Justin: 00:01

One thing to realize about all analytics numbers, they're all going to fall prey to some disadvantage.

Jeremy: 00:08

I suspect that most of the most profitable shows have very minuscule download numbers and nobody will ever hear about them.

Justin: 00:15

As a marketer, I'm way more on the soft metric qualitative side than the quantitative side. This is data where you actually have a human being responding to you.

Jeremy: 00:29

One One thing that I like is that it feels like, okay, I can actually influence this.

Justin: 00:33

If I care about the download metric at all, it's that I've just noticed that a show needs to hit a certain level of downloads before you start to get those responses.

Jeremy: 00:44

To me, this is almost the ultimate metric, and it sucks that we only get it once a year. So one of the stats that has really jumped out to me from both the 2023 and 2024 podcast marketing trends report is this kind of pair of stats. They're kind of like under the radar. I actually buried them a little bit at the end of the report because they didn't seem like that big a deal. But then some other people started like mentioning it to me and reaching out and saying, Hey, does this really make sense to you?

Jeremy: 01:09

And it was this kind of disconnect between the stated purpose that people had of their shows and the metrics they use to measure success. And so in particular, we had in 2024, '40 percent of respondents say their show's purpose is to grow or support their existing business. In 2023, it was 42%, so very similar. But in both of those years, in 2024, only 8% of respondents cited a revenue related metric as their primary measure of success. And in 2023, it was 10.4.

Jeremy: 01:38

So Mhmm. We have 40% of respondents saying the show's purpose is to grow the business, which I would assume means bring in clients and customers and revenue, but less than 10% of people are actually using any kind of monetary metric to measure the effectiveness of the show. Is this kinda weird to you?

Justin: 01:56

In a way, yes. And in a way, no. This is kind of what always happens in marketing. It's like, how's our website doing? Well, the views are up, you know?

Justin: 02:05

Okay. Well, but is revenue up? Are those views translating into paying customers? Part of it because it's harder to track that. It's just very difficult to to figure out if someone went from website viewer to customer and in the same way, podcast listener to customer.

Justin: 02:24

So in a way it's not weird. And I think we're just as a species, we just love vanity metrics. That's part that's just the they're easy to get. They're easy to display. We like when metrics are going up into the right.

Justin: 02:40

So I can understand why maybe people aren't going that extra mile and and figuring out, is this podcast actually growing my business?

Jeremy: 02:49

Yeah. So whether or not you are producing a show for your business or you're producing it for some other reasons, essentially the download is still the default metric far and away. And I'm not entirely convinced that this is the best metric that people should be tracking. I know you're a little more bullish on the download, kind of going against the the current grain a little bit. So you might get into some tension, butting heads here a little bit.

Jeremy: 03:12

But let's maybe just start off and go back in time and look at, like, why is the download the default metric that every podcaster essentially obsesses over?

Justin: 03:22

I mean, originally, and this persists to this day, a podcast is an RSS feed that has all these audio enclosures that point to MP3 files. And in the old days, you would download those MP3 files, sync them to your iPod, bring your iPod into your car, plug it into the thing, and then listen off the iPod. And so you could track and say, oh, okay. How many people downloaded this episode and then transferred it to their iPod? And then eventually, the iPods would automatically download and they'd give you a little queue of episodes to listen to.

Justin: 03:58

That's how the metric started. Essentially for an RSS based podcast, that is still how it works. So these days, when people click play in their podcast player, they might think they're streaming that audio file, but it actually downloads it to the device. So when you click play in Apple Podcasts or Pocket Cast or any of those, even Spotify, if they're doing pass through, it's actually downloading that file to your device, and then you're listening to it. There's some criticism of it because it's not exact.

Justin: 04:31

It doesn't tell you a lot of other things. How much of an episode did people listen to? Where did they drop off? There's other additional metrics that I think are helpful. I'm still on the team that says, I think the download is a useful metric.

Justin: 04:46

I think there's a lot of misconceptions about the download. I think you can add other metrics to it to make it more valuable, but that's the history. And, that's why it's still really the primary metric that podcasters use to evaluate their success or or failure.

Jeremy: 05:04

I would say from my perspective, being less technical than you involved on the hosting side of things, The download was one of the only metrics that you could measure with traditional RSS going back beyond podcasting even. Of course, this was better than anything else that was out there. Now we have platforms like YouTube that have come along that offer all these analytics and now we have Spotify for podcasters back end and Apple Podcasts back end. And they give us some of these other data that, you had kind of just mentioned there. But I think for a long time, like, it's just the easiest metric.

Jeremy: 05:34

And I think that it's hard for us to understand a lot of other metrics. And it's hard for hosting platforms and anyone else to give much more than the download. And you can see that. And so I think a lot of times there's almost a software UI bias here where it's like, if your hosting platform tells you this is the big number, you're like, as a user, I don't know what to pay attention to, but they're telling me that I got this many downloads. So I'm gonna pay attention to that.

Jeremy: 06:00

And I'm gonna chase that. And, really, for a long time, really up until the past few years, that was all that we really had to go on. And so I think things are shifting in download land, and a lot of people are super against the download. I see some pros and cons, but I'd love to to hear you state the case for the download as a continued relevant measure of traction or success of a podcast.

