119. Are You Making This Mistake With Your Podcast Data Tracking?

Sara Whittaker 0:01

Your Podcast is a powerful tool that serves your audience and your business. But how do you manage it all bring in new listeners, and convert those listeners into customers. That's what this show is all about. Welcome to podcasting for educators. I'm Sara Whittaker, classroom teacher turn podcast manager. And I'm here to help you get the most out of your show, all while making an impact on other educators. Hey there and welcome back to another episode of podcasting for educators. Before we get started today, I just want to remind you that we are in the middle of pod Tober. If you didn't catch last week's episode, I shared that I'm celebrating two years of this podcast this month. So we've got some fun things going on. I have a scorecard for you to play throughout the month that you can grab at podcasting for educators.com/scorecard. You don't have to put your email address in to get it it will just take you straight to the scorecard. The scorecard has a bunch of options of things you can do to earn points, and then these points translate into entries for a big giveaway that I'm doing at the end of the month. All the directions are on the scorecard. And again, you can grab it at podcasting for educators.com/scorecard or just click the link in the show notes. Okay, now let's get into today's content. When I was a classroom teacher, one of my biggest frustrations was centered around all of the testing and the data tracking that we had to do with our students. And my frustration wasn't that we had to do these things. Obviously, we need to be monitoring our students progress, we need to be taking data in order to figure out how we can best help our students. My frustration was that often we weren't told what the point of doing certain assessments and tracking certain data points was. More specifically, we would often give some of these assessments and then not actually do anything with the information. A great example of this, we're running records. And to be clear, I've been out of the classroom for a few years. Now, I don't even know, if you're using running records anymore. I know that so much has changed and improved with reading instruction. But this is what I was told to do during my first year of teaching. And so during my first year of teaching, I was told to take running records during small reading groups to track the progress of my readers. And then we would use that information to form our small groups. If you've done a running record before you know that you're tracking every single word to measure the students errors and self corrections, while I was shown how to conduct one of these, but I wasn't taught how to actually analyze the results and determine what the different types of errors meant, and how to then take that information and apply it to my instruction. I eventually went did the research and figure this out on my own. Add that to the list of a million things you aren't prepared for as a teacher. But that's a whole nother conversation. But for a while it was Check, check, check, I did my running record, I added it to my data binder made some mental notes done, because that's what I saw other people doing. And I thought that that's what I was supposed to do, too. We do this so much in our lives, maybe you work out for 30 minutes at home, but you really phone it in every day and you take 10 breaks during your workout to check your phone or pet your dog. But the clock is still running and you do your workout and you check it off your list and you say that it's done for the day. But we all know that if we do that, then we're probably not going to get the results that we want. And this is what happens with our podcast data. We're told to track our data. So we do, hopefully you do. And this is important. This is step one, we go into our spreadsheet at the end of every month, or whenever you do it, and you check off your boxes and you input your numbers, and then you're done. But that's where a lot of us stop, we don't take that second step of actually analyzing the data and really making sense of it in order to make informed decisions and understand how our show is doing. And to be clear, this is not your fault. Podcast data is it can be very confusing, you sometimes have to look in multiple places to get the right numbers. And it's not very clear as to what you should even be looking for. And then what you should even be doing with this information. So I'm hoping that what I'm about to share will help kind of clarify some of this, and help you come up with a plan to be able to actually make sense of your data. So I have a four step process that I want you to keep in mind whenever it is time for you to look and analyze your podcast data. And some of it part of this process you might already be doing. And in fact, I would bet that number one and two of this process you probably are doing even if you don't realize it. Step number one is to clarify your goals. You need to really understand