Understand Your Podcast Analytics and Rankings!

Hey friend!

In today’s episode we are talking about HOW to understand your podcast analytics and rankings. What to do with that information, and how to pour FUEL on the fire. Figure out what is WORKING so that you can do more of it.

Help your avatar get what they want, sis!

I hope you enjoy.

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:

(00:00):

Hey SIS. Today, we’re going to be talking about what you should be looking at when it comes to your podcast analytics. How do you know if your podcast is doing well? What should you be focused on? Where can you check to find out what your podcast is ranked and more? This one let’s do it.

(01:07):

Okay, so I get this question often. Stef, how do I know if my podcast is doing well? How do I know if this is working for me? I have no idea. Somebody helped me help myself, or some of you are constantly in my DMS. Like I checked my podcast today, 30 more downloads. I checked my podcast tomorrow 30, more like you’re two in the analytics.

(01:29):

And I think that there’s a sweet spot and it’s easy to let those analytics become all consuming or super hyper-focused on them or comparing your podcast analytics to someone else’s. And we don’t want any of those things. Like when we get back to the root of why we’re podcasting in the first place, it’s because we want to impact.

(01:50):

We want to help. We want to pour into others and we want to grow an evergreen, organic audience, right? Where we help, where we inspire where we teach, where we train, where we show up and we’re here for the long run.

(02:05):

That’s really why we’re podcasting. You’ve chosen it as your one thing. And now it’s time to dig in. Like I always tell you guys don’t look up and stick with it. When I started the show, I committed to one year, I’m like, I don’t know if this is going to work. I have no idea. I’m not sure if this is going to be what I think it is, but I’m in it. Like I’m going to go for a full year. And like I’ve mentioned multiple, multiple times.

(02:31):

Y’all is that the show is what exploded everything. And it’s because I’ve chosen one place I’m super consistent. I’m very authentic. I partner with God and let Holy spirit speaks through me very often in this show. And I show up to help you guys clarify your calling, create a God centered kingdom business, and then monetize it by helping people using your voice podcasting and courses solutions, implementation solutions, super easy, super simple.

(02:59):

Now, how do we know if the show’s working? I do think that it is important to understand your analytics because we definitely don’t want you to decline. And I think that analytics leaves clues. I don’t want you to think of, you know, certain download numbers or whatever, as if you’re doing good or not. I just want you to think of it as maybe evidence of, are you being consistent?

(03:25):

What needs to change also looking at which episodes are really, really doing well, which ones are not. And so you’re looking at it so you can pour more, more fuel on the fire, so to speak. So let’s just start there. What do we actually care about when it comes to analytics and then what am I looking at and how often?

(03:44):

So let’s start with, what do we actually look at inside of Podbean, which you guys know is what I recommend inside Podcast Pro University.

(03:53):

And that’s what I have used this entire time. I love it. Super affordable pod bean, and inside of there on the left-hand side, you can go down and you can click on I think it’s statistics on the left and you can take a look at what’s happening with your show. And really what I’m looking at is am I trending upward? Okay. Like, I don’t care how shallow that graph may be, but am I trending up? I’m not up every single month.

(04:24):

Okay. Like in December of this last year, I had a huge dip, but that makes sense. It’s December, it’s Christmas people. Aren’t super in tune with growing a business, they’re focused on family as they should be. So I expect that my show is going to take a dip. And then in January it had a spike. Yep. Exactly as expected, right?

(04:46):

In January, people are leaping in new year’s resolutions goals. They’re ready to do the things. So that is as expected as well. But when you look at my two year, I’ve been podcasting for about 2.3 years now. If you look at the graph over time, it’s trending up, right? There’s pivots, there’s dips, there’s ups and downs ebbs and flows. But, but over time, it’s up into the right. Okay. So that’s what you’re looking for.

(05:12):

You want to see like, is my show growing now, the only thing you can compare, if your show is, is growing or not is to yourself. So what I’m doing is every month, once a month, only on the last day of the month, I’m going into my little analytics spreadsheet in my Google share drive, and I’m updating it with downloads and it’s just information. It doesn’t make me feel bad.

(05:37):

It doesn’t make me feel anything really. It’s just cool. It grew awesome. And you know, what’s funny is you can usually tell why your show grew. Did you do extra bonus episodes while your show is going to grow? It’s going to be bigger than the month prior. Did you slip, did you skip some weeks while obviously your numbers are going to be lower? Was it a holiday month? Your numbers are probably going to go down a bit unless a holiday podcast.