Justin: 06:20

Well, the the high level numbers on any centralized platform have the same problem. So on YouTube, it's views. What is a view? A view is somebody who watches a video for x number of seconds, whether that video is thirty minutes long or two minutes long. What's a stream on Spotify?

Justin: 06:39

A stream is anyone that listened to it over sixty seconds. That's still the big metric that people use on those platforms. It has the same problem. In some ways, I think the download is still useful because most of those numbers people say, well, a lot of those numbers are auto downloads and things like that. Auto downloading is not really a thing anymore.

Justin: 06:59

Most of the apps don't auto download anymore. Most of the listening that happens with RSS based podcasts is still people clicking play and requesting that episode. It, to me, feels just as valuable as say saying someone watched a video for x number of seconds or streamed something for sixty seconds. It they're basically the same, type of high level number. So if you're gonna look at high level numbers, I think they're useful.

Justin: 07:28

The other thing I'll say is podcasts on Transistor that have momentum, downloads are consistently going up. And then they can look on Spotify or YouTube, and often they'll see the same things. Oh, streams on Spotify are also up in basically the same way. Views on YouTube are also up in basically the same way. So if you just want a general guidance on how's the show doing, is it gaining momentum, is it not gaining momentum, Podcasts that are doing well, their download numbers are going up.

Justin: 08:00

They're up into the right. Each episode has more downloads than the previous episode. Having a lot of downloads is still an indicator that your podcast is doing well, and I don't think we should avoid it.

Jeremy: 08:13

I agree with a lot of that. And I think that there are some places where people get too fixated on the number and they forget what they're actually trying to measure, what the download is supposed to indicate. For most people, it is engagement with the show. And so I think probably if you are producing a show for your business, your assumption is people are more likely to become a client or customer if they engage with not only one episode, but many episodes over time. And so downloads are hopefully an indicator that there are people coming back to a show.

Jeremy: 08:41

Downloads do not tell us how many episodes each person is consuming. And so you could have 5,000 downloads in a month, and that could be 5,000 people listening to one episode each for thirty seconds, or it could be one person listening to 5,000 episodes of your back catalog all the way through if you have those or listening repeat times. Mhmm. And so both of those could be true. We don't really know that from downloads.

Jeremy: 09:01

But I think where downloads worry me sometimes is when people start trying to juice their numbers, let's say, and they are treating that as real growth of engaged people. And so you see this a lot of times. I have done several client audits where they have engaged certain podcast promotion services. Some are kind of thought of as more reputable, some are more kind of LinkedIn, CD, comment, spammy types, but all of them really ruin your ability to understand what's actually going on in your show. And so a lot of times, people will pay for these downloads and they might actually get repeat downloads because there are actually still some platforms that do auto downloads.

Jeremy: 09:41

I think Castbox is one. Mhmm. There are several like lesser used podcast apps that you'll see, like you paid for this campaign on the platform and you got a whole bunch of downloads and you're like, great. My show is big now. And then you realize it just either drops off immediately for some campaigns if you stop paying and other ones, you just continually get this high rate of downloads that you're just thinking like, there's no way I actually have this many downloads on Castbox.

Jeremy: 10:03

And so keeping in mind, like, what are we trying to measure here? It's not actually downloads. It is engaged listeners of the show. And I think that this is somewhere where other metrics can, if not totally replace downloads, offer some kind of useful augmented information about, you know, the people who are listening to our show and their experience with it. And some of our good friends, Dan Meisner and Jonas Wust at Bumper, they've been big advocates of moving away from the download and toward listen time, overall listen time as well as in episode listen time.

Jeremy: 10:33

What are your kind of thoughts on that as a metric to track?

Justin: 10:36

I think it's a good additional metric to track. I think they're on record saying that they still track downloads for their their clients as well. One thing to realize about all analytics numbers is that they're all going to fall prey to some sort of disadvantage. I use the example of Marc Maron's podcast where I primarily listen for the monologue at the beginning, then I'm out. He knows us.

Justin: 11:02

He puts all the ads at the beginning. So he knows a lot of people are just listening to the first five, ten minutes, and then some folks will stay for the conversation. And so maybe Mark's numbers are really bad in terms of episode consumption rate. But on his side, he's like, it's perfect. I'm getting exactly what I need out of this.

Justin: 11:22

One thing I'll say is be careful what you optimize for and make sure that it's aligning with what you actually wanna achieve out of this show.

Jeremy: 11:31

Two more things that I wanna add in terms of the download, just for some context here. The other danger of looking at downloads is when you start to compare yourself to others, And it is very hard to compare two shows because people have different reasons for producing their show. They do different things within their lives and businesses. And so you might have two shows on the same topic in the same category that one show does 50,000 downloads an episode and one show that does 500 downloads an episode. And you might say, well, obviously, the 50,000 download an episode is way more successful.

