A New Metric For Podcasting - The Podcast Report Episode #29

Podcast report episode 29. Do we have a new metric for podcasting here? Show notes and links are at the podcastreport.com 29show hotline, 503-897-1290. It's the podcast Report with Paul Colligan. And here's Paul. Hey, this is Paul Colligan. I'm the seven time best selling author of the business podcasting bible, how to Podcasts, Podcast Strategies and more. I've been in podcasting since the beginning. I love this industry. I have since day one. And this little podcast is my gift to it, my tribute to it, my chance to play with it. There are two audiences for this podcast. There's the podcaster. Number of you listen to this show. Thank you. Number of you share that. It has helped, it has directed you, it has pointed you, it has inspired you. Whatever it's done for you, great. Thrilled to be part of it. And I love podcasters dearly. I also have a deep fascination with people about to podcast. Yes, there are a bunch of you who have not yet podcast and, well, those of you who are thinking about it and thinking about it deeply and worried about more things than what microphone to use and what to put your host. You're listening to this as well and I like that. Now, don't let this stop you from getting your podcast out there. But man, once your podcast is out there, do consider some of the stuff we're looking at talking about. Playing with the podcast report is not a massive play. You'll never see it on one of the top number one hits of podcasting and that type of thing because it's very focused, it's very, very deep. It's not a massive play, but it's a deep one and I'm thrilled to do it. The topic this week, the question of do we have a new metric for podcasting comes from really just the fact. And this has been something I've been dealing with on the show for a long time. There are just a ton of assumptions about podcasting. I should be tracking this, I should be focused on this. I should be worried about this. I should not be worried about this past episode I chatted about does a podcast even need a website in some cases? Well, we're tracking the wrong things. I did a previous episode about Twitter bombers who are actually tracking downloads that are fakes that have nothing to do with who their real audience is. So we have some who are tracking the wrong things. We have some who are tracking the right things, but they're getting them the wrong ways. How does all this fit together? Well, really, honestly, ignoring the true strength of your audience, I mean, where are they really is going to do damage to you, is going to prevent you from seeing from your podcast what you can see. Now, there are downloads of your podcast, there are visitors to your website. There might be other things, and we'll chat about that a little bit later here, but I just like to start the dialogue. I'd like to offer this idea, I'd like to offer this concept. I might be the only one thinking about this. I might be the only one going in this direction. If that's the case, let me know and tell me. If you think maybe this would be of benefit to you, go ahead and track it. It's not that complicated. So the new metric, the metric I want to suggest is dpv. And DPV stands for downloads per visit. That's basically how many times is your show downloaded to, how many times come somebody comes by and visits your website? You know, I mean, if your show is downloaded 5,000 times for every time somebody visits your website, obviously you want to spend most of your time on the audio. You want to spend most of the time on the production of your content, the distribution, the marketing of it. But if those numbers, the website are getting higher and higher, well, you got interesting things you can do there. You can grab opt ins, you can keep them there longer, you can do interactivity, things you couldn't necessarily do with a podcast. So downloads per visitor as I want to track. And basically, is it more than you thought it was? Is it about where you'd think it is? I mean, ask yourself right now, what do you think your DPV rate is? 100 to 15 to 1, 1 to 1. Is it changing over time? Does this metric matter? Yeah, it does matter because it could really help you focus if you don't know what your audience is doing, if you don't know where your audience is spending their time, if you don't know the distribution, if you haven't kind of walked through this and thought through this, you could be wasting your time. You could be wasting your audience's time, you could be missing opportunities. You know, it's back to. And I've chatted about this in the show before, you know, you figure out your market in this particular show, in this particular case, my market is podcasters. You figure out your message. The message in this particular case is go a little bit deeper, think a little bit more, and you can see considerably better results. You then figure out where the money in it is, and I've shared with you in past episodes where the money in it is for me. Then you go to the media, and most of us have realized we're a podcast or become a podcast. Now, not a lot of us got to that result from going through that process. A lot of us grabbed a microphone and started podcasting. And then we're frustrated because we don't necessarily know what the market is. We don't necessarily know what the money is. We did it out of order. You know, we did the fire aim ready kind of thing. But here's the deal. If the media for your show really isn't your podcast, your podcast is more a process of getting people to your website. Maybe your media is your website. On the other hand, if you think that's happening, but it's not happening, and you always thought that your podcast was a way to get people to your website, a way to get people to your blog, a way to get people to your business, well, if that's not happening, maybe you change the cycle. There. There might be some gold in your website, there might be some gold in your. In your downloads. I don't know. It's something I want you to consider looking at. So what I'm doing right now is I'm tracking DPVs on a spreadsheet. You know, I'm basically taking how many downloads I got every day, how many visitors I got to the website every day. Downloads I'm tracking through Libsyn. Visitors I'm tracking to the website through. I've got Google Analytics running. I've shared with you that I've got my website on Tumblr. So both of those numbers are rock solid. I'm very happy with them. And so far, and obviously I've recorded this. You know, I didn't record this a few minutes ago. These shows usually recorded about five days before they go public. But so far this month, my number to me is a really surprising 2.18. 