what you want Want to understand about your show? So take a minute and think, What do you want your podcast data to tell you? And I'll give you some examples of what these goals might be. Maybe you want to understand whether or not your podcast is converting into opt ins, or into paid resources or services. Maybe you want to be able to look at your podcast data and understand whether or not your listenership is growing. Are your downloads increasing over time? Maybe you want your podcast data to inform you of whether or not you are retaining your listeners? Are people sticking around long term? Or are they just kind of popping in and out? Or are they a one and done type of listener? You might want to understand where your listener engagement level is that? Are people engaging with your content? Are people listening to most of your episodes. And this last one is one that you might kind of glaze over. But I really want you to think about this. And that is? Are you able to kind of look at your podcast data and look at your process, and understand whether or not you're getting enjoyment out of your show and where your enjoyment is coming from. Okay, so that's step one, clarify your goals. What do you want to understand about your show? What do you want your podcast data? To answer for you? Number two is to track the appropriate data points that will give you the information you need in order to answer those questions. Or in order to give you the information that you need to know whether or not you've reached your goals. So let's break each of those examples that I had given before down so that you know some examples of maybe what types of data points you need to be tracking in order to get this information. So if you're looking at conversions, then you need to figure out a way how you can track to understand whether or not people are converting? Are they opting into your freebies? Are they purchasing your resources or your services. And it's going to be really hard to get an exact number. So I really encourage you to like let go of that thought because it's probably not going to happen. But there are ways that you can get a general idea of what your conversion rate is. You can use things like tracking links, you can use things like customer intake forms. If you have a Facebook group, you can ask questions when people join your Facebook group about whether or not their podcast listener, you can pay really close attention to your sales. If you're promoting a TPT bundle that you have, and you are promoting it in a six week podcast series that you're doing and your sales are up, well, then you can probably attribute some of that success to your podcast, you can have separate opt in forms, set up tags and your email providers so that you can get a feel for whether or not people are converting over to email subscribers. Again, same kind of thing. As I said before with the TPT bundles. If you have a freebie that you're really pushing on your podcast for an extended period of time and you're seeing those email subscribers go up, then yes, you can probably attribute some of those subscribers or most of those subscribers to your podcast. If you want to track download growth, this is pretty straightforward. You should be tracking your overall monthly downloads, you should be tracking per episode numbers. I've talked about this before in lots of previous episodes, but things like your one day seven day 30 day 90 Day downloads per episode. So you can really see at both a show level and an episode level, whether or not you're seeing growth. And I don't want you to just look at like week to week or month to month, I want you to really zoom out and look at more of a year to year picture. And we'll talk about that more in a minute. If you want to track retention rate, you can do things like tracking the number of followers. Now this is where it gets a little bit tricky because you kind of have to, to get this exact number you really have to look at like all of the different listening apps like you can go into your apple podcasts Connect account and see the number of followers that you have. And it will even tell you like how many games that month how many you lost that month, you can do the same thing and Spotify. Those are probably the two apps that most of your listenership is going to come from. But there are other apps. So it is it is tricky. And it is an extra step to really get kind of a semi accurate number of that but it's worth doing. If you host inside of Captivate, which is my host of choice. It will tell you in your analytic if you click your analytics tab, it will tell you every day what your number of unique listeners are, which would be the number of people who are listening to your podcasts on any given day. If you want your data to give you information about listener engagement, here are some things that you can be tracking you can track consumption rate inside of Apple podcasts Connect. Again, this will just be for Apple listeners, but it gives you a really good data point. Good to see.

