Podcast Analytics & Listener Insights: Unlocking Audience Intelligence

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found, and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to finish Feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Feed you'd brand. I'm Tracy Hazzard, and we're going to talk podcast analytics and listener insights today. Now, that sounds a little like in the weeds, Tom. Like, it's. I think we're angled today that what we're gonna talk about is really more about the audience intelligence, the things you can learn from that, about your audience. What patterns are you seeing? But there's a lot of geeky stuff here, and every portal, every place you host is different. So that complicates discussions.

It really does. And in order to have good insights into your audience, you really do, as a podcaster, need to understand what the analytics mean and what they don't mean. And so part of this episode, we've got to. Unfortunately, if you're a longtime podcaster, you may know this very well. But I also know a lot of longtime podcasters that still make some assumptions that aren't entirely in alignment with what the analytics really mean. And so I think it's important to cover just a few things quickly, have a few terms and a few realities of podcast analytics so that you can analyze yours properly and get some valuable audience insights.

Okay, so I have to make a confession.

Okay.

I never look at our analytics. I never look at our analytics more than once a year.

And that may not be a bad thing, Tracy. I do tend to look at them because when I log into our client portal, it's my default show when I log in. And so I do. See, I'm pretty much aware of.

I mean, those are my shows, too.

Yeah. But I think you have the binge factor as the default on yours. And when you log into the portal.

I mean, I just go straight into submitting episodes. Right. Like, is that. That's what I care about. I'm like, I'm efficient. Like, I don't even go through the tab that says analytics, but I don't look at them because. Well, I mean, we've done a whole episode on this before about. It's like getting on the scale every day. If you've gotten the scale every day, you're obsessing over your weight. Right. So we don't want to obsess over our analytics because I don't want to look at them that often and be honest with you, is that when I set a goal for our show, I set it with a year in mind. So I just don't look at it that often. That being sometimes when I see something happening on social media, like I see really great response over an episode, I might check an episode's analytics.

And that is very important and to understand everybody, hopefully listening to this or watching this episode knows hopefully they can do that. Right? They can look at a single episode. I am often very surprised how many people who've been podcasting for so long know so little about their analytics. Now, it may be analytics is not the primary reason you're podcasting. You're podcasting to bring your message to the world and to support your community, your customers. Honestly, for us, this is much more about supporting our community than it is the actual number. And so the analytics are not all that important to me either. For feed your brand, for the binge factor. I already know, and we know, Tracy. We feel it from people all the time, whether it's on LinkedIn or. I see, you know, because we post about every episode on LinkedIn, I get a lot of notifications that, you know, people liked my post for last week's episode. All this stuff. There's ample feedback that lets me know, for my business purposes, for my goals as a podcast, or in our goals as a company, the podcast is working for us, regardless of how many downloads there are.

Right. So I wanna stop you right there, though, because this is one thing that a lot of you confuse yourself with. Okay, When I say podcast, when Tom and I say podcast analytics, we're talking about the entire show, not an episode. And when we say episode analytics, we're talking about your episode. And that's. So show and podcast are interchangeable in our vocabulary and the way that we do it, because your show is an entire podcast, a single podcast listing, not the episode being a podcast. And that's many, many people get very confused about their own analytics.

This is an issue, Tracy. It's a very good point, because I know some people that will say, hey, did you listen to my latest show? And what they mean is their latest episode. Now, they're not wrong in using that term. It's just that we all need to understand we may be using these terms interchangeably, and it may mean something different to me than it does to you. So it's very important as we're talking about this, we're gonna define what we mean today by a podcast is your entire body of work. For us, it's feed. You'd brand here all your episodes, and we also would call that the show. All the episodes collectively are part of the overall show. And then an individual episode is just the weekly recording that we publish. That's how we talk about it.

