publish directly to third-party sites like Facebook and YouTube. What if there was a feature that worked the other way around so instead of sending things from your podcast host, you could hook up tools that offer some engagement stats, like Google and Facebook Analytics, to see better stats for your podcast analytics?

So, when you publish a podcast episode it’ll use your Facebook Analytics account to track how many times that’s been liked, shared or commented on and surface that information to your podcast dashboard.

That way, when you log into your dashboard the first thing you see doesn’t have to be how many overall downloads you have? Instead, you can start to start tracking metrics like how much engagement you’ve had episodes in the first 30 to 45 days of their release.

Summarizing it all

In a nutshell, podcast hosts are telling us overall downloads are the most important metric when they make it the very first thing that you see in your stats. Then, as you start going around the podcast communities, you’ll find most of the fine folks from hosting companies will tell you overall downloads aren’t as important as engagement.

And they’re right.

Engagement is important. I’d argue that for most indie podcasters who aren’t looking to make podcasting a full-time gig, engagement is more important than overall downloads.

So, why not be able to reflect that in the analytics?

If overall downloads don’t mean anything, why don’t most hosts (that I’ve seen) show you the downloads of each episode in the past 30 days or show you how many times that episode was liked on Facebook?

We all love the community that podcasting has. Let’s build better stats around that. If that’s what’s important, then it should be tracked.