Capturing 25% of podcast listeners alone, Spotify is a major player in the podcast world. With over 604 million listeners in 2024, podcasters can’t ignore the platform if they want to reach the masses and climb the rankings.
Luckily, getting your podcast to appear on Spotify is easy, especially if you’re working with a podcast agency that handles distribution.
But once you’ve completed that step, you’ve only just begun your podcasting journey. Next, it’s time to start tracking podcast analytics so you can continue improving along the way.
An introduction to Spotify’s podcast analytics
Spotify for Podcasters offers a helpful overview of data about their users. The platform shares information about your listeners, including:
- The episodes they love most
- The music they’re into
- At which point in your podcast episode they drop off
All this information helps you tailor content to your target listeners and organize sponsorships.
Spotify also offers a deep dive into episode-specific metrics, such as:
- How long people are listening for
- Your follower growth with each new episode
The best part is that all this data is updated daily, so you can track your stats in real time, keeping an eye on your podcast’s growth curve.
To make your tracking process even simpler, Spotify allows podcasters to download all this data as a CSV file. This way, you can measure your progress over time and create reports for leadership teams or other stakeholders.
How to access your podcast analytics on Spotify
To access your podcast analytics on Spotify, visit your Spotify for Podcasters' Dashboard on either your desktop or mobile device.
Once logged in, you'll be greeted with an overview highlighting key metrics of your show. This includes data such as plays from your latest episode, total plays over time, your audience size, and even your current earnings if you're monetizing your content.
If you're looking to delve deeper into your podcast's analytics, you can explore the Analytics Dashboard. This comprehensive tool offers a more detailed look into various aspects of your show's performance, the most important of which we dive into below!
The most important Spotify stats for podcasters
1) Unique listeners
Not to get confused with downloads, a unique listener is someone who has started listening to at least one of your podcast episodes.
The key differentiator between downloads and unique listeners is that with unique listeners, if a person listens to an episode multiple times, they’re only counted as one unique listener. For example, if I were to listen to the episode twice, it would count as one unique listener but two downloads.
We suggest focusing on unique listeners over downloads for two very important reasons:
- Unique listeners are a more accurate measure of your show’s real audience: Because your downloads will (unfortunately) always be higher than your unique listeners, they tend to portray an inflated view of your audience base.
- Download numbers lack depth: While high download numbers might catch attention, they don't indicate whether listeners are genuinely engaged or if they continue to follow your content.
Consider this: A podcast has a substantial number of downloads, indicating a high volume of plays. However, upon analyzing unique listener metrics, it is revealed that its unique listeners count is notably lower.
This discrepancy signals a crucial insight: While there might be loyal listeners revisiting episodes, the overall audience size might not be as expansive as downloads make it seem.
CoHost Tip: To learn more about the difference between downloads and unique listeners, check out our full blog.
2) Impressions
One common question we get from our users is: “How do I know how people found my show?”
When it comes to finding your series on Spotify specifically, your impressions data will be your best friend.
These statistics reveal how many times your content, whether it's a show or an episode, has been displayed to users on Spotify within the last 30 days. For instance, if one of your episodes garners more impressions than another, it indicates that a greater number of Spotify users were exposed to it.
With tracking impressions, the most important part is examining the breakdown of impressions by their sources. This information tells you precisely where on Spotify your content has appeared – whether it’s Spotify Home, Spotify Search, or the Spotify User Library.
Regularly monitoring impression fluctuations from episode to episode can offer valuable insights. For instance, you might notice that the percentage of impressions via Search was notably higher for a recent episode. This could indicate a popular search topic on Spotify, prompting you to tailor your future episode topics to align with audience interests.
CoHost Tip: Looking to get in front of potential listeners when they’re searching for content in your niche? Enter Podcast keywords. Check out our blog to learn how to find the best keywords for your show and climb the ranks.
CoHost Tracking Links
Interested in understanding where your listeners find your show outside of Spotify? CoHost’s Tracking Links show you what sources your podcast downloads are coming from so you can easily optimize marketing campaigns.
On top of that, you can track individual links and episodes to see what content audiences prefer across platforms.