Right. But I do want you to hear this because sometimes you'll see, like, notifications in the press and someone will say, oh my gosh, my show achieved this. But it's not necessarily 100% true. So many shows are actually a network of shows, so they treat their single listing, your show listing, and they might have a different show that actually runs every single day from a different podcast host. So we've seen that as well. So when we say show analytics, we're talking about. It could be an entire network, could be entire show, but it's one single listing. The. Whatever that RSS feed listing is. That's the analytics we're talking about.

When we say show analytics, that's another good point, Tracy. Yes. So one listing of an individual show on Apple or on Spotify, and there are networks that have a lot of shows, and yeah, they will talk about the analytics for globally, for all of them, and that's important, too. But again, it's just important to put some definitions and some guidelines on these things so that we're all talking about the same thing and we understand each other. Right.

Right.

Now, another thing is, is that your show, wherever you host it, may not actually have any analytics. So hopefully you do. If you don't, I suggest you get some. I mean, just take. Even if you're going to be like me and you're not going to look at them regularly, you need to track that information for your own purposes, for future sponsors, for all of those things that you might want to do with your show at some point. Like maybe you want to sell your show off to somebody, or you sell your company and the show with it. Not having any data, not having any stats and analytics is harmful to the future value of that show or understanding the future value of that show.

That's very true. Actually, just had a conversation within this last week with one of the longtime podcasters we've been supporting who has sponsors for this show and have for all the years we've been working with them. And because of the changes in Apple with iOS 17 late last year, their downloads went down significantly and that has negatively impacted the earning of their show. From sponsors because it's based on, they get paid based on how many downloads a month they're getting from those sponsors. And so they're actively engaged in a campaign to increase listenership and in particular downloads, because that's directly how they make money. So some people do care very much about these analytics and need to. And need to be on top of it. And so that was sort of some of the idea behind insights into the analytics and unlocking patterns and behaviors from your audience.

So that's what I want to be really clear about here. If we're going to really talk about the audience intelligence, I have to say, at the end of the day, I'm not Spotify. I care about actual listen through and listeners to my show. That's what I want. I don't care about somebody who pops in and listens to a minute, 30 seconds pops out. I don't want that because all they're getting in most cases for most of those people is the ad. They're never going into the show. And that's not helpful to me because I have my own stuff I want to sell from my show. I have my own influence that I want to create in the world. I want social media followers. I want all of those authority building things that podcasting gives to me. And that only comes if somebody actually listens.

Well, let's start there, Tracy, and let's start with one of the apps that everyone wants to be on today as a podcaster. And this app is excellent at marketing themselves, getting a lot of attention out in the media, in the world, and they would have you believe they are the destination for podcasts and giving Apple a run for their money. And that's Spotify. Okay, let's talk about them first. Because they're very different from all the other apps. We can really lump all the other listening apps into pretty much one category of apps and how they work and how their analytics are in alignment with each other. And then Spotify, they're kind of on an island on their own. They just work differently. And we at Poditize have a license with Spotify. That's why I know this stuff and that I'm not sharing anything here that isn't public. It's all public information. But Spotify serves episodes differently. And if your podcast hosting platform does not have a license with Spotify, then you're not getting analytics from your Spotify plays. Okay?

That means you have to log into Spotify to go look at them.

And you can't even always do that if you're not posted on Spotify, you can't. And most people are not.

And a paid hosting with Spotify, you have to be paying too.

I don't know the distinction of that, Tracy, but definitely I do know hosting on Spotify, most of those accounts are free and they have some limitations. Hosting your podcast on Spotify has some limitations for your show. That is not the subject of today's episode. But those of you that are hosted on Spotify or the former anchor, you're actually at a disadvantage to have your show found by more of your ideal listeners. So that's a subject for another time. Or reach out to us. Apologize if you want to understand more about that. But again, focus more on the analytics. Spotify, they as a company, care about one thing. They care about monetizing the shows for people listening on free accounts. It's how they make money as a company. And they run ads right at the very beginning, before anybody hears your episodes. So they have two different kinds of stats, what they call starts and streams. Starts is anybody who's clicked on and played an episode for just a couple of seconds. We don't even report those stats because they're not useful. I don't believe it's valuable information for you, the podcaster.

