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Mastering Podcast Metrics: Advanced Analytics Insights · Story Scaling

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: We are podcastvideoscom.
• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Our goal is to educate, enlighten, engage and entertain.
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: We believe in the power of love and transformation through storytelling.
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Welcome back, everybody.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: We are here for Story Scaling Once again.
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: I'm Dan and I've got Sam and Nate here with me.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: Today we are talking analytics what they are, how to use them and what they can do for you.
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: So how do we start, guys?
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: Obviously, you put a show out there.
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: You put it out on multiple channels Social YouTube for video, buzzsprout or something similar, rss, audiohost and you send it out there.
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: You have to figure out who saw it, how long they stayed with it, did they get to the ads?
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: How long are they?
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: How engaged are they?
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: It helps you build your show and move forward.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: Obviously, we've looked at plenty of analytics for our own website, for story scaling, for our clients, and we've seen some wacky things.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: But the idea of just tracking your downloads is no longer a thing with the rise of video.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: Obviously, youtube's a big deal and they have a robust analytics platform that we can play with.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: What have we seen that's unusual from an old-school audio podcast perspective when we jump into the video?
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: Who's going to take that?
• 1:31
  Speaker 2: I can start.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: You go.
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: First I was going to say, when it comes to the audio and video side, of course we have Buzzsprout, which is our podcast distribution platform, and then YouTube, which is the video side of our distribution, and then YouTube, which is the video side of our distribution, and podcasting has been around for a while, and you have these general ideas or general concepts that have existed, like a listen or a download.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: That's how you tell how the audio is performing.
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: And then, on the video side, you obviously have the views, but then you're trying to see how many people your content is actually reaching.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: You want to aggregate all those numbers.
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: You definitely want to do that across all your platforms, but if you're looking at a specific platform, you're looking at your actual audience reach versus how many people, your total versus unique.
• 2:18
  Speaker 2: I guess that's how you would distinguish between the two, because you have all these terms, but what do they actually mean?
• 2:24
  Speaker 2: And every platform is different in how they define things, and that's getting muddier rather than cleaner in this business right now.
• 2:31
  Speaker 3: And then you throw in video and it's just, and social platforms.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, depending on how many you're using, are you putting video on the social platforms?
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: Are the guests resharing?
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: That seems to be our biggest takeaway from the social platforms, whichever one you're using.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: If the guests or the other people that were involved in that show reshare it to their audiences, put that video further out there.
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: That's always a win always drives the algorithm yeah, I mean, if you, if you take the time to create content, why wouldn't you want to multiply it, right?
• 3:06
  Speaker 2: Sure, while you create it and then you send it out there, don't just let it do its own thing.
• 3:11
  Speaker 2: I mean, the problem is, if you're not already and this may be like a hot topic or like a sticking point if you're not already already, if you don't already have a following and you're trying to build one, it's not going to help you if you don't try to advertise it.
• 3:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah, get your content in front of as many people as possible.
• 3:35
  Speaker 3: Correct the promotion of it.
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: And then the analytics tells you how effective the promotion's been, what's working, what's not, so you can adapt Exactly.
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: We've seen with a couple of clients the effectiveness of spending just a little bit of advertising dollars on certain platforms.
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: They've seen huge spikes out of that and it's not a huge spend, although depending on what your budget is, it could seem like a lot of money.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: We've seen great results quickly.
• 4:03
  Speaker 3: Right, and the beauty of analytics is the numbers are increasing, but we can look at the analytics to see is that actually driving engagement?
• 4:10
  Speaker 3: You know like your numbers might blow up.
• 4:13
  Speaker 3: Your impressions might go big, your subscribers might jump, but are your video views going up as well?
• 4:19
  Speaker 3: And the only way you can tell that is if you look at your analytics.
• 4:22
  Speaker 3: So look at your analytics.
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: And some of these platforms.
