Understanding your listener consumption rate

If you've clicked on this episode purely because you don't even understand what "listener consumption rate" means, then you are absolutely in the right place.

Listen in!

Your podcast host of choice (Buzzsprout, Podbean, Captivate...etc) does a pretty damn good job of providing you with really solid statistics about the kinds of people listening to your show.

Your host can tell you information such as how many downloads you're receiving per episode, when people are listening, what country they are from, what city they leave in and a few other bits and pieces.

What almost all podcast hosts can't show you at the moment is how much of each episode a person is listening to. That is incredibly powerful information because it will inform how you record your content.

Apple Podcasts Connect has recently updated the analytics in the backend of your show to give you this information, along with some other stats around your actual follower count (hooray).

In today's episode, I go through what the average listener consumption rate means, and why you should be tracking it to make sure that you're providing the content that your listenership wants to engage with.

LINKS MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

The Pod Lovers+

Understanding Your Stats - Masterclass - Tuesday 13th July, 2022

Apple Podcasts Connect

Spotify for Podcasters

Transcript:

00:00
Welcome to Pump Up Your Pod today I'm talking about statistics. Now I have spoken about statistics before on the podcast, but not in this way, there is a special part of Apple podcasts that you can actually access log into, and find out a bit more detailed information about how your show is going. If you're a client of ours, you can email Hello at Bamby media.com and provide your Apple ID and we will be able to share our details with you so that you can see how your show is going. If you're not a Bamby Media client, then you can just access that stuff yourself. If you go to Apple podcasts connect, and you use your Apple ID, you'll have to sign up for like the first time and then you'll be able to add a show there and be able to track it.

The cool thing about tracking it is with Apple podcasts connect, they've recently done an update to their analytics, which was well overdue. There was a lot of stuff that was missing from the back end of that. And it gives you more information than your podcast host can. So when I say podcast hosts, I mean, you know Buzzsprout or Captivate or blueberry pod bean, you know, Lipson, however you host like where you do your uploads. That's very different to how it actually tracks on Apple podcasts that statistics that you get from within your podcast hosts are more general. So they'll have a look at your download numbers. They show you detail into the demographic of the listeners, and how each episode is going tracking over time and those sorts of things. They're very valuable statistics. Absolutely.

But Apple podcasts connect gives you this one bit of extra detail that I especially love. And that is the average consumption rate of an episode. What does that mean? Essentially, it means that it will tell you how much of your episode your listener is actually listening to, before they switch it off. That is such valuable information to have. Because you could be having this massively long episode with a whole bunch of fantastic information. Maybe it's a great interview, you're having a really great conversation with someone and then you do a call to action at the end, hey, find more about this person, my guest via the Lincoln bio, or here's a course that I have for offer or anything like that, and you wait till the end of the show to put that call to action. But if you go into Apple podcasts connect, and you can see that people aren't listening all the way to the end, if they are only listening to 50% or so of your podcast episode, they're missing a lot of the value that you're giving in that second half of the podcast episode. So it's valuable for you to know how long people are listening for not only from a call to action, where to put it in your show perspective, but also just how engaged they are with your information. So if your podcasts are on the longer end, and you can see that your average consumption is like 60% or less, then I would be seriously considering changing the actual length of your episodes. Because your listeners aren't listening to the whole thing anyway. So what's the point? Like it's so much extra work? To record a longer episode transcribe a longer episode, right? Shown it's for a longer episode, edit a longer episode. And then if you look in there, and you're like, oh, man, people aren't even engaging for that long.

03:46
Don't bother change the format please, it will save you so much time. But if you're looking at it, and like we've got one client who they have episodes that are like an hour and 10 minutes long, and I was expecting going in there for it to be like, you know, not that great engagement, but they actually have listenership that is right up there. It's a 90% it's 110%, which means people are listening to the episode and then they're re listening to it as well because of the style of content that they're sharing.

So it's not always that your episodes need to be shorter because perhaps the information that you're sharing the listenership that you have the demographic the psychographics of the people that are actually engaging with that show. They want longer episodes because of the content that is being shared. So it's something to be really aware of, I would not be just putting everything into the this is too long basket without actually going into the analytics of Apple podcasts connect and seeing where people are tuning in seeing what your most popular content is, and seeing what the average consumption rate is of those episodes. There's a So other things within the apple podcasts connect that weren't there before, which are valuable to have, you can actually see and track how many followers you have. So how many people are hitting that follow button, little plus sign and following the show, meaning that they're getting all your episodes, you can see how many followers you have. And when you lose them, and when you gain them just kind of like with Instagram, those sorts of things. You can see the insights on that. Apple podcasts Connect allows you to do all of that Spotify does not, at this point, have this kind of detail in its analytics. I'm sure it's coming because they have bought a few big statistic based platforms recently that that means big things are coming, but Apple is kicking their butt at the moment as far as what they're providing.

From a statistical point of view. We are actually about to launch a series of masterclasses which I'm very excited about. And the first masterclass is going to be understanding your stats, this is a detailed look at all the different aspects of what your statistics mean, how to analyse them properly, what you should be looking for, what you shouldn't really care about how to access all these things, and the major players there and how they all play together.

So these master classes are going to be once a month, which is really cool their paid master classes. More information on that will be in the show notes here so that you can see them, grab your tickets and join in. And as I said, there's a different topic every month, all on growth stuff. It's very exciting. And this will help you really up your game. Without being necessarily in a subscription type model where you have to be paying monthly, you can just decide which master classes you want to come to. Or you can join the pod lovers plus and you'll be able to get access to all of the master classes as well as they come through and a group discussion. That's all I wanted to say today. Just go into your apple podcasts connect and have a little bit of a look around, go to the analytics bit and see what you can find there. I hope you've enjoyed this content. And I will speak to you next week.