I don't really know any hosting company that reports a start.

I don't either. And then streams, though, which are what we report, and they're lumped in with the downloads from other apps. They aren't exactly the same, but they are close enough. But in our system, you can look at the Spotify numbers independent of everything else or as a part of your total numbers. So a stream is anybody who played and listened to a minimum of one minute of that episode, which there's a reason why Spotify runs ads at the very beginning, because they know people are probably going to listen to at least a minute before they crash out. But there's no more intelligence beyond that. We don't know if they listen to a minute or 10 minutes or the entire episode. And there is no feedback loop from Spotify on that, unfortunately. So that is going to be a very disheartening piece of news for most of you podcasters out there. But there is another data point we get from Spotify that is very useful. So while I will admit the Spotify streams, which we're going to talk about similarly to downloads of other apps in terms of their data and usefulness, aside from that, they give you how many people are following your podcast, which is similar to on other apps who subscribe now Some of the other apps also now call it following. And that may be where we're going as an industry, that they're all called followers here at some point. And that'd be fine with me. Although a follower on Apple is not the same as a follower on Spotify. Cause people can follow, click to follow it, they've listened to it, they liked it. Yeah, I want to follow, I want to be notified when new episodes come up. The difference on Spotify is they're not going to get your episodes automatically downloaded to their device like will happen in other listening apps. They get notified when there's a new one available, but it's up to the user to actually click to stream it. Okay, now, but the follower data is useful and here's why. And at least how we do it at Potitize. Every show that is hosted on Poditize, we report your followers on Spotify and we get that data every single day from Spotify and it's added to each show's analytics and it's graphed over time. So what's useful for us as podcasters to analyze and this is about listener again, insights and audience intelligence. It is valuable month over month to look at that graph of Spotify followers, especially to know are more and more people finding my show. Are my followers increasing every month or are they staying flat or are they going down? And I can tell you all three of those things happen. I've seen it on multiple shows. But the majority of shows that are continuing to publish episodes and show up weekly for their listeners, that graph does continue to go up and to the right, whether you have 50 followers now or over 7,000 followers. And we have shows that are everywhere in between and even some above 7,000 on potatoes. But you just want to see month over month. I'm getting more every week. Am I getting 50amonth, a hundred a month? Whatever it is, doesn't matter. We want to see growth. So that's the value one. Actually, I think one of the most valuable analytics we get from Spotify.

See, I have only ever seen shows that flatline.

Oh, no, I see it all the time, Tracy. On our platform, I'm always looking at.

Shows, so I mostly see flatline. This is the part that we're still trying to figure out audience intelligence wise. Right. Why do some shows increase and why do some shows flatline? What are they doing that is making a difference there on Spotify? But it doesn't correlate because listener growth is growing everywhere else. It's just not growing on Spotify. And I don't know what that is. And I think that real key is, is that for most of the shows that I looked at and have talked about in the past or really helped them analyze their. My job is usually to come in and analyze the episodes, the topics of what you're doing. Not usually to analyze your overall show. Tom will be there to analyze your show and help you figure that part out. Right. Analyze what's going on with the growth pattern. But my job is to usually come in and so when I'm coming in and looking at a topic or guest level of things, I very typically find that the best clients, the ones who are asking me to review this part of it, happen to have a much higher desktop listening base than mobile. That's the difference right there. Like our show right now, this show is 89% desktop listen to and only 7% mobile.

You mean desktop or laptop type of listening on the Internet versus on a device.

Yep. And that shows you who our audience base is. Right. Like it has this kind of intelligence, like those that are listening on watches. We have a couple clients who have phenomenal numbers on watches.

Yeah, Smartwatch. I'm actually looking at a show right now that I have been monitoring recently and 72 and a half percent of its listens are on Apple podcasts. We often see usually between 50% and even up to 90% apple on a lot of shows. Okay. Spotify isn't even. Gosh, their Spotify listens are only a couple percent and sometimes we see from 2, 3, 4% up to 13% is probably the most I've seen on Spotify. But yeah, the distribution of device, 23% mobile phone, 53% mobile watch. Now that's not just Apple, that's also Samsung watches. There is a difference. Although I guarantee you 75% of those are Apple Watch devices and then 22% desktop and laptop. So it can vary per show. Where are people listening? That's an important audience insight, don't you think, Tracy?

