What Your Podcast Metrics Aren't Telling You

If your podcast isn't growing, your metrics are the last place you should look. Every download, play, and retention graph only tells part of the story. Which means you can spend months improving your podcast without ever knowing whether you're fixing the right problem.

Every podcast's performance is shaped by two key decisions. Once you understand how they work, you'll never think about growing a podcast the same way again. 

Ready to find out what your podcast metrics aren't telling you and why most podcast growth strategies never deliver the results they promise? Hit play and let's dive in.

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0:51 – The 2 Decisions That Determine Your Podcast's Performance

2:25 – What Your Podcast Metrics Aren't Telling You

10:40 – Why Most Podcast Growth Strategies Fail

17:13 – The PodLaunch Performance Model Explained

21:53 – The Difference Between Measuring Performance and Driving It

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Episode Links:

See the PodLaunch Performance Model™

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Other Episodes You’ll Love: 

This Changes Everything We Know About Growing a Podcast

How to Pinpoint Where Your Podcast Performance Is Breaking Down

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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

If you caught the episode right before this one, then you heard me unpack one of the biggest blind spots that we have in the podcasting industry right now, and why this is making it harder than ever for hosts like you to grow your show. And if you didn't catch it, I highly recommend you go back and listen because we are in the middle of a mini-episode series that I'm dropping here on the podcast to unpack not only these blind spots that we have in the industry, but to unpack what drives podcast performance. Because right now the industry is obsessed with everything that's happening downstream. Downloads, listens, plays, retention, monetization. These are all lagging indicators of something. So the question we have to ask and answer is, well, what's upstream? And that's exactly what we're about to unpack here today. Welcome to Insider's Secrets to a Top 100 podcast. I'm your host, Courtney Elmer. Let's make your podcast binge-worthy. Think about your podcast for a second. You go through the motions every week, you prep the content, you record the content, you polish the content, you publish the content, and then you open your analytics dashboard and you look at your downloads and you see they haven't moved in 90 days, and you question yourself like, why the heck am I still podcasting? This isn't going anywhere. And I want you to think about that for a second. Think about your own behavior, your own human behavior, your user behavior. One of the things that we have gotten really, really good at doing as a collective industry in podcasting is we've gotten good at evaluating what's happening downstream and making decisions about our show because of it. Oh, my downloads haven't grown, therefore my show is not worth continuing. Oh, I've guessed that on all of these podcasts, but I haven't seen any results or ROI from it. So I guess podcast guesting doesn't work. And we're looking at it completely backwards because every metric that we're evaluating our show by, whether it be downloads, which we all know is not the best metric, or plays, which now people are trying to convince us is a better metric, or retention, which people are out there trying to say, well, this is a better metric. I don't care what metric you're looking at. Everything is downstream of a decision. Everything is downstream of something else, upstream, that's ultimately driving those metrics. It's driving the end result that you're seeing with your podcast, or in most cases, not seeing with your podcast. And right now, the industry is spending almost all of its time trying to improve podcast performance, but almost no time understanding what creates it. You can spend all the time you want improving the metrics by which you measure, but that's not going to change the measurement that you're getting. I mean, a 12-foot table is still going to be a 12-foot table if you measure it with a $10 tape measure or a $40 one. So, yes, while the industry is pushing for more transparency and better metrics, that's great. But the bigger question is, well, what determines the metrics in the first place? And so let's take listener retention. Most people want to say, well, listener retention determines your retention metric, how long people have been listening, Courtney. This is not this difficult of a question to answer. You know, your plays, that's just the number of people who hit play and listen for more than 30 seconds, and so on and so forth. But the bigger question that I've been asking, because this is just the way that my brain works and I can't help myself, is well, okay, what determines listener retention then? What determines whether or not someone hits play? Because ultimately that is what drives podcast performance. And podcast performance comes down to two things. You want to know what's upstream? It's the decisions that you make as a host and the decisions that your listeners make as a result of the decisions that you make as a host. And understanding this relationship is the key to understanding podcast performance. And so that's why I built something called the podcast performance model. And I want to unpack this for you to help you understand exactly where podcast performance comes from. Because once you see it, you're not going