The Power of the Podcast: Unlock Your Brand's Marketing Potential

Small Podcaster’s Guide to Big Growth Using Analytics

• Pedal Stomper Productions - Josh Troche

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Are you a small business owner or marketing manager wondering how to use podcast analytics even when your show has just a handful of downloads? You're not alone, and you're definitely not wasting your time. 

In this episode of The Power of the Podcast, we dive into how small podcasters can leverage analytics for real growth. We debunk the obsession with download counts and reveal how to dig into more meaningful metrics like completion rates, average listening time, and demographic data. Learn how to understand listener behavior, adjust your content strategy, and even test your calls to action like a pro.

Whether you're trying to grow your dog-walking business locally or scale your niche podcast nationally, this episode gives you the actionable insights you need, no data science degree required.

Learn how to turn basic podcast metrics into powerful growth strategies by reading between the data lines, using tools from YouTube, Apple, and Spotify effectively, testing calls to action for real insights, and setting goals that measure what truly matters.

Don’t just podcast. Podcast with purpose. 

Staying up to date on the latest podcasting news and trends doesn't have to be difficult. We can deliver them right to your inbox. 
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Analytics are very much the key for growing your podcast. But what happens when you've only got a couple of downloads, like let's say you go to look at both downloads, what are you going to figure out from that? Well, this is how we're going to help you use analytics to make your smaller podcast bigger. Stay tuned. So today we are going to look beyond the download count, because that is the first thing we all go to. Every one of us like logs in in the morning, or whether it's you've got the app on your phone or whatever, and you look at that download count, you're like, oh, how many do I have today? We're going to try and figure out who's listening, how, where and why. Even if you're a small podcaster now, there's all sorts of definitions of small podcasters out there. There you could be getting a couple of hundred downloads every week. Great. You could be getting a couple of downloads every week. Also great. One of the things that I always love to tell people when you're podcasting, when you're starting out small, let's say you get six downloads on your podcast. If I gave you the opportunity to speak to a room of six people, would you do it? Yes, you sure would. You would belt that message out for those six people all day long. You're doing the same thing. It's just in a slightly different medium. So what? We want to talk about is, first off, it's easy to get discouraged by low download numbers. I mean, I get it when you see 6 or 8 there, you're like, why am I doing this for 6 or 8 people? We're going to help you grow that. But mind you, those 6 or 8 people are there for you. We're going to take a look at like like how do we see into people's behavior? How are they getting there? What are they doing? What are they. What are they staying there for? When are they leaving and saying, nope, I'm out. So what are the things that we're going to look at with that? And what I really want you to to think of this as is like you've got a small focus group of people that are willing that they're going to listen and they are going to tell you what they want. Now, they may not put it in the comments. They may not put it in an email, but there are clues to to what they want to hear and see from you every download. It's a potential listener journey. How did they get there? What did they like? What did they dislike? So understanding that journey, it's critical for you to figure out, okay, what's working, what's not. And not only that, but do I have the right people along for the ride? Because that's one of the big questions we have to ask. Am I hitting the right target market? So let's talk about some. Like first off we're going to address some of the just basic analytics that you when you open up your podcasting program. These are some of the basic analytics that you're going to see. Of course downloads. Do I really need to explain that one. Probably not, but I'm going to anyways. Downloads are literally the number of people that go out to whatever podcasting platform and say, yep, go ahead and put that on my phone. So that way I can listen to that later. Once again, this is that base number. The other thing that people like about it, it's usually one of the bigger numbers that you can look at and be like, oh, look, there's 50 people that downloaded my podcast. That's cool. It shouldn't please don't stop there though. And if you do stop there, you're missing so many pieces of that. If you're business to business and you're here in the US and 60% of those downloads come from overseas, well, then maybe we're not hitting our target market or maybe it's it's something else is going on. There's clues to that. So that 60 downloads may look kind of cool. And I see it all the time. There's companies that will pay for downloads and they come from foreign countries. What does that matter if you just have