Listener analytics

Analytics is a data visualization tool where you can review actionable insights into your podcast’s performance. While the key metric for understanding a podcast’s reach has traditionally been downloads, listener analytics focus on providing aggregated listening completion rates from unique devices for each episode. Listener analytics allow you to better understand how users are engaging with your shows and episodes on Apple Podcasts. For example:

• How many people are listening to your podcast episodes?
  
• How many new followers did you get last month?
  
• Are listeners skipping over your episode intro or your second mid-roll?
  
• How are your shows and episodes performing over time?
• How many listeners do you have in each country and city?

Note: Apple doesn’t provide support for third-party podcast analytics, but you may be able to obtain other consumption metrics such as downloads or subscriptions from your hosting provider or from the server where your podcast is hosted. Contact your web server support teams for further details.

When you sign in to Analytics in you’ll see a list of all the shows you manage. If no data appears for a show, our data threshold hasn’t been met for the selected time frame — at least five unique listeners must play content from your show. Learn more about data requirements.

At a glance, you can see the number of followers, listeners, engaged listeners, and track plays by show, and see how data is changing during the time frame specified.

By default, data is displayed for the last 60 days. Use the date control in the upper-right corner to choose a different date range. For example, if your date range is set to February, Analytics will compare data against January.

The All Categories menu appears when you have more than ten shows with assigned categories. Choose a category from the menu to display only the shows within a specific category.

You can use the columns in the Shows view to sort your shows. By default, shows are sorted by highest to lowest amount of listeners.

Show Analytics

To view more details about a podcast, select a show. You can measure and analyze show data using the graphs and charts in the Overview tab. You’ll see a summary of your show’s overall performance, enabling you to quickly get an idea of how your show is performing using these key metrics:

• Followers: The total number of people following your show. Learn more about how followers work.
• Listeners: The total number of people that listened to your show.
  
• Engaged Listeners: Total number of people who listened to at least 20 minutes or 40% of an episode.
  
• Plays: The total number of times people pressed play on your episode.
  
• Top Countries/Regions: The total number of unique devices per country or region.
  
• Top Cities: The total number of unique devices per city.
  

Trends

With Trends you can see how many listeners and plays are occurring for your episode on Apple Podcasts.

Choose various metrics like Listeners, Plays, and Time Listened to view different trends across your show. You can add additional dimensions like Follow Status, Episode, Location, or Engagement to further analyze the metric you specified. From there, you can filter trends by location, episode, and more.

Followers

View follower trends for a specified date range.

Listeners

View listener trends for a specified date range. By default, Listeners displays trends by episode, but you can also view by country or region, city, or engagement. From there, you can narrow your trend data by selecting a specific location or level of engagement, or add additional dimensions to get the data you need.

Plays

View play trends for a specified date range. By default, Plays displays trends by episode, but you can also view by location. From there, you can narrow your trend data by selecting a specific location or add additional dimensions to get the data you need.

Time Listened

See a cumulative total of time listened across all listeners and followers. By default, Time Listened displays trends by episode, but you can also view by location. From there, you can narrow your trend data by selecting a specific location or add additional dimensions to get the data you need.

Episodes

You can view and analyze data using the table in the Episodes tab which displays details about how each episode in your show is performing, enabling you to quickly get an idea of how its performance relates to your show’s overall performance.

Use the columns to sort your episodes. By default, episodes are sorted by original release date, with the most recent first. You can also filter by episode type. Episodes which contain both RSS and subscriber audio are counted as one episode entry.

Performance

Use the Performance tab to compare episode performance based on the number of days since release on Apple Podcasts.

First, choose whether you’d like to compare performance of your last 50, 100, or total episodes up to 200. Then, choose a date range of 7, 14, 30, or 60 days after the release date. Finally, choose your baseline of comparison:

Median: Uses the episode at the midpoint of your list of episodes. Scroll down to identify which episode is used.

Average: Uses the total count of listeners divided by the number of episodes (50, 100, or total episodes up to 200).

Top Episode: Uses the episode with the most listeners.

Select up to eight episodes to compare against your baseline.