Jeremy: 12:04

But I suspect that the number of 6 and 7 figure businesses run on podcasts, I think most of those actually have very small download numbers that have high priced products on the back end. And so I think probably most of the most profitable shows have very minuscule download numbers and nobody will ever hear about them. And so Mhmm. I think that this is something to keep in mind as well. Like, what are the goals for the show and really measuring against yourself to some extent.

Jeremy: 12:28

I've seen the back end of all of these types of shows. I've seen small shows that do multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in revenue based largely on the podcast. That's not the main product, but it funnels people into the main product. And I've worked with many clients who have high download numbers that are breakeven or losing money on the show. And so when you're using the download as the singular metric of success, it's really easy to look at what the industry is saying.

Jeremy: 12:51

This is what you should be aiming for. And you lose sight of, like, does my show need to get that type of download numbers? And you end up chasing something that actually be probably shouldn't even be focusing on. This is something that would, like, a lot they come in to work with me and they're like, I wanna grow the show. And then I do an audit of the show and I talk with them and I'm like, you know, for way less effort, you could have a way smaller show that would be way more profitable for your business.

Jeremy: 13:10

And it is just so hard to create a show that gets that level of downloads. Like, what if we recalibrated our, you know, view of the show and, you know, it's just gonna be way more money for less effort. And isn't that kind of what everybody wants? And a lot of people are like, oh, I never thought about it that way. Yeah.

Jeremy: 13:23

That makes way more sense. Let's do that instead. Mhmm. So we've already talked about listen time, and we mentioned consumption rate a little bit as well. Let's maybe dig into some of the other alternative metrics that people can use to kinda calculate and get a sense of, is their show resonating with people?

Jeremy: 13:38

Are there people who are engaging with it? Is it, you know, quote, unquote successful? Whatever that means to everybody. And in my mind, these kind of fall into almost two categories, hard metrics, which are kind of like numbers on a screen somewhere you can find online. And then there's more kind of like soft, maybe qualitative metrics, which might exist in not quite so black and white numbers.

Jeremy: 13:58

So let's maybe start with the the hard metrics and go through some of these things that people can measure.

Justin: 14:03

Yeah. So in addition to consumption rate and listen time, there's conversion rates. We talked about this last episode. So how many people saw your episode on the Spotify homepage and then actually got interested in an episode. And then of the people who expressed interest, how many converted to an actual stream?

Justin: 14:20

That's a hard number. Yeah. If that's going up and your conversion rates are increasing every time you make a change, that's a positive direction, probably.

Jeremy: 14:30

And we're gonna talk about this later in the episode, how a lot of these metrics are actually things that may lead to more downloads. And so if we're chasing downloads, probably looking at some of these things will actually lead to that. And so this is certainly one of those on the conversion rates. So we've also got a little bit of a more obscure metric here, which you can find through the open podcast prefix project or o p three. And this is a prefix you can add to your podcast, and then you actually get some additional data that most hosting providers don't supply.

Jeremy: 14:55

They they basically show you how many unique devices, consumed your podcast over the past thirty days and how many downloads in total you had. And so you can kinda take these two numbers and then calculate how many roughly this is a very kind of blunt measurement, but roughly how many episodes did each person listen to. And for me, there used to be the chartable cross episode retention data when chartable was still around. And so you could kind of see of the people who listen to one episode, what percentage of those listen to the next one and so on. This is kind of the closest we have to that right now where you can see, you know, ideally, we want everybody who listens to our show to listen to every episode we published in the last month.

Jeremy: 15:31

That's never gonna be the case, but I think that this metric, looking at that, you know, how many unique people or devices, how many downloads total, you can kinda get a sense of, like, okay, are people listening to more than one episode on average or is it people who are just coming in and churning immediately? So that's, I think, another interesting one, to look into. What else is on your list here?

Justin: 15:50

Yeah. So there's also these, like, Spotify wrapped. Pocket Cast did this for the first time this past year.

Jeremy: 15:56

Mhmm.

Justin: 15:56

And what's interesting there is if you can see if you're somebody's number one show that when it gets published, you're going to that episode. You're going to listen. And, I've noticed in my consumption, like, I have shows where I listen to every episode, and then I have shows where I listen to every second or third episode, and then I have shows that I'm a fan of, but maybe I only listen to one episode every quarter or something like that. Taking a look at these wrapped numbers and seeing, for how many people are you their number one show, that could be an interesting stat to kind of observe. And if you're nobody's number one show, if your goal is to be a can't miss podcast, then maybe you wanna, yeah, switch things up.

Jeremy: 16:43

To me, this is almost the ultimate metric. And it kinda sucks that we only get it once a year. There's one update a year, so you look forward to it all year. You can't really make many adjustments. The feedback cycle is really long.

Jeremy: 16:53

But I think that's really what all of us should be aiming for is to create the favorite show for some people. And this was something that you you only get the Spotify, you users here or Pocket Cast listeners

Justin: 17:04

in the

Jeremy: 17:04

case that they rolled this out now. So it's not your whole audience, but I actually took the numbers from our Spotify rap to this past year. And then I extrapolated that out across, okay, Spotify makes up this percentage of our listener base. So if that were true for all of our listeners, I think it was actually like several hundred people that we were the number one show of, which I was my mind was blown because we only did a kind of like ten episode season. And I guess we had the roasts in our feed then we've now since removed them.