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: There's the analytics that each of these platforms offer, whether it's Facebook, instagram, linkedin, youtube, but then there are also analytics tools out there.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: We use Plausible to sort of aggregate certain bits and pieces, uh, and then you can build a bigger picture, right, but it's sort of an overall show health.
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: Yeah, so you mentioned possible.
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: We use.
• 4:47
  Speaker 2: We use that for our website tracking and any, any client that has a website.
• 4:51
  Speaker 2: We have a tracking code that goes on that website so we can track anything from um unique visits to total visits, to bounce rate, to pages per visit, anything like that time on the page, which is very important to see how your website's performing.
• 5:06
  Speaker 2: Um, and then you can also see like which pages people are entering on and then exiting on, which is also important.
• 5:13
  Speaker 2: Um cause for the clients that we have websites for that that are based on their show.
• 5:18
  Speaker 2: Um, basically, the content on that site is whatever content they're releasing for the show, so it's about each post is about the episode, right, and so what we're trying to do is change the way that the the content on the post.
• 5:34
  Speaker 2: You have the audio and the video, but then we're trying to put more readable text.
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: Exactly audio video text are your three basic delivery methods.
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: Everything else is in presentation and platform yeah, and the idea behind that is to drive up that time on the page because that helps keep your audience engaged and then they can click around on more pages and check out other episodes.
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: And that continues to drive your analytics Because, as the website side of podcast videos I'm talking about me specifically the website serve as the microsite for that client in particular.
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: So everything that you can find about the show or podcast is going to be located there.
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: Everything that you can find about the show or podcast is going to be located there, and generally it's not like a dedicated media site, but it is the place where you can find everything about them, and so what you'll see is a higher bounce rate in the lower time on page.
• 6:38
  Speaker 3: But we're trying to reverse that trend where we keep the engagement higher with different types of content on the site.
• 6:41
  Speaker 3: Well, I think another thing to kind of to your point, dan, about building a bigger picture of what your analytics look like across.
• 6:43
  Speaker 3: Everything is Nate.
• 6:43
  Speaker 3: Something we started doing is adding UTMs to our links that we put in social posts.
• 6:46
  Speaker 3: Right, yeah, and so what that does is then it populates those in plausible.
• 6:50
  Speaker 3: Correct me if I'm wrong, you're correct.
• 6:52
  Speaker 3: There you go.
• 6:52
  Speaker 3: And so now, like you know, you could put a link to the website on LinkedIn and you could put the same link on Facebook, but once they come to the website you know you might not know it just says direct link because you put a link in there.
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: And so it gives you some more background and some more granular information that you wouldn't get with a basic tool.
• 7:11
  Speaker 3: Basically just tagging your links so that you know in Plausible you can see oh, this person came from LinkedIn, this person came from Facebook or wherever else you want.
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: The nice thing about Plausible is it does tell you where your referrals are coming from.
• 7:23
  Speaker 1: So the social platforms, and then of course the websites and the newsletters Correct yeah.
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: And some platforms depending on which ones you use, like MailChimp for example, if you're sending email campaigns they'll have UTM codes set up automatically.
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: You can go in and edit those.
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: That way you can get a little bit more fine-tuned on how exactly you're targeting.
• 7:45
  Speaker 2: If you wanted to know exactly which email was sending all the traffic to your site, you can do that with UTM codes and, speaking on the social side, we're trying to do that with utm codes and speaking on the social side.
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: We're trying to do that with our advertisements because, as sam mentioned, um, one of the referral sources that plausible will categorize traffic into is something called direct or none and that usually is the top referral category and that usually that doesn't tell you anything.
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: But if you go on their site and you research that, they say well, we're getting all this information but we can't directly tell you where it's coming from, so we're just going to throw it out of the category.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: You have to set up the interface that will let you break that down.
• 8:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you kind of have to meet it halfway, you kind of have to do a little bit of work to get the information you need, but it's well worth it, because then you can get really granular and the more data you have, the better decisions you can make.
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: One of the more interesting particular data points that I like coming out of YouTube is the the time time's still engaged.
