Watch Me Decode Your Podcast's Analytics in Real Time

We all know downloads aren’t the best metric for growing a podcast. And yet we still log into our hosting platform, check our downloads, and use that number to decide if our show is working (or worth continuing).

That’s one of the biggest podcasting mistakes you can make, and the only way to fix it is to start tracking the 4 metrics that show if you’re actually reaching new listeners, keeping them listening, and turning them into leads. (I guarantee you’re not tracking these, and #4 will make you wonder why you didn’t look at this sooner).

If you’re ready to finally know which numbers matter in growing a podcast (and which ones don’t), hit play and let’s dive in.

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1:02 – Why Downloads Are Lying to You About Your Podcast Growth

5:20 – The 4 Metrics That (Really) Tell You If Your Podcast Is Growing

9:40 – How to Track New Listeners (and Know If You’re Reaching Fresh People)

13:10 – The Engagement Benchmark That Tells You If Listeners Are Actually Staying

16:45 – The One Metric Most Podcasters Aren’t Tracking (and How It Ties to Revenue)

19:05 – What Happens When You Track the Right Metrics for 90 Days

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Episode Links:

• Get your editing off your plate so you can focus on growing your podcast: Book a call with Resonate Recordings
• See where your podcast ranks in search with Ausha’s SEO tool (free trial) 
• Find your unique listener count with PodAnalyst

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Other Episodes You’ll Love: 

• The Truth About Podcast Episode Length (and Why Most Get It Wrong)

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Special thanks to Resonate Recordings, our implementation partner for PodLaunch® Accelerator. If your podcasting efforts aren't bringing you the listeners or sales you expected, book a strategy call for help to fix it.

Follow for more podcasting insights:  LinkedIn | PodLaunchHQ.com

©Ⓟ 2018–2026 by Courtney Elmer. All Rights Reserved.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Most people look at downloads to tell if their podcast is growing or not. And yet, we all know that downloads are not the best metric for determining a podcast's true health. In fact, they're the worst. And yet, what do we do? We log into our hosting platform, we look at our downloads, and we use that limited, unreliable, no good, very bad metric to make a snap decision about whether our show is successful or not. And more importantly, whether it's worth our time. So, how do you fix this? By learning the four metrics that actually determine the true health of your show. I guarantee you these are numbers that you are not tracking because nobody talks about tracking these things. And number four especially is going to blow your mind with, oh my gosh, why didn't I think to look at this before? And I promise you, by the time you finish this episode, you'll finally understand which numbers matter, which ones don't, and you'll have a crystal clear sense of how your show is performing so you know exactly where to focus your efforts next. Welcome to Insider's Secrets to a Top 100 podcast. I'm your host, Courtney Elmer.