to be able to unsee it. And once you see it, you're going to understand how these relationships work together, your relationship with your listeners in the sense of the decisions that you're making that then inform the decisions that your listeners make, which then impacts everything else downstream of that that happens on your podcast. So once I started asking this question, and this is a question that I've been obsessed with answering over the last six plus years, since 2019, what is upstream? I realized podcast performance follows a pattern every single time. And I'm a very visual person. So I map this out so that I can study it. And if you're visual like me, I put this up on my Substack, Courtney Elmer.substack.com. Go check it out. You can see exactly what I'm about to walk you through. Again, Courtney Elmer.substack.com. You'll find it there, podcast performance model. Because most people think that podcast performance looks something like this. Have a great idea. Let me start a podcast. They start the show. They publish great content weekly. They get some downloads. The show grows. They get sponsors, they get revenue. Boom. Easy, right? More often though, we know what it looks like. We know that's a lie. We know that it looks like this. You start the show, you publish great content weekly, you struggle to get downloads. You keep publishing great content weekly. You try to optimize different aspects of the show because you keep struggling to get downloads. And so you give up and eventually quit podcasting. But in reality, what's actually happening behind the scenes, behind everything that you are putting into your podcast, every topic that you cover, every episode you create, decisions are driving all of those things. And this is largely unconscious. This is something not only does the industry not acknowledge or even talk about, but it's something that we absolutely cannot ignore if you want to build a high-performing show. Because at the end of the day, all a podcast is is a human talking to another human. All this is right now is a conversation that we are having together, you listening, me sharing. But when we forget that, and when we focus so much on the optimization of all these different pieces and parts of our show and how are we going to get more listeners and discovery and all the things and all, you know, YouTube and all the platforms, and we get so blinded by the fact that at the end of the day, all we have to do to build a top-performing podcast is learn how to influence human behavior. How do we influence our listeners' next action that they take as a result of the actions that we are taking and the decisions that we are making? So I want you to think of it like this. And again, if you're driving or you're not somewhere where you can look at this visually on the Substack, visualize this, okay? Visualize a flywheel, a circle. Outside of this flywheel, existing at the top in an overarching sense, are the objectives that you have for your show. It's not just the internal why, the reason that you got into podcasting to begin with, because you have a message to share, because you had something that happened to you in your life that you now feel compelled to share about or teach about or seek to offer transformation about. That is the internal why, but we also have the external why. And the external why is why a podcast? Why is this the vehicle that you chose? And what are you hoping that this vehicle, this platform, gives you? And my husband always laughs because I say vehicle. It he says, no, Courtney, it's vehicle. Like there's no H. I'm like, no, it's vehicle. There's clearly an H in the word. So anyway, anytime I say vehicle, now I can't help but laugh. And now you can laugh with me. Vehicle. Okay. So your podcast is the vehicle. And this is really important because this is a step that gets missed. There are assumptions that happen. There's assumptions that the podcast is going to help me get more visible. The podcast is going to help me grow my audience. The podcast is going to help drive revenue. But I'd invite you to go deeper. That's great. Grow your audience, get visible, drive revenue. What are those things going to do for you? What are those things going to give you? Because at the end of the day, if the podcast is the way to get from A to B, B is where you want to go, A is where you are, and the podcast is the vehicle to get you there, then we got to make sure that we've got the right vehicle to get us there. If we're going to be crossing very rocky terrain in a Saharan desert, like we got to have the right wheels and tires to get there. If we're going to be cruising along the interstate at 80 miles an hour, well, that's going to change the way that our car needs to perform. So this is important because this overall objective exists outside of this flywheel that I'm about to describe. But it also informs the flywheel. It's what triggers the flywheel. It's what gets us started. Okay, we need to build this thing to help us accomplish this goal. So if you're not clear on that goal, you got to stop right here and do that first. But then, based on that goal, is when we then say, okay, I'm going to start the podcast. And this is when we start making decisions as a host. And right there at the top of the flywheel, at the top of the circle, we have host decisions, which then influence your listener decisions. Your listener decisions then inform the strategy of the podcast, which then creates podcast performance, which produces the metrics, which then informs the host decisions. And round and round we go. So we're going to break this down. And this is