(05:58):

Did you have a whole lot of guests or do something really different really out of brand? Your show might go up. It might go down just depending on what your audience is wanting from you. The other thing to think about too is did you really pivot, did you step out of your content pillars?

(06:15):

Did you go too far outside of what you’re known for your show’s going to dip because you’re, you’re diluting your brand when you don’t stay on point with your niche and solve their problems.

(06:27):

Okay. So that’s really what you’re looking for now. How often am I looking once a month? That’s it. I don’t need to look more often than that. Okay. And I’m just looking, did I grow yes or no? And then why, if yes, how can I do more of that? If, no. What did I do? And one of the other pieces of information, really, the only other piece of information that I’m looking at inside of my podcast analytics are my episodes.

(06:48):

So if you scroll further down in the in that little analytics section, if you scroll further down and you can change the timeframe. So I check my two year, I check my one year and I check my 90 day podcast episodes to see which episodes are the most downloaded are the most listened to. And then I’m looking for trends in there. I’m looking for trends on content.

(07:12):

What are you guys actively searching for in listening to titles? What are those titles like? Are they triggering? Are they SEO focused? Are they formed in a question? Are they formed in a rhetorical? Like, how am I form formatting?

(07:25):

Those episodes that are doing really, really well. And then I’m also looking at how I can do what more of that. So just to give you guys an example, when I go and I look at my top five episodes from the last year, I see that live coaching is highly, highly demanded.

(07:44):

And what’s interesting is the episodes that say live coaching at the beginning of the title are doing better than the ones where I was hiding that it was live coaching and putting it at the back. So I’ve since converted back to my original method of titling my live coaching episodes with live coaching at the front, super fun, super easy tweak.

(08:04):

I could also, if I wanted to pour fuel on this fire, so to speak, go back and retitle all the live coaching episodes by pulling in live coaching and putting it at the front. See, so I’m only doing this to help my show grow. Okay. The other ones I noticed is that any time I have triggering episodes, like, is it time to break up with Instagram? That’s a really heavy hitter for me. Anytime I talk about money, you guys love it.

(08:28):

Like how I made 36 K in three days. That’s a huge episode that you all love. How you can have my exact income model, how you can be in coaching and have a profitable business, like any episode that has to do with your success with, with financial income or with apps that you’re super, probably frustrated with. Those are going to do super well.

(08:48):

So I pay attention to that. Now you can you can also redo a title or a topic that you’ve already done then in a different way. Like my industry episode was so long ago, it was so long ago. It would be time for me to maybe do an update there and talk about how my feelings have changed towards it, or, or blah, blah, blah. So looking at your episode, analytics really helps you double down and know what your person needs and wants.

(09:17):

And it’s desiring from you because why would they click on something if they didn’t really want to listen? Or the inside of that episode was a gangster and people are talking about it. Now, what else can we do here? If you go back and you look at your most downloaded episodes in the past 90 days, one year in two years, you can go back to those blogs, that link to the episodes.

(09:37):

This is a, this is a bonus strategy, excuse my ring, doorbell, and update those blogs and make sure that those call to actions are updated. Right? I have some really old episodes that might link to a course that no longer exists that are still a super high performing episode.

(09:54):

So we as a team need to go back and update those blog posts so that they are relevant so that they point to the right current solution that I have, which right now is three things, right? Clarify, you’re calling podcast pro U and podcast profit done. So really those are the solutions that I want to provide.

(10:11):

No matter what episode my Lola is listening to. So that’s where you can look at. Okay. So I think I talked about what are you checking for? Okay. The next question. How do you know if you’re ranking? You can go to chartable.com, C H A R T A B L E. COM

(10:27):

I think I spelled that right .com. And you guys don’t need to do the paid one. You don’t need to do anything crazy. You just type in the title of your podcast and search. Okay. Now this is super sporadic. Let me tell you, I have ranked number 21 or 24. I don’t remember one of those in the entrepreneurship category. And then there are months I’m not ranked at all. There are months I rank at one 61.

(10:47):

Like I’m all, it’s all over the board because it depends. What is everyone else’s show doing? What is your show doing? How many reviews have you had recently? Like, have you taken a hiatus and just done one episode a week versus three? Like it’s super sporadic and based on its own algorithm. So don’t get tied to this. I’m sure not tied at all to the, to the months that I’m not ranked.

(11:08):

And I’m only checking it once a month. What I’m doing is paying attention to whatever that highest number ever was. Great. I’m going to use that for marketing. So in my copy and my marketing, I say I’ve ranked number, whatever it was 21 or 24 in the entrepreneurship category. Sweet.