Why Downloads Are Lying to You About Your Podcast Growth

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Let's make your podcast binge-worthy. Something really weird happened in the podcasting space last week. Podcasters around the world were seeing big spikes in their download numbers. Most of the podcasters who were affected by this were people who had relatively small download numbers on their show. They might have been used to getting 25 downloads an episode or 45 downloads an episode. And then suddenly they spike to 200 or 300 or 400 downloads an episode. And they're like, oh my gosh, did someone find my podcast? Did someone download my back catalog? And for the moment it was exciting. Later, it came out that all of this was completely fake. It was driven by bots in multiple countries. So, rightfully enraged, these podcasters took to groups online and they blamed everything from their hosting platform to blaming AI for potentially stealing their podcast content. Some of them even threatened to leave their hosting platform as if this was the hosting platform's fault and not a universal issue. What was fascinating to me was you saw these very conflicting opinions from podcasters themselves who were affected, where some were saying, Oh my gosh, well, I hope that the next time this happens, my hosting provider will take podcasters' concerns more seriously. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you had people going, Well, what's the harm in fake downloads other than inaccurate stats? Because the more downloads, the more visible my podcast becomes on platforms. And let me tell you, this made for some very spicy reading in my 11 p.m. Doom scrolling hour. And you know, it wasn't really quite the right time to jump in the comments and give a piece of my mind on why they were all looking at the wrong thing. So instead, what I did was I created this episode for you to help you understand that if you are using downloads as your primary measure of your podcast success, you're doing it wrong. But by the same token, if you've been podcasting for three months or more and you're looking at your downloads as the primary way to tell whether your show is growing, I can't completely fault you for that. Because when you look around at the podcasting space, there is this vast yawning chasm that exists between the podcast getting millions of downloads a month and those barely struggling to hit 100 downloads an episode. Most podcasts fall on one end of that spectrum or the other. I rarely meet someone who lands somewhere in the middle because if you were cruising along at 10,000 downloads a month or more, you're usually not the one complaining. And so the fact of the matter here is that downloads used to be the only metric we had to measure podcast growth. And they're the easiest metric to access. So it stands to reason that it's the primary metric that most podcasters turn to when they want to know how their show is doing. And it's also the most discouraging because if you're giving away your best work for free in every episode and sharing real value and publishing episodes every week like clockwork, and often doing the heavy lifting on the back end, listening back to your episodes, editing every episode, painstakingly putting in hours and hours of effort and care and heart into your show, then it is easy to take those low downloads really personally because it can almost feel like an attack of your character, that you're not good enough, that you're not smart enough, that you're not knowledgeable enough, you're not popular enough, and that what matters to you, people don't care enough about because they'd rather listen to Joe Rogan drone on for five hours and 19 minutes than listen to your 24-minute episode that actually teaches them something useful. And I get it. Podcasting is the most vulnerable thing that I have ever done. Believe me, I have nightmares still about the third grade episode. Well, it's not an episode as far as a podcast episode, it was an episode in terms of like a life episode where I was standing on the podium in my third grade class, prepared to give a speech about my favorite sport, which happened to be horseback riding. And prior to standing up to give this speech, we had been paired up with other people in our classroom. And I was paired up with these two boys who were best of friends. When I tell you they were like peas and a pod, they were like peas and a pod. Or maybe Bonnie and Clyde would be a better, more accurate representation. And I remember when we were preparing, I was so excited to share about riding horses because let me tell you, this is something that I miss to this day. Like I loved riding horses when I was a kid. I still love it, I just don't get to do it anymore. So I'm sharing all about this, and they were like, that's stupid. But what about baseball? What about football? Blah blah blah blah. So I was already feeling vulnerable getting up there to share about this. And what happened next? I was standing up on that podium and I look out at my

The 4 Metrics That (Really) Tell You If Your Podcast Is Growing

SPEAKER_00 5:20

class, and those two boys are sitting there in their desks and they're laughing at me. And that has stayed with me to this day. Now I've done a lot of work and gone through a lot of therapy to heal through that. But when I tell you that using my voice and hosting a podcast is the most vulnerable thing that I've ever done, it is the most vulnerable thing I've ever done. And so if that's you and you know what this feels like, I have good news for you. In fact, I have not one, not two, but four better metrics that you can use to tell if the effort you're putting into your show is actually paying off. Now, for our advanced clients who we run quarterly analytics reports for, they are always amazed at how well their show is doing when we show them these numbers. Then, when they implement the content and marketing strategy that we build for them over the next quarter and they see measurable returns in these numbers, suddenly podcasting becomes fun again. It becomes worth it again, and all is right in the world. So if you're one of those who's on the fence about whether to continue your podcast, my challenge to you is this run these numbers on your show that I'm about to give you. Implement one marketing strategy over the next 90 days to attract new listeners to your show. Notice how these numbers change, and then decide if continuing to podcast is worth it to you. And this is the part where I break down these four metrics what they are, why they matter, why they are more effective metrics to look at than downloads, and how to track them. But before we start breaking these down, I want to give a big thank you to our sponsor, Resonate Recordings, who is a top 10 podcast production agency globally and the only strategy first podcast production agency who works hand in hand with you to launch a podcast, edit your podcast, manage your podcast, or grow your podcast. And I know I've been teasing a big announcement coming out in the coming weeks about a strategic alliance that Podlaunch and Resonate have built together. And if you're following me on Substack, then earlier this week, you gotta peek into exactly what that entails. Now, that post is still up on my feed if you want to go join me over there where I share more of like the raw, messy, unprocessed behind the scenes of growing a business, being a CEO, navigating difficult decisions, and growing a podcast. Courtneyalmer.substack.com. You can find that in the show notes too. But the smartest move that you can make if you want to grow your podcast, but you're editing your show right now, is to get the editing work off your plate and get it off quickly. Why? Because podcasting is a ton of work already. And when you're editing your own show, it eats up any and all available time that you would otherwise have to market your podcast, especially if you are podcasting and you run a business or you do this alongside a full-time job. And if you don't have the time to market your podcast, it's gonna be really tough to grow it. So if you know you want to get the editing off your plate, or if you've hoped to maybe one day get the editing off your plate and you want to know what that can look like, I've linked to them in the show notes below where you can book a call with Resonate's team and find out how to get your time back. And speaking of getting your time back, you have my full permission to stop wasting it by looking at your download numbers and look at these four metrics instead. You ready? The first is your new unique listener count. Unique listeners is different from downloads in that now the platforms offer us the raw data needed to know if it is one individual listening to your podcast versus one individual downloading multiple episodes of your podcast. And that's part of the problem with downloads, is that a download doesn't tell you if that was one person who listened to 10 episodes or if that was 10 different people each listening to one episode. So you might see that you have 400 downloads on a single episode, but that doesn't mean that 400 people listened. In fact, if you are listening back to your own episodes on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts, then you're counted in that download number too. So, unique listeners, what this does, and there is a way that you can find out what your unique listener count is, but when your unique listener count is going up month over month and quarter over quarter, this means that your marketing efforts are working. This means that you are attracting new unique listeners to your podcast. And this is the number we want to track more than downloads, because this is going to tell you how many individuals are listening. Now, granted, yes, we could get in the weeds here and talk about, well, it could be one individual who listens on their phone. And then when they're at home, they listen on Alexa or they listen on their iPad or they listen on a different device. But really, that is splitting hairs. We're really just looking to get a directional sense of how many new listeners, unique

