Podcast stats are hard to measure.
iTunes doesn’t give many metrics, podcast hosts and portals are not much better. A benchmark for podcasts’ listenership is subscription and downloads. Its difficult to get accurate information because the medium itself is decentralized. Consumption happens across different devices.
Depending on just what your goal is for your podcast, you may not care about the same stats that other people find useful.
[RELATED: Kim Stuart discusses Key Podcast Stats and What They Mean]
There are ways to track and collect some podcast metrics. We host our own podcast and use plugins and analytics to watch our podcast episodes grow our traffic using our Podcast Marketer pass.
Other ways to obtain podcasts stats without relying on iTunes is to:
Host your own by building the feed through WordPress podcast plugin – like we do with Mobile Wallet Marketing Made Easy.
Podcast stats platforms or portals like Podbean or Podtrac will host your podcast and provide you with their metrics.
Distribution networks are the next frontier for Podcasters. Spreaker is now offering dynamic ads to generate revenue for themselves and in return give them your podcast stats.
Podcasts simply uploaded to iTunes is not enough to get noticed. Promotion takes time and energy, how much of it do you have to make your podcast a success?
[PODCAST PROMOTION: Do More with Your Podcast Stats]
Your stats are almost always going to be low, as far as the number of listens go. There are many outlets to send your podcast to that it takes time to add up the cumulative total of podcasts. You are hard pressed to get accurate iTunes stats, you can’t get GTM to work properly (or at least we cannot seem to) in order to use Google Analytics to count, so it makes it hard.
The real problem we find with stats is that it’s super hard to figure out how long people are listening. As we mentioned, we’ve been working with two programmers to try and get Google Tag Manager set up so that we’d have better details on referrals for the listener origination, and we’d love to see the total amount of time listened for each play.