👋🏾 Hey everyone this is Ashley with RSS.com Podcasting and I’m here with another exciting update! In September 2020 RSS started beta testing a brand-new Podcast Analytics dashboard. Well, a lot has changed since then, and I want to share some of these updates with you.
When you log into your hosting account and head to your analytics tab, you’ll still see a lot of the original data we previously shared on the dashboard. This includes your followers and downloads numbers, the top 5 episodes of your show, and the most popular time that your audience is downloading your episodes by time and day of the week.
So what’s new? For starters, we’ve added a Devices, Platforms and Client Apps section. Here you can see where your listeners are engaging with your content. You can tell whether they downloaded your show on PC or mobile device, or if they used a watch such as the Apple watch or a speaker such as the Google Home system. You can also tell whether your show was downloaded on Windows, iOS, or Linux systems, and which app they used including Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or another popular podcast directory.
But the analytical data doesn’t stop there! We also have implemented geolocation into your dashboard so you can tell which part of the world is listening to your show the most.
This kind of data is what your potential sponsors want to see so they know whether or not your audience is a good fit for their sponsorship dollars!
It’s worth noting that you might notice there are some differences between the numbers we’re providing in our customer-facing dashboard when compared with the numbers being reported by Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.
This is due to two important factors:
The first is Terminology – These apps and platforms use similar labels that often represent different calculations. For instance, we estimate “Followers” by calculating the average of the first 24 hours of unique downloads for your last 3 episodes, whereas Spotify “Followers” indicate the number of people who click the “Follow” button on a podcast in the Spotify app.
The second is Caching – Some podcast apps may cache your episode in their servers or store them locally. Platforms that cache your content typically don’t disclose how and when they do so. Spotify, for instance, is well known for caching your episodes, and in some cases, this may result in discrepancies in the number of downloads and followers being reported in RSS.com’s Analytics and Spotify’s Insights.
For example, if one of your episodes is downloaded once via Spotify and it gets cached, it’s possible that multiple listeners streaming it in Spotify will result in only 1 download displayed in our Analytics. This is a common problem for all podcast hosting services that requires more collaboration across the industry.
To learn more about analytics and why your numbers on directories such as Apple, Spotify, and Google may look different than those present in the RSS dashboard, visit the link to our blog post in the description box.
Until next time, we’ll keep improving our platform for our users. If you have an idea that you think our developers should implement, don’t hesitate to reach out on social media or to our support team. Thanks for tuning in!