Founder Podcast Playbook: Understanding Listener Analytics

Does this describe you? You opened your podcast dashboard this week, maybe as recently as this morning or yesterday. You saw a number and you either felt vaguely okay or pretty terrible, and then you closed the tab and got on with your day. See, that's not a podcast strategy.

That's reading your horoscopes. And in this episode, I'm going to give you the playbook for putting that data to good use and actually grow your show and grow your brand. Welcome to B2B Podcasting Insights with me, Neil Verlio, the founder of Podnos, a podcast agency helping clients get better results from podcasting. Here's something I want to make clear.

Today we are going to be talking about podcast listener analytics, and I'm not going to be spending the next 10 to 15 minutes just pontificating to you about how unimportant download numbers are, how they're the worst metric to focus on, and all that stuff. You've probably heard it a million times. Instead, what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you a way of actually putting those analytics to good use. Those download numbers that are staring you in the face and are kind of the poison chalice, if they're on the high side, it's great.

It fuels your ego. It makes you feel good. It also gives you something to report back to the board or the CMO or whatever decision maker is in your business. If that number is low, well, it's the opposite end of the deal, isn't it?

You get scrutinized, questions are asked. Is this worth doing? What I want to give you is a playbook where you can start a Monday morning protocol in terms of what to look at in your analytics, in what order, and the most crucial part here, what decision each number in that dashboard should be prompting you to make. Here's the problem that most B2B founders and their marketing teams have around podcast analytics.

They've got the dashboard open, they've got the data, and they're doing absolutely nothing with it. Certainly nothing useful. We have all the data, but no idea what to do. And it's not because they're lazy.

It's because nobody ever told them what the data is actually meant to be used for. So let's fix that right now, starting with metric one downloads. Okay, I know I just said that I'm not going to stand on a soapbox about downloads here, and I'm not, because downloads are useful for something. They do tell you stuff.

They're just not telling you what most people think they're telling you, downloads don't measure popularity, they measure reach. And reach on its own means absolutely nothing unless you know who's being reached. And here's the thing. If your episode about fixing your sales deck got twice the plays of your episode about company culture, then your audience has a sales problem right now.

So stop diversifying. Go deeper into what's already landing. Here's your Monday morning protocol move. Stop comparing this week's episode to last week's episode.

That's just noise. Compare episode topic to episode topic. Which of the topics are pulling in more plays? That's your content brief.

That's telling you what you should be talking about more. That's your audience literally telling you, hey, I like this stuff. Do more of it. And in the only language available to them, they're telling you what problems they're currently faced with.

Metric 2 episode completion rate otherwise known as retention data. This is the one. If you only track one metric on your show going forward, make it this one. The completion rate, which you can see in Apple podcasts, in the Podcast Connect Dashboard, and in the Spotify for Creators dashboard.

That data tells you whether the right people are sticking around. And what are you benchmarking for here? Well, let me tell you, a completion rate consistently below 40% means one of two things. Number one, your content isn't relevant to them.

Those people that are pressing play are just, nah, it's not for me and they're stopping it. Or two, your opening isn't making a strong enough case for why they should be sticking around to hear more. Both of those are fixable. It just means you've got to get a bit more intentional about how you hook people in to your episodes and tell them up front what they're going to get.

Back to that intro episode that I published a couple of weeks ago where I was saying to you, people don't want to hear 90 seconds of plinky plonky piano music. They want to know exactly what problem you're going to fix for them, or even before that, making them aware that the problem exists in the first place. And they want to know exactly what the outcome from listening will be. Will you help them fix it, or will you steer them towards a way of doing so and make sure there's absolutely a clear next step waiting for them at the end of the episode?

Because if there isn't, you're leaving money on the table. Here's your Monday morning protocol move on this one. Pull your last five episodes completion rate together and if one is dramatically different from the rest figure out what it was that was different about that episode. And the answer is almost always to be found in the first two minutes.

Metric number three the drop off points. Now this is one of the most underused insights in podcasting data and it's sitting right there in your dashboard again. Apple Podcasts, podcastconnect.apple.

com, spotify for creators. Look at it. It's completely ignored. They're also in YouTube.

That is the one thing YouTube is really good at. Drop off timestamps are not a measure of failure. They're your script doctor. They're telling you with precision to the second the exact moment that your content stopped being relevant to the person who should be most likely to buy from you.

Maybe went off topic. Maybe you started explaining something your audience already knows and they felt a bit patronized. They went to another episode somewhere else that was telling them a little bit more about what they wanted to know at that point. Maybe it's where you put your CTA in and it felt like a bit of a hard sell too early.