something that it is so important for you to embody as a host, for you to understand this as a host. So we're going to walk through it step by step. The first is let's start with the host objectives, these overarching objectives that exist outside of the flywheel, but that inform and even trigger the flywheel. This has to be in place because otherwise our flywheel might be spinning in a direction we don't want it to go. So the question you have to ask yourself, and maybe you've asked yourself this, maybe you know this on a surface level, but if you are not crystal clear on the deeper objective that your podcast needs to accomplish, then this is where we start. What do you want your show to do? Because every podcast starts with an objective. This might be implicit or explicit. We want it to be explicit. We want you to know exactly what it is. We don't want it to just be like this vague idea that it's going to grow my audience and generate leads and sales. What do you want it to do? Is this primarily a lead generating tool? Is this an authority-building tool? Is this an audience growth tool? Are you here to entertain? Do you sell a service that you want the podcast to help with? Maybe there's a couple of things there that you want your podcast to do. And then I want you to ask, okay, well, what do those things then do for me? What does that give me? Because at the end of the day, you might say, well, more leads gives me relief because then I don't have to worry about, you know, lead flow coming in the door. And then when I have that relief, well, then that ultimately is going to drive sales. We've got great conversion rates in the business. So then, you know, more leads is going to help us build more sales and sales is going to create more revenue, which is then going to give me freedom. So a podcast then is your vehicle to freedom. Yeah. Okay. Now we're getting somewhere. So you want to know what is the surface objective, and then what is the deeper driver of that? Because different objectives are going to create different host decisions. A podcast that's trying to sell coaching is going to make different decisions in building that vehicle than the one trying to maximize downloads, which is different than building authority, which is different than a show that's purely meant to entertain. And so it's not that the podcast industry is solving the wrong problems. It's solving the right problems in the wrong order. Because before you can optimize a show, you first have to know what you are optimizing for. Most advice out there helps you improve one part of your podcast at a time. Most tools out there, you install them and they help you do one thing on your show. For example, an AI copywriter takes your transcripts and ingests those and then spits out content, but that's all it does. It's just helping to optimize one little bitty aspect. But if you want to drive predictable podcast performance, you first have to be crystal clear on what you want your show to do for you. And then you have to understand where the performance is breaking down right now and what to improve first before you invest more time or more money fixing the wrong problem. And better podcast performance begins with understanding what drives it. So we have to be clear on the host objective because then that informs the host decisions that you make, the decisions that you make on your show. Because once your objective is clear, you begin making decisions. Thousands of them. Who's the show for? Who's it not for? What should I name it? What should I title this episode? Should I interview guests? Should I add video? Do I need a YouTube? How should I monetize this? What's the best way for me to monetize this? How often should I publish? Thousands of micro decisions that each of us have to make on our podcast every single day. Yesterday you probably made 20 of them without realizing it. You picked an episode title, you created a thumbnail, you wrote your intro, you prepped your content, you talked about certain things, you organize your content a certain way, you picked what call to action you were going to give. Every one of these micro decisions moves your podcast trajectory in a different direction. This is so important. And this is where it gets really interesting is that host decisions don't create podcast performance directly. It's the relationship between the host decisions and the listener decisions. Because the decisions you make for your show are going to influence the decisions that your listeners then make about your show, which is what ultimately drives podcast performance. And that's why this next step in the flywheel is all about your listener decisions. So we have the overarching goal, and then we kick off the flywheel with the decisions that you're making as a host, which then informs your listener decisions. Because based on all these micro decisions that you've made for your show, listeners are then going to make a series of micro decisions and they're going to decide whether to click, whether to skip, whether to stay, whether to leave, whether to subscribe or follow, whether to share, whether to talk about your show, whether they trust you, whether they're going to buy from you, whether they're going to listen again. This is the crux of it all because the degree to which your show succeeds ultimately comes down to the degree to which you understand what moves your listeners so you can influence the decisions they make and the actions they take. Not in a manipulative way, but in a way of understanding how we as humans are naturally wired so that you can move people. Can you tell I get excited