a I mean, if it's downloading, no one's actually listening to it and it's not your target audience. We're doing this for marketing. So let's make sure it's going to hit that target audience completions, consumption rate, average listening time. Those are all kind of one in the same. They have different names depending on where you find those. Now, if you dig in to like your buzzsprout or your transistor, you're not going to find that information there where you're going to have to go to find that is, you're going to have to look at like your Apple podcast or your Spotify. It's not going to be in your podcast, RSS host. It will be in the podcast host, I guess I would say platforms where the people are actually getting that. The gateways, such as the Apple Podcast, the Spotifys, the, the larger ones of those typically have more tools in there. So that way you can go in, you can look if you have like, let's say you're using Buzzsprout or transistor or someone like that for your podcast and you want to see like the amount of time someone spent listening or the, like I said, the average listening time, the completions, the consumption rate, the things of that nature, you need to make sure that you also have, like Spotify, Apple Podcast for creators, Spotify for creators. Make sure you have those items so you can go in and get that data. Once again, you're going to need to go in and get that data, pull it out, and then kind of compile it. There's simple and easy ways to do that, especially if you're even remotely good with Excel or Google Sheets. Just pop that data out in a CSV file, put it in there. You can look at that stuff there. The other thing that is available in most of the platforms is like buzzsprout and transistor. Is your audience demographics, like geographic location that is a big thing that you want to look at. Because once again, if you're doing a local podcast, you want to make sure that you're getting local people in the podcasting class that we just finished up, I was working with someone who's he's got a dog walking service. Yes, he knows who he is. He's not walking dogs on the other side of the country. Eventually he'd like to get to that place, which is awesome, where he's franchised out and stuff like that. But for right now, in building his business, he's focused on a very local market. If he's getting downloads from Cincinnati, from Miami, from New York City, those don't matter. At least now. Yet, I mean, his core business is in the Cleveland area. That's where he needs to be. So he needs to make sure he's doing the things to get out to that audience. And then through the analytics, double check on those locations to make sure that he's hitting the right places. From this, if you are looking for some deeper insights and stuff, there's sites like Pop Track, charitable, blueberry, those offer some different and unique insights. Now, a lot of things we could get into like IAB 2.0, things of that nature that the technical side of that, there's a lot of standardization out there that really, for most end users, isn't as much of a concern as long as you pick one of these reputable sites, you're going to be getting as accurate as information as possible with those, you're going to look at those and say, okay, look, this is going to pull from all the platforms. It's going to get all the information that it can in one place. A lot of them like pod track chart of all blueberry, they they've got these free entry level tiers. They give you about the same amount of information that something like Buzzsprout or whatever does. But you can go I mean, if you are willing to pay for that, you can go a little bit deeper. That's one of those things where if you're small, I don't necessarily recommend it. It's probably not worth the time, or it's probably not worth the money for you to go do that. For the numbers that you're going to get to go, just visit Spotify, visit Spotify for creators. I want to make sure I clarify in that and Apple Podcasts for creators. If you visit those, download that information, put that in, or even just at least glance at it and look at it and try and get the information from it, you're going to be in really good shape. Now, we've talked about the the podcasting side of it, but I want to talk about the elephant in the room that so many podcasters are always talking about. Is the video side of things. YouTube. Yeah, there's people that are dismissing it. There's people that are saying, oh my God, it's the next thing. Who knows? What I do want to tell you is it is a platform and you should be there. And YouTube has, for most every creator, phenomenal analytics. We can tell you not necessarily by name, but we can tell you who is listening to the podcast, what their age is. Are they male or female, that those are the types of things that really help you drill down and make sure that you are hitting your target audience. If you're if you're looking for like, let's take someone that's interested in making sure maybe it's a roofing company. Typically the housewife is the one that's going to make that phone call if you're getting out. And it's mainly like 24 year old men that are hearing your podcast, well guess what? Probably not the right audience. You probably need to look at where you're directed and go from there. YouTube will offer those