Absolutely. And so it really depends, and this is why I say sometimes this is an episode, topic, guest basis where you'll start to see a trend happening for a particular episode or particular guest, where it spikes and it has a lot more of what I'm going to call desktop listens or listens that are not mobile. And that has to do possibly with a better blog going on or better sharing of it in the Google search system. Right. We find that if you have good AI ranking. So if you're being served up by artificial intelligence bots, Somewhere as a source for something, you tend to have better desktop ranking than you do mobile ranking. It's just kind of going on in that model of it, where. Where are you showing up? So if that's the case, then I need to dive deeper into a search engine optimized model, right? Because I'm doing well there already. So that means my topics need to grow in an area that is useful to Google search. It needs to grow in that area. It also might mean that I need a mobile campaign. I need to do better on apps. So your decision making about where your audience already exists, do you want to dive deeper into it or do you want to diversify that your choices need to come in here and do a better job of thinking about how that could function. That's the audience intelligence rate that we need to get at. And that's what I'm looking at is it's like I look at it from two perspectives, Tom. I look at it and say, do I need to increase my listenership in the mobile device? Is that even important to me? Is that important for my business? Is that important for my client base? Is that important for me? Selling books or selling whatever it is, my programs, my courses, whatever it is that your business is in, are you better served if that happens on a desktop laptop OS model or is that going to be better if you do that on a mobile device? It's totally up to you what your model is to make a decision about where do I dive deeper and how do I take this intelligence that I've learned and decide I need to have a campaign to grow my mobile listens or I'm just going to dive deeper into where I am.

And there are specific ways you can actually grow your listenership on mobile devices if that is part of your goal. We actually have ways to do that. And honestly, since the very foundation of potitas of our business, Tracy, really, we have taken a very SEO heavy approach to the power of podcasting. And it's no wonder that some of our shows, quite a lot of them, honestly, that we produce, are being viewed and listened to through a laptop or desktop device more than a mobile device, because that's how people are finding it more through Google searches. Of course, Google searches happen on mobile phones too, but I think people tend to do a lot more of that on their laptop device than mobile device. Actually, we should look up those numbers too. I don't know those off the top of my head, but regardless. So the followers again, for Spotify, just looking at a show here that has 1274 followers. A month ago it had 1234 followers. So 40 new followers over the course of the month, continued growth. Right. So again, growth is to me, the most important thing to assess out of all this stuff and to make sure your show is continuing to grow and not flatlining or declining. And that's where some of these insights can be very helpful. So let's go on to just remember we were talking about Spotify first and this other category of pretty much all the other listening apps where downloads are what you're getting your reports on and you don't have any follower data. Apple doesn't share with anyone how many subscribers you have for your show. There are certain insights you can get through beta as to play through and that's useful information to have. So as podcasters, if you don't have access to your Apple Podcast Connect analytics, you need to get access to that to see these things. Because you want to know, you know, because Spotify doesn't tell us if they've listened to just one minute or the whole show or whatever in between. Apple actually gives you that kind of feedback loop. And you can't view it in your hosting platform, but you can view it in on the back end of Apple for your show. You should be aware of that because that's useful too. Tells you, do people like your content? Are they listening to most of it or not? Very important, very important data that provides you a lot of good information. But downloads, truly Again, growth continuing to grow. I don't care if you're getting 50 downloads an episode or 5,000 downloads an episode or anything in between. Every show starts somewhere and grows over time. We want to see growth. So the most useful thing for the analytics, other than if you're monetizing through sponsors and getting paid by how many downloads you're getting a month where their ads are playing. And some of you may very well be doing that. But otherwise just general growth is really an important measure of success. And if you're not growing, then something needs to change.