about this stuff? This is, oh my gosh, it's just human psychology at work. And when you have even just the slightest understanding of this, you don't have to be a psychologist, you don't have to have studied this for years in school or anything. Like, we just have to have a basic understanding at how we as humans are wired to work. And you already have this understanding innately because it's your own user behavior. Why do you do the things that you do? There are beliefs and life experiences deep down on the unconscious level, the subconscious level, driving every decision that we make and every action that we take. Think about it like this. Have you ever released an episode that you knew was one of your best? All the decisions, all the thought, all the heart that you put into that episode, and almost nobody listened to it. In fact, it underperformed. You looked at your catalog and you were like, oh my gosh, this, I thought this was gonna be the greatest episode ever, and nobody listened. Like my other episode that I thought was literally just I threw that together and you know, 11 p.m. the night before we're supposed to air, that one performed better than this one. Why is that? It's because great episodes don't automatically create great podcast performance. Listener decisions do. So maybe they didn't click. Maybe they clicked, but they didn't stay. Either way, that behavior gave you information that you can use to make your next decision if you know how to pay attention to it. And if you know what's breaking down and when and where and why. Because when you understand what moves people and when every podcast decision is rooted in how your listeners think, how they choose, how they behave, and what motivates them to act, then you can begin to engineer podcast performance. And this is what brings us to strategy. We see more and more and more being talked about these days about podcast strategy. In fact, I remember when I first started Podlaunch and I was like, I'm gonna say I'm gonna podcast strategist because nobody is saying that. Nobody is talking about podcast strategy. Now, what is everybody talking about? Podcast strategy. And this is good because the industry is finally starting to understand its importance. But notice that strategy is not step one in this process. Strategy on its own only gets you so far. And the problem is that most of the quote unquote strategies out there today are at best a collection of tactics that may or may not be the right tactics for your show. Your strategy ultimately needs to be informed by the decisions that you make next because of what your listeners told you, whether they told you that verbally or not. And in most cases, it's not verbally, it's through their actions. So we have to learn how to read those actions. And again, we need a turn to listener behavior. If your episode downloads have stayed the same for the last 90 days or more, the answer isn't go out and create better content. It's let's pinpoint why people aren't clicking. If everyone leaves five minutes into your episode, the answer is not let me publish more episodes, it's let's pinpoint why they left. I know it seems so obvious to talk about it this way, but yet when you really take a step back and look at the industry, this is not how we approach it. Most people are like, well, I just need to get more content out there so that I can get more listeners and get more chances to be discovered and so on and so forth. No, no, no, no, no. We need to step back and pinpoint, well, if someone left five minutes in, why did they leave? Or on the contrary, if a listener binged three episodes in a row and then emailed you to ask about your program, well, the answer, although you can do this, the answer is not to pat yourself on the back and be like, ha, I'm the greatest podcaster ever. I know we all have a tendency to want to think that, you know, when we finally get that email from someone who's like so excited to learn from us, it's like, oh, finally the podcast might be working. I don't know, maybe it is. This is exciting. But really, what you need to do in that moment is pinpoint the decisions that you did make in those episodes that led to the decision that your listener then made to listen, listen again, and reach out. Your listener behavior should inform your strategy for your podcast. Most of us do the opposite. We decide on our strategy before we understand our listeners. But the highest performing podcasts, after spending 30,000 plus hours studying this, time and time again, we found the pious performing shows, the top shows out there, they're the predictable outcome of understanding and influencing listener behavior. And that right there is the most beautiful thing because when you understand how to build a strategy for your show that meets your objectives and then influences your decisions, which influences your listener decisions and informs your strategy. And then you can build a strategy that gets you where you want to go. The strategy piece is the building of the vehicle. This is okay, how are we going to power the vehicle? Is it gas powered? Is it electric? What are we actually doing to move the vehicle from A to B? That's the strategy. No two shows are alike. And so no two strategies are going to be alike. And so the degree to which your strategy is built to meet your unique specific objectives for your show will be the degree to which you'll be able to then drive and yes, even predict your podcast performance. So the strategy then, the implementation of that strategy, the execution of that strategy is ultimately what then drives the rest of the downstream stuff