Speaker 1: In today's episode, you'll learn how to use Apple's Podcast Analytics platform to better understand your audience. Welcome to Podcasting Q&A, where you learn the best tips and strategies to launch, grow, and monetize your show. This week's question comes from Dan.

Speaker 2: This is Dan at Sky Pilot Faith Quest Podcast, and I have some questions about the Apple Podcast Analytics. I love the Buzzsprout Analytics, use them all the time and find them very helpful. Then I go to the Apple Podcast Analytics, and I find them really confusing. Sometimes there's information about a particular podcast that is lacking on the next screen. It seems inconsistent within its own podcast analytics as well as compared to what you all offer. Tell me what I should be looking at there. Should I even be using them? Is there helpful information there? What are your recommendations?

Speaker 1: Thank you so much for your question, Dan. So Apple Podcast Analytics offers some additional data points that they don't necessarily share with podcast hosting sites. And while having more information is usually a really good thing, you kind of need to know what you're looking for and what you're looking at when you're in Apple Podcast Connect. So on this episode, we're going to tell you and explain a little bit about why the data points might look a little bit different, and then how to get the most out of Apple Podcast Analytics. So let's talk about why you might see some download discrepancy between your hosting site and Apple Podcast Connect. So with a hosting site, they're going to show you across the board how many listens an episode is getting. Apple Podcast is not set up that way. Apple Podcast Connect is going to only show you information from listeners that meet two specific set of criteria. The first is that the listener has to be using the most current version of the Apple Podcast app. The second is that that user also has to have given permission for their diagnostic information and their usage data to be shared. On top of that, there is a 72-hour lag time. So if someone listened to an episode that you posted on Monday, you're not going to see that reflected in your stats until Thursday. On top of that, if you get less than five people that meet that criteria, Apple is going to register zero data for that episode. So the key here is if you want to find out information about how many listens an episode is getting, you're going to want to check in with your hosting site, like Buzzsprout, who's going to show you how many listens you've gotten over the course of all time, as well as where maybe your audience is listening from. So if you're not going to get an accurate reflection of your download information from Podcast Connect, what is it good for? Actually, there are three really good data points that Podcast Connect can offer you. The first is average consumption by episode. When you land on the analytics dashboard for your podcast, scroll down until you see recent episodes. Once you're there, look at the stat in the far right column. The percentage you see here is the average amount of time your audience is listening to each episode. For example, if you have a 20-minute episode with a 75% average consumption rating, that means that people are listening to about the first 15 minutes of that episode. So the next data point you can see in Podcast Connect is episode listen duration. Click through to one of your episodes to see a graph showing you the percentage of listeners that are still tuned in at any point in your episode. If you're doing everything right, you should see a gradual taper from the beginning to the end of the episode. If you see a sharp drop in listeners, click on the portion of the episode and listen to it to figure out why so many listeners bailed at the same time. For example, there was an episode entitled Finding the Best Podcasting Microphone, and we noticed that people stopped listening around the 19-minute mark. When we went back and looked at that, we noticed that that was where we had kind of identified that podcasting microphone, and so people didn't really have a reason to keep listening. So what you want to do is really think about why people would drop off. Really explore that. If that's that you've given them an answer and they don't need to listen anymore, if it's more of a clickbait kind of title, if you had an ad run in the middle, just reverse engineer why everyone might have disconnected at that point so that you can create more content that has people stay on for the duration of the episode. The last thing that you can learn from Podcast Connect is how many new listeners subscribed after listening to a particular episode. Below the listener duration graph for each episode, you'll see a row of additional statistics. On the far right, you'll notice a percentage called Devices Subscribed. Devices Subscribed is the percentage of unique devices that subscribe when listening to the episode. For example, if you have an episode that has a 20% subscribe rate versus an episode that has a 90% subscribe rate, you're going to want to look at what you did to get 90% subscription because if you can do more of that, it'll result in more podcast listeners. It's going to help you grow your podcast tremendously. While Apple Podcasts can offer you some specific data points for a portion of your audience, we really do recommend that if you want a more holistic look at your podcast performance, you check back in with your podcast hosting site. Thanks so much for your question, Dan. If you have a question that you would like us to answer on a future episode of the show, definitely go to speakpipe.com slash buzzsprout, or click the link in the show notes and leave us a brief audio message. Don't forget to subscribe to the Buzzsprout YouTube channel and subscribe to Podcasting Q&A wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. That's it for today. Thanks for listening, and as always, keep podcasting.