types of analytics. I want you to make sure that you do that even at a very low level. They will tell you who is watching your podcast and other information. It's something that you really, really should be paying attention to and diving in. And like I said, YouTube is really by far I mean, they are one of the best at being able to track that. So what are the actionable takeaways from this? I don't want you to look at just the totals. We all do it. I know we're all going to look at the download totals and celebrate that, or get upset about it or whatever. It don't just look at that number, look at who makes up that number, how how did they get there and why are they there. That information is out there. So how do we apply that? How can we like if we started looking at this information, that's great. But information without action is just it's kind of useless. It's just information that's hanging there and something that's going to weigh on your mind. So let's look at some specific data, on this are certain topics or interview styles leading to higher completion rates, maybe higher download rates. What are we looking for with this? We've got we've worked with people that do both types of episodes. Someone may do an interview one episode and they may do a solo episode the next time. Those are two very different things, and they may appeal and appeal to different audiences. Now, in some cases, you can find find that those will kind of be parallel. Those will run next to each other and do fairly well. Some cases you'll find that look, the interview episodes are great and the solo episodes completely bomb. That's fine too. What you need to do is you need to look at that and say, okay, which direction do we want to go? If now what I'm going to caution is if you say, look, I really just want to do solo episodes, even though I know, I know they aren't doing as well, then that's okay. But realize you're going to take a dip before you come back up as your audience changes and cycles through to people that like more of that style. So take a look at the the other piece that I want you to take a look at is your average listening time and drop off to determine, like your ideal length. Now there's two pieces to that that I kind of want to cover. If listeners are consistently dropping off at the 20 minute mark and your podcast is 45 minutes long, maybe realize that, okay, that could be their commute length, that could be whatever. And most of the analytics won't necessarily pick back up that they picked that episode back up right away. So give it some time to bake that stuff in. But if people are if you see a sharp drop in where people are cutting out, you need to go look at those episodes and see what happened at that point. Did I change interviews? Did I start asking the last question? Was this where I was starting to taper off? Is this where we both got tired? Those are the things that you need to look at and you need to take this. Spend the time with those analytics and say, I see a drop off here. Now, once again, a steady decline is perfectly natural. People are going to drop off as time passes. Some people have a five minute commute. And you know what? They're only going to get through ten minutes of your podcast before maybe the next episode comes out, and that's fine. But realize that you're going to have you should have this steady drop off if you see a cliff anywhere, that should be your key to really say, I need to. I need to look at what's there and what do I need to change about it. When people ask me how long should my podcast be? Those of you that have listened to the show long enough, you know what my answer is? If you've taken my class, you know what the answer is. Your podcast should be as long as it's interesting. If if you can keep stuff interesting for 45 minutes, great. Your analytics will show that though. Let's look at another practical application for this is like I said, when you've got different segments to your podcast, there's a lot of really well, well run shows that have different pieces to them. The, the business facts that Christy Myers and I do. We've got a couple of different pieces to that now. They kind of, I guess I would say there's not hard transitions into those. They kind of meld from one to the next, and that works okay. But there's other shows where there's a look. We're going to do an educational piece here. We're going to do an interview piece here, and then we're going to do a conclusion here. And they do hard transitions into those. Look to see where people are listening. The most. Look to see on YouTube where people are watching the most, make sure. And I don't want to say you should cut the pieces that aren't doing as well, but make sure you focus on your the bulk of your effort on the things that are doing well. If you focus on the things that aren't doing as well, I mean, you should give them time, care and love and all that other stuff. So they they grow and hopefully come up. But the thing that's the fan favorite, make sure that you are putting the time and effort into that to make sure that that comes out as top tier every single time. What I really want to get to with this, your actionable takeaway on this is the fact that your audience, in a way, is telling you through these analytics what they want. They aren't necessarily