3) Average listen and episode drop off
Spotify calculates the average listen by averaging the data for at least 50% of listeners to determine how long listeners are tuning in. This metric can be a helpful guide to understanding whether or not your content is resonating with target audiences.
To access this data In Spotify, simply click on any episode in your web dashboard to generate a performance chart revealing listener retention throughout the episode.
Steep declines indicate potential points of disinterest or disengagement, prompting creators to review and refine those segments. Conversely, strong retention areas offer opportunities for clip creation to boost social media promotion or even monetization through Spotify's podcast subscriptions feature.
By analyzing drop-off patterns across multiple episodes, podcasters can identify trends and make informed decisions to optimize content length and structure, ensuring maximum listener engagement from start to finish.
If a lot of listeners are dropping off around the same time, dig a bit deeper to find out:
- Did an ad run too long?
- Did the conversation go off-topic?
- Were there technical issues?
We suggest getting comfortable with experimenting with different podcast formats and segments to see how they impact average listening time and drop-off rates.
CoHost Tip: If you’re interested in our top tips for beating listening churn, check out our full blog where we share our top 5 tips to reduce podcast drop-off rates.
4) Starts and streams
Spotify counts a “start” as anyone who has started listening to one of your episodes, even if they only listened for a few seconds.
Similar to episode retention data, this is helpful to see if there are trends in your listeners starting an episode but then not listening to completion. It could be a tell that maybe you need to make your intro more engaging, your episodes, shorter, or test out a different format.
Streams, on the other hand, qualify as anyone who has listened to an episode for more than 60 seconds. When it comes to comparing starts vs. streams, you can likely guess which metric will tell you more about your podcast’s growth.
If you have fewer streams than starts, this is another clear indication that you might want to change up your intro or question whether your episode title is misleading.
5) Audience insights
One of the most important things we always remember to tell users and clients is to take an audience-first approach to podcasting.
Without understanding who your listeners are, their preferences, and their behavior, it’s difficult (if not impossible) to create a podcast that resonates and makes an impact.
Spotify tracks information about your audience such as their age, gender, and geographic location. The platform also tracks the top five most listened-to artists of any listener who has tuned into your show in the past 28 days.
These stats are extremely important to track because they will ultimately help you get to know your listeners better so you can create content that’s aligned with their personal preferences, interests, and values.
On top of that, if you notice your show has a large following in a specific location, you can plan in-person events or live shows. You can also target location-specific ads most effectively.
CoHost’s Audience Advanced Demographics
If you’re looking for more of a deep dive into who your podcast listeners are, their preferences, and behaviors, you’ll need a more robust analytics tool.
Audience Advanced Demographics allows users to uncover their listener persona through insights like age, social media habits, income, hobbies, pets, and more.
This information helps pro-podcasters:
- Produce content tailored to your audience's preferences
- Enhance sponsorship sales with comprehensive listener profiles
- Boost your podcast ROI by ensuring you're reaching the right audience
- Integrate your listener insights with other crucial podcast metrics within CoHost for effective performance reporting
CoHost’s B2B Analytics
If you’re interested in learning more about the companies and industries tuning into your podcast, CoHost’s B2B Analytics tool is just what you need.
With B2B Analytics, podcasters can find out which companies are tuning into their shows including their industries, average company size, and average revenue breakdown.
This information can help you:
- Build partnerships and target outreach
- Tailor content to listener preferences
- Retarget advertising
- Enhance sponsorships
- Segment audiences
With the CoHost’s Prefix, you can access both Audience Advanced Demographics and B2B Analytics, regardless of your current hosting setup.
Building connection through audio
While all of these stats are important to track in different ways, the most important element to prioritize on your podcast journey is forming a genuine connection with your listeners. The more you get to know your listeners, their habits, and what makes them tick, the more you can create powerful and impactful content that will resonate with them.
Growing your audience over time is important, but it won’t mean much if you haven’t connected with your listeners on a human-to-human level. One of the keys to podcasting success is remaining authentic and tapping into the psychology of your listeners in each episode, which will help you find sustainable growth and longevity in the podcasting space.
To help you confidently tell the stories behind the data, learn more about Spotify’s podcast stats, and reach out to our team.
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