A couple of the things that I want you to take a look at in terms of listener behavior is most, I'm going to say portals. Most places where you're viewing your statistics, your analytics for your show, your hosting platform form. Right. Most of the places that you look at those things on allow you to search by date. So you can do a date range and most people will do like the last week or the last month. That's kind of the default on a lot of those things. I don't recommend looking at it like that, because you're going to especially in like the summer months, right, Tom? You get a false sense of where things are from a trend perspective. And so what I like to do is at least pull a quarter, so 90 days, three months worth or six months worth minimum. And that's why I tell you, I look at mine a year. I actually like to look at it year over year as well. But look at six months or a quarter of it at a time because it can help you even out the spike months. So if you were look at the summer and you were to go July, August and September, you're starting to see the growth go back up in September. That's what happens is we tend to have a little dip in listenership. It's sometimes a lot depending on your show category in July and August and then it comes picks back up in September. And so you're going to start to see your trend going back up. But if you were only looking at a month at a time in August, you're going to be freaking out because it dropped.

Well, context is very important when you're looking at these analytics. Yes, that. And keep in mind, are you publishing consistently? Because if you took a break in the summer, of course your downloads are going to drop off. There are many, many things that affect this. So you really want to make sure you're looking at all your analytics in a certain perspective with context is very important. And we talked about growth and importance trips. You were talking about SEO and how feed your brand is listened to more so over computer devices than it is mobile devices, which is a fact about it. And that's because we've done an incredibly good job with SEO. But I also want everyone to understand there is. There are not all podcast listings, meaning identities are the same and not all hosting platforms are the same. And I mentioned early on, those of you that are hosting on Spotify for podcasters or the former anchor, you are at a significant disadvantage for exactly that. Okay, you're at a disadvantage because there are certain limitations that platform has about your show listing where you're just not going to be found as easily. And I'm not going to go into the detail of that. I will have a link in the blog post of this episode for our power podcast appraisal. If any of you want to learn more about your show in that regard, especially if you're on that platform.

It's free, by the way.

It is free. Yeah, I'm not selling anything. This is free. It's@podotized.com appraisal. But there'll be a link in the blog post for this episode. But you may not know some very important things about your podcast listing. And making some changes is going to have a dramatic impact or can have a dramatic impact on how many people find your show, how many people follow your show, how many people listen to your show. And I just find a lot of shows are, you know, recording with, well, so to speak, two ears behind their back. Can you do that? Like two hands behind your back? I don't know.

I don't know. Good visual, though. I like. I don't know.

I don't know if that was a good visual. But, you know, I was trying to make an analogy there. But the reality is you can't afford as podcasters to be knowingly or unknowingly holding your own show back from being heard. Why would you ever want to do that? That doesn't make any sense. And if your analytics are sort of cruising in neutral and not really growing. And again, it's not about the number, it's about the rate of growth.

Right.

And if you're not growing, then you need to understand these things even more and then be able to make some.

Get.

Analyze them, get some insights and make some smart decisions going forward.

So let's talk about listener behavior, because you're going to see some patterns of things and you may have to search and sort. That was my reason for bringing up the like. Look at a broader view of it over time. So, for example, we had three months where we were not doing any social media because we were in process of re. Re establishing an entire team and trade and training them. It's coming back up again and I'm already seeing double the number of listeners month over month because we're posting on social. This is a really good indicator for you. If you stop doing something, take that period where you stop doing it. Like in the summer, I stopped publishing. Right. If that happens to you, if you were on a season when you were during the break, look at your download numbers, look at what's going on with your place, looking at it during that off period versus the on period. Not social promotion. With social promotion, look at it from those different periods of things that you were doing. And then when you start to see an anomaly over that period of time, I like to dive into the episode details. That's the next thing that I look at. And is it a topic that resonated with people or a guest that resonated with people? Am I seeing a pattern of that Again, so that that's when I might expand out and say, okay, I had a guest who talked about YouTube. We have Fran Acero on all the time and she's amazing and she talks about YouTube. And when I go back and I ping all of those episodes and I say, okay, we've had her on three times in the last year. Let's look at the total year and is there always a spike with her or was this one particular subject a spike? And the stats show there's always a spike. So let's have her on again. That's a good option for us. This is saying we're doing the right thing by having her on again and again and again. So making decisions about it, about what to provide in the future is being listener sensitive.