2.18 downloads about 2 to 1. And I'll tell you this, I'm spending a lot more time on this show. I'm spending a lot more time on this content than I'm spending on the website. I mean, right now, for every hour that I've spent on the show, I've spent maybe three minutes at the website. And gosh darn it, with these numbers, for every hour I've spent on the show, I should be spending about 40 minutes on the website or, you know, and maybe the opportunity is higher at the website. Maybe I should Spend more time at the website. I'm going to track this for a while. I may even go back and see what we've got there. I thought it would be much higher. I really would. A lot of you are coming to the website, a lot of you are visiting and checking for the links and that type of thing. Now this is causing me to seriously reconsider my site strategy. I really didn't think you'd be there. I did not think you'd be coming out to it. Yet you are, which is fascinating. Now, part of it, let's be honest, part of it is the very nature of podcasters and part of it is the very nature of my audience. And it's a little bit tweaked because I know I give the types of links that hopefully get you interested, that send you out to the website and that type of thing. So maybe it's tweaked in my situation, but gosh darn it, a bunch of you are at the site and I'm not taking advantage of that. So that's what I'm doing. That's part of why I bring this up and it's part of why I want to share it with you. Now, what you can do, certainly grab a spreadsheet, track your DPV's downloads per visitor. But even more importantly, I'd love to hear them if you'd love to share them on Twitter. PodcastRPT is the Twitter account. You can go to thepodcastreport.com Twitter, you can go to the podcastreport.com Facebook to see where we're at at Facebook. I would love your thoughts. I would love to get your DPV numbers. I'd love to see am I off? Is my audience really different? I'd be really curious with this. And then when you get these numbers, I'd like your thoughts on are you going to act on them? Is it going to change what you're doing? Is it going to change how you respond? I'd love to continue conversation now, for goodness sakes, don't let this be the only thing that you track. If you are building a list with your podcast, you might want to consider names per download. NPD maybe. Obviously, if in the world of selling sponsorships, your big thing is downloads. And please don't cheat or be lame. Get real downloads. That'll put you in a much better place. But yeah, track this stuff. I would love to hear what you're doing. I actually set up a the day I recorded this, I put up a link at the podcaster community at Google and Google is hard to find stuff through. If you head out to the podcastreport.com 29 look at me sending you to my site, bringing up my DPVs. I will have a link to this Google conversation. We'll see what happens there. It could be huge. It could be tremendous. It could die in the Vine. I'm not sure. I think it will be interesting, but I would love to continue this conversation. I'm going to continue to track everything that I think matters and I think this does and I'd like to hear from you on this one. Definitely a shorter episode today, but I wanted to get this out because I don't know I'm going to have fun with this again. ThePodcastReport.com Twitter to find us on Twitter ThePodcastReport.com Facebook to see what's doing there. You can go ahead and leave comments if you'd like. If you'd like the transcripts for today's show, go ahead and text Ep. 29 as in episode 29 to 503-897-1290 you can call the hotline of 503-897-1290 and find yourself leaving us a voicemail message. Might be fun to play one of those on a future episode. I've got two links up@thepodcastreport.com two nine one of them is the link to the new how to Podcast book that's coming out shortly. Should be fun. Another link is to this conversation at Google Next episode. I got a bunch of ideas. I got a long list of stuff and I might hit any one of them. But I'd love to hear from you what you think would be fun to do in the next episode of the podcast report. My two most popular episodes so far have been the buying of an audience with Ed Rush, which boy that that garnered some attention. Then my monetization episode has just gotten a lot of traction. I think the SEO on that, the search on that has been really, really interesting. Now if this is the first time you listen to the show and you're just playing in the podcasting world, please subscribe to the show. That's what the real benefit is. Subscription makes it possible for you to get a new episode every time it comes out. Right now the show's coming out every Tuesday and I would love to have this pushed automatically to you so that you don't have to find me in social or you don't have to bookmark my website and come back on a regular basis. Subscribe. You can go to podcastreport.com iTunes if you are an iOS user stitcher if you'd like Pocketcasts if you are the sophisticate Tunein if you are the Windows Media user. Word Spreaker if you want to go there. IHeartRadio EvenOvercast not quite at SoundCloud yet. So close and I've been hinting to that. This is Paul Culligan from the podcast report. The email is the podcastreportoutlook.com if you got an itunes review, any of that would be fun. If you if not, no worries. Talk to you next week. Bye.