Jeremy: 17:29

So we had maybe 25, 30 episodes. So we weren't even publishing all year. And I thought, wow, that is really, really interesting. And I think that actually maybe leads us into some of the soft metrics here.

Justin: 17:41

Mhmm.

Jeremy: 17:42

Which are things that are a little bit harder to measure. But my experience of producing season one of the show is I had a lot of people who were giving me the feedback or posting publicly online. Like, this is my favorite show right now or I'm listening to every episode. I'm listening to multiple episodes. Last week, I was on a call with somebody who was asking, so when's the show coming back?

Jeremy: 17:59

Like, I I miss it. And it's it's been basically ten months since our last episode, and this person is now telling me, like, I want more episodes. And so that's this interesting overlap here. We got this Spotify kind of favorite show, but then we can actually get some of that data the rest of the year. So what are some of your favorite ways to kind of get some of this mushier, looser, more kind of ephemeral data?

Justin: 18:20

To kind of expose my personal preference as a marketer, I'm way more on the soft metric qualitative side than the quantitative side. I think I inherently distrust most quantitative metrics. I think they're always a little bit messy. You never really know the cause and effect. Whereas qualitative metrics, if you're doing them consistently, they can become quantitative and that you eventually build up so many anecdotes that you have really reliable data, but this is data where you actually have a human being responding to you.

Justin: 18:55

I've always said my number one metric is response rate. You put out an episode. Do you get an email? Do you get a comment? Do you get someone stopping you on the street?

Justin: 19:05

Do you get someone stopping you at a conference? Do you get people trying to find you somewhere on the Internet and saying, listen, that episode changed my life, or that episode was great, or that episode really made me think. That metric, that response rate is what I'm looking for. And if I care about the download metric at all, it's that I've just noticed that a show needs to hit a certain level of downloads before you start to get those responses. Once you have, let's say, 500 to a thousand legitimate downloads per episode, I've found personally, that's when you should be seeing some responses, some people finding you and telling you how much they enjoy the show or interacting with you in some way.

Justin: 19:56

I think response rate should be the number one metric. You're trying to get people to respond in some way, either to become customers or become fans, just engage in a thoughtful way with what you're talking about. That's accessible to everybody. And I like that podcasts have always had this friction because this is what makes the listener to me more valuable than a YouTube viewer is they're driving home and they have to wait until they get into the garage before they reach out to you. That kind of engagement where they have to actively, like, pull over and then write you an email or get home into the garage and then respond to your message on Blue Sky, like, that's response rate.

Justin: 20:39

And I think it's really what everyone should be optimizing for.

Jeremy: 20:44

I was turned on to this by, newsletter writer and book writer and marketer, Anne Handley. I don't know if you're, familiar with her. She's a great person to follow. She's more in the b to b space, but she's got a just a wonderful marketing newsletter that's, like, funny and warm and human. I think it was for her hundredth issue of her newsletter.

Jeremy: 21:01

She shared, like, a bunch of metrics that she tracks, and her number one was response rate. I think she actually called it unsolicited response rate. It wasn't that you asked for somebody to respond to you. It's just that people read the newsletter and could not help but write back.

Justin: 21:13

Mhmm.

Jeremy: 21:14

And ever since then, that was several years ago. I actually, for an old newsletter that I wrote, I turned this kind of soft, more anecdotal data into hard data where basically I put a a spreadsheet together where if ever you get issued the newsletter, I said, okay, here's how many people received this newsletter. So maybe it was like 7,000 and here's how many replies that I got. And usually it was like a small number. It would like most issues might get zero or one.

Jeremy: 21:39

And then you'd get one that got eight and you're like, woah, that I I was onto something there. And so then, of course, you can just make a formula that turns that into a percentage. So what is your unsolicited response rate? And so I actually turned this into a hard metric and you can just see the trends. And a lot of times I was very surprised that the episodes that I just really wanted to land with people got crickets.

Jeremy: 21:58

And I was like, that it's still one of my favorite issues and I'm gonna go to my grave saying like, this was the best thing I've ever written. And then it was some other things that were to me, I was just like, I don't know that there's really anything here. I'm gonna write that. And that would get a bunch of replies. And you can kind of get an insight into like where people are at and and what is resonating with them about your work.

Jeremy: 22:15

So Yeah. I I love that metric. The other thing that I would add on to that or there's actually two additional layers to the response rate, and it has to do with the actual content of that response. And so the one could be a specific thing that you want to hear people say. And so you may want to be building mind share in the market that you are operating in around a specific thing.

Justin: 22:35

Mhmm.

Jeremy: 22:36

And so that might be, like, you want to be associated with a certain idea. And so maybe we want to be associated with data driven podcast marketing. And maybe I even wanna know that people find our approach to making data feel approachable refreshing. And so if that's a goal of mine, then that is guiding the show. I wanna hear that back, and that is a sign that, hey.