Now, there's another thing that you can see now, Tracy, let's just say. Cause we've seen this happen with other episodes of other shows where there's just one particular episode that does so much better than the others and it's an anomaly, right? Let's say two of the three of those episodes of Fran and Sorrow only had a certain listenership and the third had a much higher one. We usually find that has to do with the title of the episode. That can have a lot to do with how many people take notice and click it. And Tracy, you know this from your Inc. Magazine column writing experience. What's one word that often, if it was in the title of any of your articles, and we've seen this in podcast episodes too, that would always be a winner and get more people to click.

Well, I'm not sure what you're gonna say here because I'm probably.

I know which one. You said it to me many times over the years, so I thought you would remember.

If you have a don't in the title, it will work. So that's one of the things. But I don't think that's what you're asking me for here. But if you have like the things you do and the things you don't mistakes, any of those, those will rank higher than the positive ones. I'm just going to tell you that again and again. When you go into the don'ts for something, you will have a higher rank than the dos, but that's not what you're asking.

Moy, is that a bit of the sort of train wreck mentality everybody slows down to watch or that there's a reason traffic always slows down when there's an accident on the other side of the road? Because everybody's looking at it, right? You sort of can't get take your eyes away from it. No, I was talking about topics that have to do with the brain and when you mentioned the word brain or other things with it.

But that's across all shows.

Yeah, no, that's across everything. But we do see that, that, that for some reason that's highly searched on gets a lot of attention. So if your episode, I mean this is just a friendly little tip and you should try it out, but if you are recording an episode that it would be in alignment with what you've talked about to have the word brain or anything related to the brain in the title, I would definitely include that word in there. You probably see a spike in. In click through and listenership of that episode. And that's just from many years of experience with what Tracy was doing writing columns. But it also, it does equate through to podcast episodes, especially if you're creating blog posts for each episode.

Right. And it's the same thing. It's a psychological reason. Right? The same reason that the don'ts work, the mistakes work. Right. As to attracting people. So but too often we title our episodes with a person's name because so many of you are doing guest interviews and that actually has the worst record of working as an attractor. So if you run episodes that are a mix of topics and guests, you'll see all the guest episodes start to be lower than the topic episodes. So it only runs when you mix them together. You'll be able to see that. But there's no reason you can't fix that. If you've got a guest on, just focus on the topic parked first and the guest name second and you're fine in the like second half of it. It still taps into the same search engine optimized model. Like you get around that. Because I do that with the binge factor all the time. The binge factor is a hundred percent guess. And I probably have double the traffic that we have here on feed your brand because feed your brand is only focused on people who are actively podcasting. Right. I guess. If you're not podcasting, why would you tune in and listen to our geeky little topics about analytics? Right? And more people have podfeeted and quit, but they're very curious what podcasters are doing. So the stories from podcasters, the interviews do fairly well. Plus I have a guest who's sharing out my show, which is why I have double the traffic. So it's working for me. But if I focused on the Guest name. I wouldn't be seeing the traffic level that I do from the desktop versions that I was talking about from the search engine optimization that is driving traffic to my episodes. So I'm getting that 60% of boost from search engine on a desktop, a laptop, an OS of some kind that most people are never getting. So their listens don't even have that number in it.