How to Track New Listeners (and Know If You’re Reaching Fresh People)

SPEAKER_00 9:40

listeners, is your show attracting. And more specifically, are your marketing efforts attracting? Because if this number is not growing, well, this means that your podcast has an audience growth problem. So no wonder your downloads are going to be lower than you want to see because we're not getting new listeners to the show every single day, which if you've listened to this show for any length of time, you have heard me say that this is one of the two things that have to happen if you want to see audience growth to your podcast. The second thing that has to happen to see audience growth to your podcast is to keep those listeners listening. And we'll get to that metric in just a second. But if you want to track your unique listener metric, you have a couple of options. The first is you can use the platform data that Apple Podcasts provides for you. If you log into podcastconnect at Apple.com and it will have a unique listener count there at the top for you. It'll also show you how many new followers that you have gotten and the percentage increase in followers that you have gotten to your show over the last time period. And you can toggle and adjust the time period to take a look at this. Now, this is helpful, but it's only going to show you what's happening on Apple. For a lot of podcasts, Apple is primarily where listeners listen. Over 70% of our listeners are listening on Apple Podcasts. So if it were me, I could look at this number and get a good directional sense of my unique listener count and see, yeah, it's growing. Or no, it's not. We need to adjust or change or amp up our marketing efforts. Now, if your primary listening platform that listeners listen to your podcast on is not Apple, it's not going to be very reliable in terms of figuring out your unique listener count. But the good news is there is a third-party platform that recently hit the market called Pod Analyst. I will link to this in the show notes. I am not an affiliate. You can set up an account there for free. And once you link your podcast, it will start tracking your unique listener count on Apple and your unique listener count on Spotify. And it will show you exactly how many unique listeners your show currently has and over time whether or not that number is growing. So that's what I would recommend if you want an accurate directional picture of whether or not that number is growing month over month. Now, I mentioned a moment ago that hand in hand with this, we also need to be keeping listeners listening to our podcast. This is how you grow an audience. If you're attracting listeners but you're not keeping them, then you have high churn on your show. Now, you've probably heard of the importance of listener retention. I like to call it your listener engagement metric because I don't discount qualitative data here. Where if you have a listener who told you, wow, that episode really made a difference for me, or you saw someone shared your podcast on social media, or you got a DM on LinkedIn of someone who said, I love your podcast, and it's been really, really helpful for me. So take qualitative data into account here. But as far as an actual metric, we want to look at your listener retention. The best place to get this is gonna be Apple Podcasts. Now, when you log into Apple, you're just gonna look under episodes and at your analytics, it's gonna give you a listener consumption percentage. You wanna average out what your average listener consumption percentage is and notice what that is. Maybe it's 65%, maybe it's 72%. Note that number, and then what you're gonna do, and this was a calculation that my good friend Seth Silvers has figured out to help figure out where your benchmark retention should be based on the length of your episodes. So all you're gonna do is simply take 100% minus the average length of your episodes, and that is your target retention baseline. You'll compare your average retention to your target retention baseline and notice a gap.