The data is pointing at something, but your job is to figure out what. Here's your Monday morning protocol move on this one. Screenshot your top three drop off points across your most recent batch of episodes and and have a look. If there's a pattern, is it the same segment of the show every single time?

Is it the same kind of content? If so, you found your recurring problem. Get rid of it or fix it. And that will fix the whole show's issue metric four.

Repeat Listeners and this is your buying window signal. We talked about buying triggers on a couple of episodes recently and that's kind of what this is about. And most founders completely miss it. A first time listener is curious.

A repeat listener is considering what you can do for them. They keep coming back because something in your show is answering a question that they're still lingering around. They haven't resolved it yet. That's an open loop in their buying journey.

And your podcast is what they're using to try and close it. These are your highest value listeners, full stop. Make absolutely sure that your call to action is framed for someone who already knows you, not for a complete stranger because they're not a stranger anymore. And here's your Monday morning protocol move on this point.

Look at your listener retention curve week on week. Is it growing even slightly? That stickiness is worth more than a spike in new downloads from, say, being featured in a carousel on one of the podcast apps or somebody sharing your episode's Link on a LinkedIn post. Most of that doesn't convert for longer term.

So there we have it. That's the four metrics, the four decisions that you can be taking around your podcast. None of them require a spreadsheet, none of them require a data analyst, and all of them can be acted upon. Before your next episode even goes live Monday morning, stick an hour in your diary to go through all this stuff.

Downloads compare topic to topic, not week to week. Completion rate, your audience fit, test drop off points, your script rewrite, repeat listeners, your buying window and triggers speak to them like they're almost ready to buy. Because they probably are. Each episode I share questions from founders running their own B2B podcast.

You can send yours to Neal. That's N E a l@podnos.co.uk p o-k n o w s.

co.uk. this week's comes from Rachel, who's head of growth at a professional services firm. Rachel has recorded six episodes and hasn't published a single one.

I see where this is going, she asks Neil. I keep going back and finding things to improve on my yet to be published episodes. How do I know when an episode is actually ready to publish? I'm going to be honest with you, Rachel.

You're not tweaking here, you're hiding. And I say that with complete understanding, because almost every founder I've worked with has had a version of this conversation with me at some point. Here's the truth for you. The six episodes sitting on your hard drive are converting.

Absolutely nobody, not one warm prospect, has heard them or been nudged closer to making a decision to work with you or booked a call. Meanwhile, the episode that has published imperfectly next week and then lands in the ears of one person who maybe needed to hear it that's already doing more for your business than anything you've recorded so far. So you need to meet the imaginary version with the real version, because there is no ready, there's only published and unpublished.

And unpublished is just really an expensive hobby that you're kind of justifying with the brand attachment. So what I would say is pick the strongest episode, accept that it won't be perfect, and just publish it no matter what happens. The second episode would be better, because by the time you hear the first episode with the ears of a listener rather than creator, you're going to pick up on things you can improve, and the sixth one will be even better still. But none of that improvement happens while they're sitting on your hard drive being quietly tweaked into the point of irrelevance.

Another tip for you it might be time to hire an external editor to be the critic on this and actually tweak it in the way that helps your business doesn't stay anchored in your ego. Hope that helps. Rachel Time for this week's quick tip for B2B founders stop writing your show notes as a summary of the episode. Nobody who hasn't listened yet cares what you covered.

Your show notes are a landing page for the person who found you through search, and they haven't pressed play yet, but they're trying to figure out whether they want to write the notes for that person. Write for search intent, not for listener resources. By all means, stick the listener resources in there, because it then gives them an idea that it's worth them listening to. Then have the outcome at the end, but don't write it like they've already listened.

And here's something that's worth knowing if your website SEO is weak, your Apple Podcasts episode page can actually outrank your own site for the same keywords. Which means your show notes might be the very first thing a warm prospect ever reads from you. So treat them accordingly. If this episode's been useful, I've put together the Founder Podcast Playbook as a downloadable resource.

You can go and get that. It talks you through everything we've mentioned, covering all four metrics that we talked about today and with the Monday morning move for each one laid out so so you can act on it straight away next week. To grab it, go to podnos.co.

uk Founder Podcast Playbook. That's podnos.co.uk founder podcast playbook and the link's also in the episode description, as you would expect.

And if you want to go a little bit further and figure out whether your show is actually doing a useful job for your business right now, that's what the Podnos Podcast Growth Diagnostic is for. It's a single session designed to answer exactly those questions. Also in the episode description. Until next time, best of luck continuing to publish your B2B podcast.