This is so true, Tracy. I just want to share a very, very quick little story. You know, I do these power podcast appraisals every day. I meet with multiple podcasters every single day who I've never met before. And I'm looking at their show and I often will see shows that making what is, I think a typical rookie error. And their entire title of their episode is around the guest name interview with Tom Hazard. Let me tell you something, that title is not going to set the world on fire. Even with my name, because I think my name is great. No, it's not going to do anything. What is the episode talking about? I don't. And people looking at. They don't know who Tom Hazard is from anybody, right? What'd you talk about now? Crafting that title. Very important. What's the topic you're talking about? And then comma, colon, whatever. With guest Tom Hazard or with Tom Hazard, whatever. You can have the guest name in there. You want to feature them, you want to highlight them, you want to make them feel special, but put them at the end. It's like the footnote. It's the context on the end. It's not what was discussed. Start with lead with what was discussed in those titles. That can also help you a lot in what you're doing here.

And so if you're not doing some of these things, what we want to encourage you to do is to tap into this listener behavior we're telling you about. Try some episodes like that and do a compare and contrast. Start to see what happens. Do you get an increase in listenership? Do you see a boost of what's happening with that? Does things change for you if you promote on social really heavy for a month or don't promote on social for a month and see what dips? Right. Or don't publish because you decided to take a break? Compare that to when you are publishing more frequently. See what's happening in your analytics and see what your listeners are acting on and doing. Are they responding with their behavior? You're publishing more, they're listening more. That's. That's great knowledge because it says if you publish more episodes they will come, right? They will listen. That says that's the number one traffic driver that you can do to build more downloads, publish more episodes. But why do it if they're not listening? Check it out first. Make sure it's going to be valuable and worth your time, and you will.

Find that your episodes will come up in search for guest name. If somebody searches on your guest name name. Yeah, having that in the title helpful. And it's also helpful on the web if you have a blog post for the episode. Often our customers will rank higher in Google search for their guest names than the guests do for their own websites, because so many guests actually do kind of a lousy job of their own website SEO. And so that's true.

So this is where I want to caveat that, Tom. I want to plus that. Okay? I want to plus that. If your listener base, if you're not in a mix where my traffic, 89% of my traffic is not coming from the player apps, okay. If 70% of your listens are coming from Apple, 10% coming from Spotify, and then the rest of it coming from various directories and the os that is Google Chrome, or directories, as it's called sometimes in the say, if that's what you're seeing on yours, then the number one guest tip I can give you here is to make sure that your guests are podcast hosts, because you want someone who's guaranteed to already be being searched for and asked for in the app to begin with. But if you're in like I am out in the general Google space, the search engine optimized space, I can have anyone I want on as long as their Google search is high. Right. Somebody's typing their name into Google, then it's good for me.

Definitely. Drafting off your guests is something that has been huge in podcasting for a lot of years. And there are many aspects of that and there are actually some different episodes we've recorded about that and other things to talk about there. It's a reliable strategy as long as that strategy is in alignment with your goals, your podcasting goals, or your business goals. Right, Right.

And I'm saying it's not only in alignment with your business goals. Cause obviously you have growth areas, right? Like, look, if I wanted to rank in Instagram, I've got to find an Instagram influencer. So if I want to rank on the podcast app, I better have guests that are already being searched for in that podcast app. It might be a celebrity, but more often than not, it will be the podcast hosts. Themselves that are being searched for. Because typically someone will go, I want to see so and so show before they'll remember the name of the show. So they usually type that person's name in. So it happens to me all the time. I'm like very highly searched, right? Because I've been on a lot of shows and I have my own shows, so it makes it easy for somebody to search for me. That's gonna be of your benefit to have someone like that as a guest on your show. In the search engine optimized world, there are people who outrank others who have high Google ranking. And when you do an episode about them, or in this case a blog about them with your episode in it, and especially a multimedia one with video and audio and blog, when you do that and somebody searches for them, your blogs will come up first, your videos will come up first, and your podcasts will come up first before their own content because it's third party validation of that person. So it's always really good for you to have that mix going on for yourself if you want to drive traffic. So what we're saying here is that we want you to look at your analytics and say, what am I doing today? And should I do more of it because my listeners are responding to that? And then make sure you're checking it and seeing that they are still responding. For instance, if I publish too many a week and I've done it because I had a backlog and I've done that, they won't listen. I won't increase my listener base because it's too much in a week. They have time for one. Your listeners might saturate if you did. Right. And so maybe you need to do shorter episodes. There might be some things. Shorter, more frequent episodes. Like there are things you can do to try to see if increasing that, because increasing that increases your downloads. And that may be your goal for yourself. Your goal drives them to stop listening. You haven't done any better. So you've got to test out that listener behavior. So do more of what you think you're doing well and see how that plays and then try to figure out another strategy to increase where you're weak. So my next goal is I'm weak in the mobile listen side, or I'm definitely weak in. I don't know, nobody. I mean, I have like 0.7% listens on the watch. Like, so, like, nobody listens to me on a watch. Could I do something about it? Well, it might not be important to me because if they're listening over a watch, and the watch is their primary. They're probably not going to make a very good client for us. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe that's the best client for us and we don't even know it yet.