• 8:47
  Speaker 1: You know it'll show you when your listeners are falling off.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: At two minutes You've still got 74% of them, but at five minutes you're down to 30%.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: We've already told one client hey, it looks like you're dropping a lot of people in those first five or six minutes because you have a very long intro moving forward.
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: Cut that intro down, jump in.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: It's more of an educational, informative type of subject than it is an entertainment and you're actually losing people because you're taking too long to get into the subject.
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: They took that to heart and their retention shot up pretty quick.
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: Well, the great thing about that is that specific case.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: You can tell that person about that.
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: It.
• 9:30
  Speaker 2: Depending on how they take that right, I mean, they'll have to probably change their process a little bit, but depending on what the data is telling you, that's usually your, your best decision, right?
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: I mean, that's, that's how you make your show.
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: Better is how, how you see what the audience is doing great that's how your audience communicates with you, right Through your analytics.
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: Well, and the other big part about analytics is they are your trick.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: When you go out and actually want to start making money, you want to start selling advertising, you want to chase sponsorships down, Analytics will give you the numbers that says, hey look, this is my reach, this is the eyeballs I'm reaching Not just how many, but a lot of times.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: You can get where you can get other demographic information and you can use that to basically sell yourself and start supporting the show.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: That's the other big part of having the analytics available is that it's it's proving your value.
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's one of the things we've looked at.
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: Is the nice thing about plausible and YouTube as well is you can see where, how, like, how wide your audience is right.
• 10:36
  Speaker 2: You can see the different cities, regions, countries, even, um, and it's actually very cool to see that you're not just in the U S like.
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: Your audience is also international as well.
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: I actually just looked at ours earlier for podcastvideoscom and since the first of the year we have had at least one web hit, 94 different countries worldwide, every continent.
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: We're going international, every continent except antarctica.
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: So if anybody out there is listening in antarctica, hit it.
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: We want that last comment we'll have to hit them with the rss feed, because it's probably all the signal they're getting out there.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they may have a connectivity issue, so anyway, that's basically an intro to what analytics are.
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: There's no one industry-wide dashboard tool out there.
• 11:26
  Speaker 3: It would make our lives a heck of a lot easier, though.
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: I think our, our big boss may have tasked Nathan with creating such a beast at some point, but you do have to use multiple tools.
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: You've got to aggregate these, these things together at this point and there's just, there's no one stop shop for it.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: Youtube is a great place to start, but there's a lot more to it.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: I will mention.
• 11:47
  Speaker 2: It was sad to see.
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: We used a platform called Chartable and as of December 12th or early December, I should say they shut down and one really interesting metric that was on that platform was the consumption rate.
• 12:02
  Speaker 2: Now it was only for the audio and it was only pulling data from Spotify and I'm sure you can get this data from each individual podcasting platform like Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: That could be a big dig to get to it, but getting all that information into one spot is the tricky thing, because it would be nice to see all that information in one place and then be able to see like okay, I only want to see the different podcasting platforms or, if you're on video, wherever you're hosting your video on YouTube, but then, if you want to, see Spotify is going to be trying their best to become a big competitor there too.
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: Yeah, until the dashboard exists and well, I mean, we'll just have to create it ourselves.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: It is.
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: It's still a gathering process from multiple places.
• 12:46
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but it's very well worth the work.
• 12:47
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yes, and gathering process from multiple places, but it's very well worth the work.
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yes, guys, if you have questions, comments, thoughts, obviously you can always shoot us an email.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: We are at podcastvideoscom Dan Kraft it's D-C-R-A-F-T, that's Nate and Sellers that's Lewandowski or any of the rest of the team.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, or just info, just it.
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: Actually that'll work.
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: That'll get it to all of us.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: Or you could subscribe to the newsletter, where we'll always have more.
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: So, guys, thanks for being here and thanks everybody for listening.
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: This is Story Scaling and we'll see you next time.
• 13:24
  Speaker 3: See ya.