The Engagement Benchmark That Tells You If Listeners Are Actually Staying

SPEAKER_00 13:10

So for example, my show episodes, I aim to have these as 20-minute episodes. We might be a little over sometimes, we might be a little under sometimes, on average, 20 minutes. If I subtract 20 from 100%, I'm left with 80%. That is my target listener retention. Now, if I then average up my listener consumption metric from Apple Podcasts, and I noticed that my listener retention was only 72% or 67%, that would tell me I've got a content problem. My content is not holding attention. And I could make specific adjustments and adjust my content strategy to help increase that number to get close to or surpass the target retention baseline. Or on the flip side, if you are hitting that baseline, then you know your content is holding attention and that is not an area you need to focus. You'll look at the other metrics to see where might there be a gap elsewhere in my podcast funnel and what steps might I need to take to fix it. The third metric that you want to look at, and this one is becoming more and more important as we shift from recommendation-based discovery and top chart-based discovery to search-based discovery, and that is SEO visibility. Now, what this is is simply a measure of how visible your podcast episodes are in search. This matters because if you have a show on a specific topic and you've got other shows out there, competitor shows on that same topic, and listeners are finding those shows and not yours, then those shows are getting your listeners, and your show is virtually invisible in search for any keyword terms related to your topic that listeners might be searching. This is a bad thing because you are working really hard to put this content out. So we want it to get seen. We want it to get found. And the good news is with podcast SEO, this is easier to do than ever. And optimizing your show for SEO is not technical, it is not complicated, it's very simple. I've got a lot of episodes that walk you through what to do, when to do it, why to do it, how to do it. I'll link to some of those in the show notes for you. But this is a more effective metric than downloads because what this shows you is not just this random arbitrary number of how many times your episodes were downloaded, which, by the way, a download doesn't mean someone listened. They might have your show on auto download on their phone because that is an option, and they might not actually be listening to those episodes. So again, don't get me on my high horse about downloads, but this is just one of the many, many, many reasons, among all the reasons I have given you about why downloads are not an effective metric. But SEO visibility will tell you whether or not your episodes are showing up in search. And when I say your episodes, this is the magic of podcast SEO. Because it's not just about getting your show found, but it allows you to get more of your episodes found. You know, all those episodes that you have in your back catalog if you've been podcasting for a year or more, the ones that listeners who find your show are maybe not gonna scroll all the way back and listen to, but the ones that are still relevant, the ones that still solve problems for your listener, that listeners would still benefit from if they found them and heard them. Yeah, all of those can become entry points into your show as well. So we want to make sure that listeners are finding those in search. Now, there's a number of different platforms available on the market to track. OSHA is my favorite because of the ease of use, how user-friendly it is, how intuitive it is, and also how complete the data is on OSHA. There's a couple of other platforms that have hit the market that offer similar SEO tracking, but OSHA is my favorite, and I will put our affiliate link in the show notes below for you if you want to check that out. In fact, I think they offer a free 14-day trial. I recommend just try that. Just go get your baseline

The One Metric Most Podcasters Aren’t Tracking (and How It Ties to Revenue)