Well, the important thing here, Tracy, for people to realize is no two shows are alike here. This is gonna be different. What the analytics tell each of us is gonna be something different, because what's important to us is different. What's meaningful to our listeners or to ourselves and our businesses is different. There's a lot of different ways to look at this. And so also podcasters, we're talking about a lot of different kind of analytics here. And this is sort of the point. Yes, Spotify streams, podcast downloads, talking about followers. Then we talked about SEO on websites, Google searches. I'm sure a lot of you listening to this, the DIYer podcasters out there, especially if you're relatively new, are like, what? I need to consider a website. I need to have a website for my show. You guys are talking about creating a blog post for an episode, and this is like a foreign concept. But guess what? There are analytics for that, too, and they're meaningful. And there is just a lot to consider here about the analytics and the insights to that. Not just how people are listening to you, but how they're finding you to even be able to listen to you. It really starts from a little further back, Right? But then once they're listening, you analyze more, then you can sort of steer the ship of your podcast show coming back to that definition from earlier in the direction you want it to go. But if you don't pay attention to these analytics and all these different aspects of it, really spend some time and don't obsess over it. Like Tracy said, that's not the point. You don't need to obsess over it. You don't need to look at it every day, but you need to look at it periodically. And when you do, you need to make sure you understand what you're looking at and what it really means.

And then do a design of experiment. You make a hypothesis about what you think is happening with your listening behavior and try it out, see if you're right. And if you're right, then that's something worth spending more time, more energy in and diving deeper in. But too often, we just throw spaghetti at the wall. That's like the very Italian term in my family. Throw spaghetti at the wall and hope it sticks. And we are never checking to see if it actually stuck. And we should do more of that or it's ready.

Now.

You know, Tracy and I practice what we preach and we're trying some new things actually with feed, you'd brand and I'm not going to really talk about that today, but this is a little tease. Pay attention down the road here a couple of months and we probably will be talking about some things we've changed and what those results were because we're doing some design of experiment ourselves in order to see if we can increase conversion of something in a certain way. So I'll just leave it a little generic like that. But we're doing this too, so we're not just saying you should do it. We're actually using our own show as a test.

So anyway, we told you this. We were going to dive a little deep into the geekiness of the analytics, but at the same time, we want you to really look at this as an opportunity. An opportunity to figure out how you can be of better value to your listener. Tap into something that they're already interested is way easier than trying to make them do something they don't want to do, right? And then from there, how does that tie in and strategically dovetail in with growing your business, making those things happen? This is a good time of year when we're doing this one live, but if you're hearing this and you haven't done it in at least nine months, go ahead and dive into it. This is time to take a look at those numbers, take a real good look at what you've been doing and figure out where you want to go next. That's the best way to keep engaged in your podcast. Make it continually valuable to your audience and to your business and yourself.

Heard something valuable today, but didn't get a chance to write it down. No worries, we've got your covered. We partnered up with podcasters united.org where podcast hosts like you can get free resources, free masterclasses, the largest podcast tip library assembled, and free promotion opportunities. While you're there, don't forget to follow us on YouTube and on social unitedwepod so you can get feed you'd brand live. Until next time, keep podcasting Ra.