(11:22):

That’s awesome for you to use as messaging, but don’t get tied to that again. It’s just, it’s just, just marketing. It doesn’t mean anything. And because it’s so sporadic people don’t hang out in the top 10 consistently, unless you’re over about a million downloads.

(11:37):

And we know that only 0.0, I think 5% of people ever hit that level anyway. So relax. Okay. It’s like chill. Check it once in a while while if it feels triggering for you, don’t check it at all because it’s really not relevant. Okay. The next question you have is how do you know if my podcast is doing well?

(11:55):

Okay. Well, let me tell you guys some crazy information here. My show has really been a steady grower for 2.3 years. I’m talking, it’s just like bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, like around th th th th like a super slow grow. Well, I have clients who had a really slow six months. Like their chart was almost just straight, straight, straight, straight, straight, straight.

(12:19):

And then they hit that six month or even a year. And then they had a massive pop, like I’m talking like 20 K download pop a month. Like it, it was massive. I’ve also had students who have a massive out of the gate, they’re like hitting 10, 10,000 months.

(12:34):

And then they, they sloped down and they kind of like, they kind of taper and then they hit like a consistency. So what I’m telling you is that everybody’s podcasting journey is really different.

(12:46):

So you really can’t compare yourself to anyone else. And my only question for me is, did I do the best I could did I say consistently? And by consistently, I mean a minimum of one episode every single week, ladies don’t mess around. If you really want to grow fast, lay down some other apps that you’re wasting your time on. All right. And double down on the show. I’m telling you it’s so worth it in the longterm.

(13:10):

It is so worth it to say, I’m going to delete Instagram Thursday through Monday. I’m only going to show up there three days a week, and I’m gonna do two episodes. I am telling you keeping the main thing. The main thing is going to stop diluting your brand, stop driving you crazy and allow you to actually scale and grow something that you own. Yes. So good. So are you showing up consistently?

(13:31):

And then the next one is, is your show growing? Is it trending up when you look at the big picture, of course, we’re going to have peaks and valleys, but is it just trending up if it’s not trending up, can you find some reasons why, or take a look at the months where you were trending up and ask yourself, what did I do differently?

(13:51):

Did you have more solo episodes? Your audience is loving you. Did you have more interviews? Maybe your audience is loving those conversations. Did you do an extra episode a week, obviously that is going to really impact, affect your download numbers. So those are the questions you can ask yourself. And then finally, my last piece of advice here is to just bless it and release it.

(14:14):

Okay. Podcasting is a long grow. It’s a long game. It’s a choice too, that you intentionally that you’re going to do this as your one thing until, until anybody that has a successful blog, YouTube channel pod cast is definitely in it for the long haul.

(14:35):

Okay? Overnight success is a lie and anyone that’s promising you otherwise, I’m sorry, but you’re going to be disappointed. You have to do the work. You have to go through the grit in order to have the breakthrough, you have to show up and speak and get through the messy, the messy start in order to reach a fruitful finish. Okay?

(14:56):

So you’ve got to just roll up your sleeves, put your head down and get to work girl. And also just know that no matter what your download numbers are, it really doesn’t matter. As long as you stay consistent and you stay super focused and you are niching in that is really important. And you have clarity on serving your person with all of your heart. That’s all, that’s all. This is about.

(15:18):

What if you impacted one person, would it not be worth? It changed one person’s life, motherhood, marriage, business spiritual growth prosperity, maybe their health journey, like whatever your thing is, would it not be worth it to know that you made an impact in someone else’s life using your voice.

(15:36):

And I’m here to tell you that if you podcast and you stick with it for six, 12 months and beyond, you’re going to be helping so many more people than you even know, because a lot of people are lurkers. No offense, no offense. If you’re a lurker on my show, but you know what I mean? And girl like they listen and they don’t engage. So there’s also everyone. That’s there for you hearing from you and you don’t even know it. So good.

(16:00):

So that those are my tips. Those are my takeaways for you on what to look for in your podcasting stats, how you can use that information to grow and pour fuel on the fire and continue to repurpose content going back and updating the episodes that are really killing it and getting your head, keeping your head down, staying super, super focused, checking it once a month, bless them releasing and doing it until I hope this was helpful.

(16:26):

If you guys want more of these quick episodes and you have some topics for me, pop into my Instagram DMS, let me know, shoot me an email. I am committed to showing up for you guys here in my one place with all my heart, with all that I have to offer. And I would love to hear what you need to learn and why you want to hear from me love. And God’s light is your life.