Jeremy: 22:54

We're doing our job that we're we're setting up to do. The one for me right now that I've kind of heard a lot from people recently, like, once a month, I'll get on a a call with somebody or they'll send me an email and they'll say, yours and Pod News are the only two newsletters I subscribe to on podcasting. And to me, I'm always like, okay. Great. That is exactly what I want.

Jeremy: 23:13

I want to be a must subscribe, must read, or people say, yours is the only newsletter I read every day. I know the bar for quality is consistently high if people are giving me that feedback. And so Yeah. That's, one of the other things. You can kind of set a goal for yourself of, like, what do I want people to associate with me?

Jeremy: 23:27

And then that goes into your content. And then if that's coming back to you, you know, I'm hitting the mark on that thing.

Justin: 23:33

And by the way, I think the reason I like this approach, there's actually more ambiguity with quantitative research often. You're guessing. Mhmm. So let's just take examples like book sales. An author puts out a book, and they don't know how what percentage of the book got read.

Justin: 23:51

People have no idea how many people are reading it, how many people buy it and don't read it, all that stuff. What they do know is response rate. Hey, author. I'm emailing you right now because chapter six changed my life. I need to let you know.

Justin: 24:06

Here's all the reasons I care about this. That's response rate. Response rate is almost always correlated with things you want. People talking about your thing word-of-mouth, people recommending it to a friend. My guess, for example, is, response rate or kind of general qualitative chatter about the show Severance is correlated with the number of people who are watching it and consuming it and going all the way to the end.

Justin: 24:37

But this approach allows you to just bypass all that, like, wonky data stuff. Like, oh, is it Where is this all coming from? And what does this consumption mean? And Oh, it doesn't matter. If response rates are up, you're golden.

Justin: 24:52

And as a creator, it's human. If your streams are going up or your average consumption rate is going up, okay. Great. This happened to me at Podcast Movement in LA. I'm walking by myself.

Justin: 25:07

You know, you're not there. My wingman's not there. I'm just walking around. And somebody comes up to me and says, hey. I just wanna let you know that I really enjoy the show that you and Jeremy are doing together.

Justin: 25:18

It's like, holy crap. Like, out of a fairly small number of people, there's someone that recognized me and actually had the wherewithal to come up and talk to me. That speaks volumes about Mhmm. I can extrapolate from that and go, wow. We must be reaching a lot more people if you have that kinda interaction.

Justin: 25:39

But then on a human level, it's like I can go, oh, well, can you tell me, like, what's resonating about the show? What do you like? What don't you like? It gives me way better information. And as a creator, that's way more motivating than just saying, Okay, well, consumption rate is down this month.

Justin: 25:56

That sucks. Like, I can use some of that information.

Jeremy: 26:00

You know, it's striking me here that you were talking about response rate as in people responding to you. But there's also like, that is actually indicative. All of these soft metrics but also all the hard metrics, I think come back to this, like, emotional response rate where it's like how many episodes that you put out connect with people in some way. And that could the the variety of connection can be name any emotion and there's a way to connect with that. And so that could be inspiring or motivating or teaching them something or entertaining them, making them laugh, like, whatever that is, making them feel like as part of a community.

Jeremy: 26:28

All of these things, like, this is what we're really trying to do. People will listen more if they are getting an emotional experience in some way out of a show. People will tell a friend if they're getting that experience. Like, they will remember the show. It will stick in their mind if they're getting these things.

Jeremy: 26:40

So this idea of response rate is almost kind of like how many times can you hit that mark with your episodes and you're gonna see a lot of these other things. So it's almost like everything is kind of tied back to a version of response rate, but it's more like what you're putting out there is that connecting with people. So

Justin: 26:56

That's right.

Jeremy: 26:56

Yeah. I think people sending you emails, responding to your social, post, things like that, mentioning you unprompted online, that's not really a response to you directly, but them sharing your show. You also mentioned that there's ways to do some of this kind of, like, social listening, things like that. I know Podchaser actually has a feature you can sign up for free, and you can see if your name or your show is mentioned on other shows. Mhmm.

Jeremy: 27:16

And this is actually something that after every year after I put out the podcast marketing trends report, then I see a bunch of other podcasts, usually about podcasting, are mentioning the report or mentioning me. I can see, oh, I didn't see that anywhere. Nobody mentioned that to me, but I'm hearing about this through this tool that, like, oh, other people are talking about this. Or Mhmm. You know, I hear that, sometimes I'll talk with somebody on a call and they'll say, oh, I was on this webinar the other day and they mentioned you.

Jeremy: 27:39

And I'm like, oh, cool. Like, I had no way to track that, but here somebody else is telling me this.

Justin: 27:43

Yeah. There's actually another service I'll shout out called PodScan that allows you to set up Google alert style alerts. So you can say, here's my brand name or here's my personal name or whatever, and it will alert you every time you're mentioned in a podcast. They're transcribing every episode ever released. And so that's another indication.

Justin: 28:05

You know, does this idea spread? We're looking for resonance. That's why we're doing this. And so if you're looking for resonance, then evaluate your success or failure based on that.

Jeremy: 28:18

So you again mentioned, you know, a lot of these things lead to downloads or lead to revenue. And so, essentially, what we're talking about here is this idea of lead and lag metrics, or some people call them leading and lagging metrics. How would you describe this concept to somebody who's not familiar with it?

