Measure podcast performance

Analytics is a data visualization tool where you can review actionable insights into your podcast’s performance. You can access Analytics from Apple Podcasts Connect.

With Analytics, you can better understand how users are listening to 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?

Use the Performance tab to compare episode performance up to 60 days after being released on Apple Podcasts. Compare up to eight episodes using one of the following baselines:

• 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.
  

Consumption metrics: downloads vs. listens

While the key metric for understanding a podcast’s reach has traditionally been downloads, Analytics focuses on providing aggregated listening completion rates from unique devices for each episode.

For example, you can see the number of users who listened to an episode and the average listening time for an episode.

Note: If average consumption is over 100%, one or more unique devices listened to the entire episode more than once.

Additional consumption metrics for RSS feeds

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.

Tips: The following can be helpful when implementing analytics on your server or with your web host:

• HTTP 302 responses are followed to a depth of up to five redirects and don’t update the feed URL in the directory.
• The URL preceding GET-style form values (before the first “?”) must end in a media file extension such as .mp3.

http://www.podcaster.com/load.mp3?f=&Wipeout.mp3 (correct)

http://www.podcaster.com/load.php?f=&Wipeout.php (incorrect)

For more information, see Interpreting Server Requests for Podcast Reporting.