SPEAKER_00 16:45

SEO visibility metrics, and then you could see for yourself how valuable it is to have that data and decide whether or not to continue from there with a paid plan. Now, the fourth and final metric that I will give you here, wait for it. Drum roll, please. Your total new leads and revenue. Now I know this one might seem obvious, but are you tracking it? Because if the answer is no, is it because you don't think it's important or because you don't know what to track? Ask any podcaster, and most are gonna say, I know it's important, but I have no idea how to track that. So I'm gonna show you this way you can close the loop and know with certainty whether your podcast is paying off. So this is simply tracking if people are clicking from your show onto wherever it is you want to send them next. Are they joining your email list? Are they purchasing your offers? Are they booking calls with you? Are they clicking your affiliate links? Whatever it might be, you want to have a way to track that. Now, there are a number of ways you can do it, but the easiest way that I have found is to have a unique link that you share on your podcast for whatever it is that you're driving traffic to. If it's your email list, have a link to join that list that you share nowhere else but your podcast. And then you can easily see, like if you have a landing page, say, to join your email list, then you can see how many people clicked on that landing page and you can see how many people converted. And that gives you a conversion percentage right there of how many listeners took action on your call to action and actually clicked through, saw that page, and or became an email list subscriber because you only shared that link on your podcast. So that is the only place where that traffic can be coming from. You can also do this with UTM tags. If you're technical and you know about UTM tags, you could have Chat GPT help you figure out how to use UTM tags or UTM tracking. That's another very reliable way to do this. But if you're not technical or if you're just looking for the least complicated way to do this, then know that whatever call to action you put on your podcast should be a unique link that you share only on your show and nowhere else. And you should be tracking that on the back end to see how many people are actually clicking that link and or landing on that landing page and converting to the thing that you ultimately want them to convert to. It's going to be hard to isolate podcast traffic if you're just sending everybody straight to your website. But if you're sending them to a specific landing page for an action that you want them to take, well, that becomes much easier to track those listener conversions. Same with an affiliate link.

What Happens When You Track the Right Metrics for 90 Days

SPEAKER_00 19:05

Most affiliate links have a program where you log into a dashboard that shows you how many people clicked on that link and how many people converted. That is what we're looking for here. And when I tell you that when we report on this for our clients and they see that there is attributable revenue back to the podcast and there are attributable leads back to the podcast, it's like, oh my gosh, okay, this show really is working. It doesn't matter now if I only have 200 downloads an episode, because I got four leads from my podcast just this week. And so it suddenly takes all the pressure off of downloads and the pressure of your podcast needing to grow downloads because now you have all these other ways to see if your podcast is actually working and is actually healthy. And I'll tell you this, it sure beats logging into your hosting provider, hitting refresh, and seeing the same download numbers staring back at you. And the good news is if any one of these numbers is not where you like to see them, well now you have a clear picture into where there are gaps in your podcast funnel and where listeners might be dropping off. And if you're not a numbers person, then don't look at this like numbers or metrics. Look at this like gears in the wheels of your podcast funnel. If they are not all turning together, then they're not turning. And if they're not turning, they're not bringing listeners to your show, which means you're losing listeners to your competition. But this is completely fixable. And if you know what else that'll do for you, it'll all but tell you exactly where you need to focus your time. If your unique listeners are growing, but your engagement is lower than your benchmark, that's a content problem. If your engagement is close to or above your benchmark, but your new unique listeners hasn't grown over the last 90 days, that's a marketing problem, and so forth. Because when you focus on these other metrics and more importantly, on the activity you can take to drive those metrics, then guess what? Your downloads will naturally go up and you'll get what you wanted in the first place, which was higher downloads. So if you have a podcasting friend who complains to you about low download numbers or podcasting is such a struggle, and I don't know, I might just quit this thing. Please be a good friend and text this episode to them. And if it helped you, I would love it if you would leave a review on Apple Podcasts or tap the five stars on Spotify if you listen on Spotify. Because speaking of reviews, we are just seven reviews away from 200 positive reviews on this show in the US. And if you're in the US and you get value from this podcast and you've never left a review, then I invite you to leave one now. Because when you leave one and you take a screenshot of that and send it to us at hello at podlaunchhq.com, you're gonna get a free 30-minute podcasting strategy call with me. I was debating raffling this off because I was like, oh, seven calls. I don't know, do I wanna have seven calls? Yes, I do. I want to have seven calls. You and me and your podcast. I've got nothing to sell you. You just get my full attention on your show. But you have to send the screenshot to us or it won't count. Also, you have to do it before the end of this month. And once we pass 200 reviews, then we're gonna shift into drawing a name every five reviews for a chance at that free podcasting strategy call. So this is your moment if you have never left a review and you would love for me to sit down with you and review your podcast and help point out where you can improve and also where you're doing things well. We're gonna sit down, we're gonna look at it together. You can pick my brain about all things podcasting. And speaking of these metrics, specifically SEO visibility, this is one that you can see improvements with in as little as a couple of weeks when you know what to optimize for. And in the next episode, I've got a special guest joining us who will show you what happened for his show when he spent just a few hours making his back catalog more visible to listeners searching for his topic. So if you're curious to learn how to optimize your episodes so more listeners can find them, then come with me to the next episode and let's make your podcast binge worthy.