Justin: 28:34

A leading metric in the software business is if we're getting more trials, that generally means that, you know, revenue will increase, and the lagging metric is revenue increased. A leading metric could be we're getting way more customer support requests complaining about bugs, but a lagging, we get more churn. People are Right. Canceling.

Jeremy: 28:56

It's essentially, like, there's some early indicator that predicts a future thing. And so there's, like, if you're seeing this now, you might expect to see this thing later, essentially.

Justin: 29:05

That's yeah. Because by the time somebody cancels or churns, and this happens in podcasting as well, they're like, you know what? This episode's just not doing it for me. And then you listen to two more, and you're like, this is so dumb. I'm just gonna unsubscribe or unfollow this podcast.

Justin: 29:20

Well, by the time they've churned, it's too late. Right? The lagging indicator has happened. There's nothing you can do about it. But if you were getting some leading indicators, like, people are finding you your email and saying, listen, man.

Justin: 29:33

Like, your audio quality has just gone downhill. Like, you've gotta fix this. I can't listen to it anymore. Getting an email like that from a bunch of people would be a leading indicator that you've gotta do something, and you actually have some time to do something about it. Whereas, once you've lost them, you've lost them forever.

Jeremy: 29:51

It's interesting because I was thinking mostly of positive leading indicators, but there are also the negative leading indicators that things are going to get worse. And it it actually makes me think of I remember Jay Klaus talking about, like, now his YouTube channel has exploded. His podcast is pretty big. The YouTube channel is much, much bigger. But when he first got into YouTube maybe two, three years ago, something like that, he was in his first year, was putting out really high quality video podcasts.

Jeremy: 30:14

And he mentioned at one point that he got all these comments. He was just, like, really frustrated with the process because he put in a lot of money into the process in terms of hiring, building out a studio, doing all these things. And then he'd also put in a ton of time into doing it and was still getting, you know, 800 maybe like 1,500, two thousand views an episode. But he's like, our quality that we're putting out is so much better than this and I just I don't know what to do about this. Like, should I quit?

Jeremy: 30:39

It doesn't feel like I can justify putting in this kind of expense going forward if we're not getting the views. But he mentioned that he kept getting these comments where people in the YouTube comment section would be saying, dude, I don't understand how you have so few views. Like, this is gold. This is so good. And that, in my experience, is always a leading indicator that you're doing something right and that there is a breakthrough coming at some point.

Jeremy: 31:00

And it's impossible to say the timeline on that, but if you are repeatedly getting that feedback that people are kind of incredulous almost that, like, how are you not getting more traction to this? Why why have I never heard about you before? It's like, okay. Now I know. Like, that is almost the purest leading indicator that, okay, I gotta keep doing this and double down on this and good things are gonna come.

Jeremy: 31:19

So Yeah. That's like a big one. I'm curious about, like, some of the other podcast focused leading indicators that you are going to get future maybe uptick in downloads.

Justin: 31:29

Well, one that I can think of right now is if your numbers are compounding each year, whether that's downloads, whether that's listens if they continue to go up and double every year, at first, that can seem so small. Like, I doubled from 500 to a thousand regular monthly listeners. That's a good sign if you do that two or three years in a row, because the tipping point is when all of a sudden it's like, well, going from a thousand to 2,000 didn't feel very big, but going from 2,000 to 4,000 starts to feel big. And I've used this this, metaphor of rolling a snowball down the hill. You know?

Justin: 32:06

It just, like, starts small, and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And I think that approach to growth in general is what we're looking for is, you know Yeah. Am I consistently getting more and more numbers as opposed to the other approach, which is the slot machine approach where you're just, like, pulling a lever and saying, okay. Did that move things? I got a big guest.

Justin: 32:28

Like, did it did it work? Did it work? It's like, no. Like, focusing on the things that compound, I think, are, a really good leading indicator.

Jeremy: 32:36

That's a super long term, leading indicator there. One thing that I like about a lot of leading indicators is that they actually feel more approachable, and it feels like you have a bit more agency over, okay, I can actually influence this in a more direct kind of cause and effect way than download sometimes. Mhmm. And so the one for me that I think is the my favorite leading indicator for basically all good things in podcasting is that consumption rate. You mentioned before with the Marc Maron example, there are certainly scenarios where maybe the point is not that everybody listens through the whole episode and it's segmented in a way where, you know, the first half of the episode is for, you know, the casual fans and the rest of the episodes for the die hards.

Justin: 33:13

Mhmm.

Jeremy: 33:13

But most shows are trying to get people to listen through the full episode. And I think if you're only getting 50% of people making it through the episode, if the average consumption rate is 50%, that is a leading indicator that you are going to stay plateaued or even shrink. And so that is probably something that is a negative sign for the future of your show. Whereas if you're getting 70 to 80% of people who are completing the episode, that's a leading indicator that, okay, like, I might have small downloads now, but if I have an average consumption rate of 80%, that is better than average. And that is a sign of a great objectively great show that the people who are coming in, they are loving the show.