Sara Whittaker: 10:01

Okay, how long on average? Are people sticking around for this episode? Are they only listening to five minutes? Are they listening to 50% of the episode? are they sticking around until the very end, you can track things like the number of messages that you get from listeners, or the number of shares that you get on Instagram or Facebook or wherever number of email replies, this is something that I think a lot of people overlook. But if you track these things, then on those days where you're feeling kind of defeated, you can look back at these numbers and think, wow, over time this many people have engaged with me about my podcast content. another data point for engagement would be number of ratings and reviews that you're getting on Apple podcasts. And then let's talk about your enjoyment level. This is something that you could actually keep track of, you could add a data point of how you're feeling about your podcast, how you're feeling about sitting down and recording an episode, how you're feeling about promoting an episode, are you really excited about it? Are you feeling kind of just blah about it, and then you can track trends over time based on the topic of episodes, the time of year, the time of month, things like that. Okay, so step one was to clarify your goals. Step two was to attract the appropriate data points that will give you the information you need in order to determine whether or not you're meeting your goals. Number three, is to reflect on your results. And this is a step that a lot of people are not doing. And this is not always black and white, some reflection really requires you to get super curious about your data, and start asking questions. Again, I really want you to zoom out and look at the big picture and not just look at week to week or month to month. So maybe you're looking at your data and you're thinking why did my downloads spike six months ago? Why did I have such a great month? Oh, let's look at the content that I put out that month. Oh, I did that series that did really well that people were really engaging with. That's why my downloads were so high that month, or maybe my downloads didn't increase last month. But if I compare it to this time, last year, my downloads have doubled since last year. Maybe you look at your reviews and realize, Wow, I haven't gotten any new reviews in the past three months. What have I done to try and get new reviews, maybe you haven't made it an intentional call to action not only on your podcast, but also through your email and on Instagram. If you're looking at your data, and you really want to understand what topics people have been really excited about over time, so that you can, if you're trying to see trends, to show you which topics do the best on your podcast, what I teach inside of podcasts like you mean it, my audio course is to categorize every episode under a content pillar. And then you can track those over time. And inside of podcasts like you mean it, it turns your spreadsheet into visual graphs that you can see. And one of those graphs shows you it breaks down the different content pillars to show you the percentage of episodes that you've done within each of those content pillars. So if you see that your audience gets really excited about certain topics that fall within a certain content pillar, but then you look at your data and you see, oh, I've only done, only 15% of my episodes fall into this content pillar, then that's going to tell you, Oh, I need to do more episodes on this topic. Maybe you're looking at your data, and you're doing some reflection and thinking, Gosh, nobody is buying my course. Okay, so let's get curious about that. How many times have you shared about it? Are you aligning your episode content to funnel people into this course, and into the problem that you're solving for them in this course, maybe you're reflecting on your data, and you notice that your consumption rate on certain episodes are really, really low. And you notice that they tend to be on episodes that are like 45 minutes plus, or you notice that your consumption rate on an episode on a certain topic really tanked? Or maybe you tried out a new format and the consumption rate was really low or really high. Okay, so doing this reflection allows you to start asking some of these questions and get curious about what your data is telling you. Okay, so we've clarified our goals, we're tracking the appropriate data points, were reflecting on our results. And step number four is to then apply this information to your planning. Okay, so if you were reflecting on your data, and you see that that series that you did, on whatever topic did really well, well, let's do another series, either on the same topic, or on another popular topic. Maybe you're looking at your download data and your downloads have been kind of stagnant for the past three to five months. Well, maybe it's time to plan a listener survey, maybe you need to put a little bit more effort into marketing your show, because you realize you're not bringing in new listeners, that follower count isn't increasing. Or maybe you're bringing in new followers, but you're also losing followers consistently. Okay? That would be information that's telling you that you need to really reflect on the type of content that you're putting out or the way that you're structuring your content. Back to that idea of if you're realizing that people are not converting to, let's say, your online course, what can you do to try and improve that, you can create ads, you're going to create off relying content for four to six weeks so that you can have some solid data to look at to see if that strategy is working. If your consumption rate is low, on those longer episodes, shorten your episodes, take out fluff, this step of applying your data to your planning can also be as simple as maybe you're planning out quarter one content for 2024. And you're not sure what to focus on. Well go and look at your downloads at a per episode level. And look at your listener survey data. If you've done a listener survey before, what are people asking for? What are people telling you that they want to hear more of? Okay, so those four steps, again, were to clarify our goals, track the appropriate data points, reflect on your results, get curious about your data, and apply it to your planning. After listening today, I want you to think about what this process would look like for you. I can give you these four steps. And hopefully they'll be helpful for you. But you have to then tweak it and make it fit into your planning process. When will you track your data? When will you analyze it? And when will you apply it to your planning? And that's all going to depend on how you do your content planning? Do you do it once a month? Do you do it on a week to week basis? Do you do it per quarter, all four of these steps can be used no matter how you're doing your planning. A lot of this is trial and error. But like I said before, get curious, get curious about why your downloads aren't increasing, make a plan to improve it, try it out, analyze the results, and then the cycle continues. This really is all a cycle. It's all an experiment. There's no perfect way to increase your podcast ROI because your show and your audience is unique to you. And you have to be willing to get curious and to try things out. And the sooner that you can be at peace with that, the sooner this can actually become fun for you. I know when I see my downloads aren't going up, I take that as a challenge to myself. And I think about how I can try something new to fix it. And to reach that goal of increasing my downloads or increasing my consumption or whatever it is at the time. I've mentioned podcasts like you mean it at least once in this episode. It really is a great resource that will help you gain some clarity about your podcast data and about how to track it on a consistent basis. It will also help walk you through how to really create podcast content that is aligned to what you are driving your listeners to when it comes to opt ins or paid resources or services. You can learn more about that by going to podcasting for educators.com clicking on the Courses tab and going down to podcasts like you mean it the next time you sit down to look at your podcast data. I hope that you try out this four step process. And then it helps you understand your podcast data a little bit better and apply it to your planning. I'll see you here next week. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. To keep this conversation going connect with me on Instagram at podcasting for educators. I'm always looking for an excuse to talk about podcasting. If you're looking for support and launching, managing or growing your podcast, check out my online course the podcasting for educators prep school at podcasting for educators.com/prep school. I'll see you here next time.

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