Why All Podcasters Should Use Podcast Statistics & Analytics
Measuring your podcast stats provides valuable insights into your audience’s preferences, allowing you to tailor content to better meet their needs and interests. Tracking metrics such as listener demographics and episode performance helps to attract potential sponsors and advertisers, fostering the podcast’s growth and monetization potential. 
Measuring the success of your podcast is a multifaceted task using statistics and analytics. There are three ways you can measure your audience:
- Web traffic – A must for any website
- Media downloads – Your viewing or listening audience
- Audience survey – Understanding your audience
We recommend using WebTraffic and Media Download Statistics to measure your podcast and website. Blubrry offers free podcast statistics.
Measuring Podcast Web Traffic
Measuring web traffic is a great way to determine how users interact with the content you post on your website. Web statistics can be measured using the tools listed:
- Google Analytics
- AWStats (provided by your website hosting service)
- Webalizer (provided by your website hosting service)
Web traffic tools will measure web browser traffic from browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.
Measuring Podcast Media Downloads
Measuring media downloads is a great way to determine who is listening or watching your media content. Media downloads can be measured using Blubrry Media Statistics (available to blubrry.com users) and other platforms.
Media download statistics allow you to measure media download traffic from browsers, internet-connected TVs, devices, and apps on Android or iOS, and via podcast directory sites such as Blubrry.com and Apple Podcasts.
Learn more about Blubrry Podcast Statistics
Podcast Listener & Audience Survey
An audience survey is an easy way to find basic information about your audience. You can make your own audience survey using Google Forms, but we highly recommend you use the survey available for Blubrry members. The Blubrry audience survey is a small and simple survey you can add to the sidebar of your website. Results are available in real-time.
Learn more about Blubrry Audience Survey
The Problem With Measuring Feed Subscriptions
Feed tracking tools allow you to measure traffic from feed readers. It is important to note that feed-tracking tools primarily track when the feed is accessed. It does not tell you when an episode has been downloaded.
Podcast sites such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, iHeart and many other applications rely on cloud-based management of feeds.
Tip: How to Approximate Subscribers from Podcast Downloads
It’s easy! Podcasters who have the Thrive Bundle (only $10/month) can find their number of downloads and subscribers right there on their dashboard! If you’re not a Thrive subscriber, here are some other ways to approximate:
Podcast applications are managed via cloud-based services, which give the appearance of one subscriber even though there are many more; because of this, a true podcast subscriber total is not available. We do have a tip on how to approximate the number of subscribers your podcast has.
The most important factor on your side is consistency in download totals between each episode. Consistent downloads between episodes guarantee that you do have subscribers. Moreover, the first two to three days of each release are dominantly consumed by subscribers.
With that knowledge, we recommend viewing your latest episode downloads within the first 48 to 72 hours to approximate the number of podcast subscribers. Keep in mind this total is an approximation, some podcast subscribers may deviate from their normal consumption habits for various reasons.