that the industry is obsessed with talking about discovery, retention, conversion, monetization, trust, et cetera. And the biggest takeaway here is that these are not isolated disciplines. These are not isolated things. You can spend years optimizing individual parts of your show. You can go tinker with your cover art and optimize for SEO and so forth. But until you start asking whether those pieces are actually working together to drive your podcast performance, your show may continue to struggle. Or said a different way. The purpose of your podcast is not to share information. It's not even to help you achieve your goals, because that's not going to happen until you move people. And that is the ultimate purpose of a podcast, to move people, to influence people. And the degree to which you move people will be the degree to which your podcast performs. Or in other words, gives you the specific, tangible, measurable results that you set out to achieve with your show in the first place. And when you understand what to fix and in what order, you can drive better results, which then gets us to the metrics piece. This is the piece that a lot of people look at first. But this is the piece that we need to look at in light of all these other elements. You know, everyone is obsessed right now with building the best tape measure for podcast performance. Better metrics to measure by than downloads. And yeah, we need it. We need that. Yes, listener retention is important. Yes, understanding your podcast conversion rates and so forth are important. But hopefully you're understanding now that metrics don't create performance. They just report it. Metrics tell you what happened. Listener behavior tells you why it did. Remember, why not what. Metrics are just reporting on the outcome of the decisions that created them. And so once you understand that metrics are result of your listener behavior, podcast performance is the downstream measurable outcome of how successfully you've moved people upstream in the listener journey. From non-listener to listener to repeat listener to follower or subscriber to lead to and to client or supporter of the show. People don't create podcast performance just because they listened. They create podcast performance because they decided to do something after they listened. And so this is why this is so important, these host decisions, because this ultimately is the missing piece. It's the piece that nobody's talking about, the piece that ultimately creates all of these downstream things that we then can close the loop with. So if you walk away with nothing else from this episode, I want you to remember this. The quality of your podcast can never exceed the quality of the decisions behind it. And it's not just one decision, it's the result of hundreds of interconnected decisions, which is why isolated tools produce isolated improvements. And we're going to continue unpacking this because this is something that, you know, you might be sitting here going, wow, I've never thought about it this way. You might be sitting here going, okay, but what about this? What about that? If you have a question, if this raises a question for you, please find a way to send it to me. If you're listening on Spotify, drop it in a comment. If you need to email it to me, email it to me. Hello at podlaunchhq.com. Whatever you need to do to get that question to me, because I want to hear your questions. I want to be able to answer that for you, especially the stuff that's coming up in real time as we think about this in a different way together. And if this way of thinking about podcasting has been helpful for you, I'd love to invite you to help support this work. You can become a founding supporter of the show right inside of Apple Podcasts. Or if you're not listening on Apple Podcasts, just click the support the show link in the show notes below this episode. And when you do, you're going to get early access to new episodes and behind-the-scenes updates as we continue building all of this together. And either way, whether you support the show as a founding supporter or whether you just simply show up each week and listen, thank you because it means more to me than you know. You are what powers this work. And helping you become a better host and making better decisions as a host so that you can succeed in podcasting is my promise to you. And then of course, this naturally begs the question well, what decisions do I need to make? What decisions have I made that maybe haven't been the right ones? How do I change that or fix that? How do I make better decisions for my show? And what do I need to do in order to make them? And that's exactly what we're going to unpack in the next episode. Because you're someone who knows your podcast should be performing better than it is. And I know that you have invested time and money and effort into your podcast. You've published dozens or hundreds of episodes, and you're still asking yourself, why isn't this growing? Your podcast still isn't delivering the audience or the authority or the leads or the revenue or the freedom or the relief or the whatever your objective is that you expected. And so the question from here isn't, well, what do I need to do to grow? But why isn't growth happening? Remember, why not what? So the first step to figuring that out is to diagnose where your own podcast performance is breaking down. And in the next episode, I'm going to take you behind the scenes of something we have spent almost a year building for you that we're about to roll out in beta to answer that exact question and help you make your podcast bingeworthy.