Jeremy: 33:51

The content is on point. And so probably people who listen through full episodes of a show are more likely to come back. And people who are more likely to come back for an episode are more likely to talk about it or share it with someone. And so for me, that's one of those things where we actually have direct control over that in terms of how we're structuring our episodes, how much editing we're doing, the types of topics that we are, you know, covering in our shows, and how we structure those from a kind of content perspective.

Justin: 34:15

I think this is one reason the folks at Bumper like listen time as a metric because Mhmm. If you are increasing listen time Yeah. Sometimes what you'll do is you'll go, well, people are only listening to forty five minutes of an hour show, and so then you'll reduce it to thirty minutes, but then the consumption rate stays the same. Whereas Yeah. Maybe what you wanna optimize for is overall listen time.

Justin: 34:39

Like, people are just listening to more minutes on average every month, and that's also a leading indicator. Like, I'm putting out enough good minutes of audio that people are increasing the amount of audio they're listening to from me every month. And sometimes that could mean I'm just gonna put out more episodes. And Mhmm. Lo and behold, my listen time goes up.

Justin: 35:02

Sometimes it means I'm gonna make the episodes longer knowing that my consumption rate will stay roughly the same, but I'll get more listen time.

Jeremy: 35:10

I had a client a few years ago who had that exact conundrum where he put out maybe an hour and a half to two hour episode, and it was about real estate or something like that. And he'd just been in the industry so long, he could just get on and riff. And he was one of those types of, like, charismatic people who can kinda pull that off. Mhmm. But he was seeing that he was, like, 55% consumption rate.

Jeremy: 35:27

And so he was, like, oh, I wanna get that up. So he immediately cut his episodes in half, and his consumption rate went up. But then he started hearing some of this response from people. And it was all of his people who were, like, his existing customers and people who would become customers most likely who were saying, hey. We like the long episodes.

Jeremy: 35:44

And so it turned out a certain subset of his audience actually loved and wanted to eat up as much content as possible where more of the casual listeners, you know, were tuning in for less. And so it was actually the best thing for the business was to keep those longer episodes and actually have a lower consumption rate, but a higher amount of listen time.

Justin: 36:00

Another one to look at is just overall impact of the funnel. So last time we talked about what you get in Spotify's new dashboard, how many impressions you got, and then here's how many people you got checking out the show, and then here's how many people actually listened. If the overall impact and momentum in that funnel is increasing, meaning Mhmm. At the top of the funnel, you're getting way more impressions, and that's leading to more people checking out your show, and that's leading to more people listening, and then that leads to more people sticking around. That is a good leading indicator.

Justin: 36:36

Conversion rates are something to look at too. But sometimes, in marketing, it is just way better to get way more people in the funnel, at the top of the funnel, even if your conversion rate, declines. Mhmm. You're just getting more people out at the bottom. That's a a good leading indicator that something's going well, I think.

Jeremy: 36:56

The last one that I have here related to leading indicators, this is more for the business side of things, is podcast driven email growth. Mhmm. And so I'm a big believer that podcasts play a hugely important role in generating clients and customers, but it's not the only tool that you need. And really, email is the perfect complement to that. And part of the problem with podcasting is there's so much friction getting people into a podcast and out of a podcast.

Jeremy: 37:20

And so you might have diehard listeners, but getting them to go to a sales page when they're driving or running or cooking or anything else is just really hard. Mhmm. And so you're gonna unlock more of that potential revenue, more of those potential customers and clients if you can have podcast listeners who are also on your email list. And so I would say that especially if you're in business, if you are doing some experiments maybe with your calls to action, maybe with your content strategy to more clearly align it with whatever you offer on your email or a lead magnet or something like that, and you see, oh, I'm getting more people onto the email list, like, that's a leading indicator that probably you're gonna end up with more sales down the line as well. It's good to think about, you know, what these metrics are and then also think about what are the different things that I can play with to influence them.

Jeremy: 37:59

And then if I can, you know, improve my consumption rate, improve my conversion rates, get improve the number of impressions I'm getting, whether that's in Spotify or just out in the world Mhmm. And improve, you know, the number of people who are getting onto my email list. Probably all the other good things you want, the lagging indicators or the lagging metrics at the end of your funnel, whether that's downloads or sales or revenue or whatever that is, are naturally gonna happen. Mhmm. Alright.

Jeremy: 38:22

So we kinda started off the episode talking about downloads, some of the pros and cons here, talked about a bunch of the other metrics that we can use to track some of those hard and soft metrics, and then looked at lead and lag, indicators and metrics. You were pretty entrenched on the download side of things early in the episode, but I I saw some excitement, come out when it came to the anecdotal stuff. So Yeah. Where are you kind of falling after this conversation at the big picture? We've got all these analytics, all these things that we can use to track the success of the show.

Jeremy: 38:50

How do you kinda distill your philosophy around, you know, trying to measure if what you're doing is working?

Justin: 38:56

I mean, I think I'm still looking at downloads kind of top level most of the time. Mhmm. And then just keeping track of how many responses I'm getting to the shell. And then maybe every once in a while going in and drilling down and saying, okay. How's our consumption rate doing?