shouting it from the rooftops, but when you see a drop off, they're telling you, I didn't like this. If you see it stays on consistently, they're telling you, hey, two thumbs up. The analytics will be the thing that helps you hear them loud and clear. The the next step that I want to get into with this though, is let's go beyond your Buzzsprout Libsyn transistor dashboard. Let's let's go into the back end of things here where it's it's not obvious what's going on. What are ways that you can find information that's not in the analytics? What happens if you have a podcast that's only got 10 or 12 downloads? Then what do you do? Well, there's very specific things that you can like put in your podcast to figure out what's working. So it one of the ones that I like is putting calls to action in. So let's say five minutes in, you put leave a review, ten minutes in you put share this episode with a friend, 12 minutes in, you put hey, check out our website. Here's a quick poll for you. The next episode you put, first thing you say, hey, we really want to hear from you. DM us on socials. Track how many of these, how many people you get from things. If you get one of each of those, well, great. You know, people are hanging on for the full episode. If you only get one thing from here or there, you realize that, okay, this is I need to focus on these a little bit better. Those specific calls to action and asking people to do things can be another way to get a marker. It's it's once again, it's that way for them to tell you what's going on. And I'm very indirect way. Hey, if you're listening to this do X, if you're listening now do Y, you can do that for different episodes. That will give you a ton of information to find out what people like, what they what they'd like to see more of, what they'd like to hear, more of. It's to me the the those calls to action that so many people think of them as just the, hey, we're going to get you to do something so we can act on that something. And that's true. But there's that additional piece that people aren't looking at is that can be data collection for you. Hey, we have four people to sign up for our email newsletter that came from episode number nine. Awesome. What was in episode number nine? That was an it obviously became an episode that people were really engaged with. Those are the things that I really want you to think about it. This is your direct line. So what what what is the what is our moment? What is the the what is the data going to tell you to do? And how are you going to read it? What I want you to look at overall is we've got calls to action and we've got hard numbers. Those are two different things. You're going to look at those with a bit of balance. When you're smaller, when you're real small, you're going to need to rely on some of those calls to action. Hey, tell me what you think about this. You're going to need that. What's difficult about that is remember that the data from that is going to be a lower amount of data because it requires action on the part of listener, the other data that you're going to get, the how many likes, the number of downloads that requires no action at all on the part of the listener other than pressing play, which we hope as a bare minimum, everyone is doing. Every one of our clients is doing so to say, the other piece to that is you want to make sure that from that information, how and where you're getting that information, you need to be having a strategic planning session around that. Once again, data is just data. Unless you turn it into actionable steps. So set goals. Do you want to improve average listening time? Are you looking to increase engagement? Are you just looking to get more downloads? That's an easy one. The answer to that last one is almost always yes, but figure out what it's going to take to do that and look at the data and what the data is telling you, in that you may do something where you think, hey, this is a great idea, and you get half the downloads on it than you thought you should have. Well, then there's something wrong in there. I want you to regularly review your analytics and track your progress. This is like anything else. It's tough to get to a goal if you haven't set the goal. It's also very tough to get to the goal if you haven't tracked your progress. So just like you would do with your business budgeting everything like that, set a goal and look at what it's going to take to get there. The analytics are going to tell you, are you doing the right things? Are you doing the wrong things? That to me is the big key. Don't just look at the numbers, connect them with a listener and their behavior, and use that as feedback for how you can move your podcast and your business forward. With that being said, we'd love to hear what topics you would like for me to cover about podcasting coming up. Do me a favor, leave that in the comments. Also, leave us a review. Feel free to email me. Yes, this is that call to action. Those are the three that I'm going to have you guys work on this week. Nonetheless, do me another quick favor. Take care of yourself. If you can take care of someone else too. I will see you very, very soon. Oh oh, hey, everybody go!

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Josh Troche

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