Justin: 39:13

Some of these other things maybe run an experiment for a month, two months, three months, and then come back in three months, drill down again, see if it's had any sort of impact. But high level, I'm still looking at downloads. And then the next thing I'm looking at is response rate. How about yourself?

Jeremy: 39:32

I will say that you won me over a little bit back to the download side of things. It has been something that, you know, I've always tracked and I'm always going to track just because it is that obvious number. And I think to your point, it is a obvious indicator of momentum. If you are not meddling with your downloads by driving paid traffic to it or doing any of these podcast promotion tactics, then if that number is going up, clearly, that's a sign that more people are either discovering the show or more people who do listen are coming back. So, I think there's a lot that we can take away from the download as a kind of simplistic high level metric.

Jeremy: 40:03

The other thing that I will go back to though, if you are running a show that is part of a business, I think you need to find a way to attribute revenue to the podcast. And so I think so many people that I talk to, they just have no idea the impact of the show on their business. And so they'll produce it for three years. They'll put hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of dollars into it from hiring editors and all these other things that come along with it. And at the end of the day, they really can't say, has this led to growth in my business?

Jeremy: 40:30

And I think a lot of times people think of monetization purely as sponsor driven with podcasts. But, again, the most valuable podcast, let's call them, the shows that drive the most value for the businesses attached to them, do not have any sponsors and they are client and customer acquisition channels and they're actually pretty small in terms of downloads. Mhmm. So, for me, that is is ultimately, you know, a big thing that I'm looking for for any shows that I do. I'm looking for when I get on a sales call with somebody, do they quote back episodes to me and they say, oh, you and Justin talked about this thing here and I I realized I needed to work on that.

Jeremy: 41:03

And I'm like, oh, there's a a certain type of response rate that, like, okay. I know the podcast is playing a role in getting me customers. And so that's something that, again, you can put hard metrics to, but I think whether that's, conversational or if that's something like a post purchase survey where, you know, somebody signs up to your product and there's a little checkbox that says, which of the following have you engaged with? And maybe they say the newsletter and your, Blue Sky feed and your podcast. And it's like, okay.

Jeremy: 41:26

If you see 40% of customers are engaging with the podcast, you can now actually say, oh, the podcast, I can see that it's having an impact on the business. And so I think, yes, downloads are useful. But depending on what your goals are for the show, there's probably more useful metrics that you should try and find a way to get even if it's vague data on some attribution that it's doing what you want.

Justin: 41:46

Yeah. And this honesty, I think, will help people feel better about their show. Because if let's say you're doing a a business podcast and your employees really enjoy it, and it's just fun for them, and it gets them more activated, it crystallizes their thinking around a bunch of topics, which in turn helps drive the business forward, just be Mhmm. Honest about it. If that's what you're getting out of it, a podcast can drive results in all sorts of different ways.

Justin: 42:15

And sometimes it's just like, I get to talk to interesting people in my industry, and that alone is valuable. Or it helps clarify thinking for blog posts, which then drive traffic to our website or whatever. I think people will feel better about their show if they're just brutally honest about it and being able to say, who cares about the downloads? We're getting something valuable out of it. That being said, I I really like this other metric you came up with, here at the end, which is download to hour of effort.

Justin: 42:43

What's this metric?

Jeremy: 42:44

Yes. I was just, brainstorming a bunch of obscure additional metrics that you could choose to track. And some of these are things that I actually do care about quite a bit. We're not gonna go through all of them now because they require some explanation. I'm gonna put a link to them in the show notes for this episode.

Jeremy: 42:58

So if you wanna find, these other obscure metrics that you can track to help judge the success of your show, you can find those in the show notes. But this one here, I came up with as I was brainstorming some of these, and it downloads to hour of effort. And I thought, actually, it's kind of an interesting way to measure the impact of your effort. And so let's say you put ten hours a week into your episode and you get, you know, 250 downloads. And then a year later, you're putting in ten hours of effort a week and you're getting two two thousand five hundred downloads.

Jeremy: 43:22

It's like, hey. I the same amount of effort is getting me more out of this. Or you could also look at this could be a leading indicator as well. You're saying, I put fifteen hours of effort in, and I'm still only getting 250 downloads an episode. Or maybe it went down to 200 And you're like, okay.

Jeremy: 43:36

Something is wrong here after I'm putting more effort in and it's not having the result. And so I think there's something to to kinda dig into there. I thought it was just a funny, kinda quirky little thing, but I might actually start,

Justin: 43:46

tracking this in some way. Yeah. Like, what's the effort to reward ratio? However you determine that. And anybody can create a spreadsheet.

Justin: 43:54

And so if you start tracking how many hours or how much money you're putting into the podcast, money invested to downloads or money invested to response rate or money invested to business outcome, then it helps you evaluate whether this is worth it for you.

Jeremy: 44:09

So if you're curious in digging further into all of the data that we talked about in this episode, along with much, much more related to growing your show, building your audience and having a more effective successful podcast, you can find all of that at the Podcast Marketing Trends 2024 report, which is at podcastmarketingtrends.com.