This article is part of a series about RadioPublic’s Podsites. Want a simple, beautiful and affordable podcast website that not only helps your web visitors become subscribers but also tells you how much listening is happening? Start building your Podsite today.
Google Analytics and your Podsite
Google Analytics add a whole other layer to your website to help you understand how visitors are interacting with your podcast. For your Podsite, we make adding your Google Analytics tracking ID easy: log into your RadioPublic dashboard, then click to start editing your Podsite (alternatively: login to the editing dashboard from your Podsite by clicking the link in the footer of your Podsite or by adding “/admin” to the end of your website domain name). Then add your tracking ID to the final field in your Home section.
Now that you’re starting to collect this data, it’s time to start navigating what you’ve got. And that’s where things get fun and sometimes complicated: when you have a lot of data, it’s hard to know what you’re looking for in the numbers. Starting with a good question helps you find a useful answer, one that teaches you about your audience and guides you to take more strategic next steps. We’ll start each of the sections with a query that’ll be answered by visiting a specific part of your Google Analytics dashboard, then by looking at a specific sliver of your collected data.
Since Google Analytics is incredibly powerful and incredibly deep, we won’t be going into how to begin navigating all the ins and outs of your analytics dashboard (the course provided by Google is an excellent primer). There’s a few pieces that are particularly valuable that we want to point out for podcasters, since they help you understand the connections between your website and your podcast listeners, and we’ll go into more depth on that below.
Listening on your Podsite
Your Podsite comes with the unique ability to track listening events: anytime someone presses play on any episode on your website, you’ll be able to turn that into meaningfully measured listening data. When you layer podcast listening data provided by your podcast hosting provider with the listening data from your Podsite, you can get a better picture of exactly how much time someone spent listening to your podcast.
How much podcast listening is happening on my Podsite?
To begin measuring listening data for your Podsite, log into your Google Analytics dashboard, then:
- From the left sidebar, navigate to Behavior → Events → Overview
- Select “Audio” from the Event Category section in the main view.
- Then select “Event Action” from the Primary Dimension.
- You’ll see “playback” as the Event Action. This keeps track of ALL listening happening on your Podsite.
- Total Events is the value we care about. Each event is equivalent to 10 seconds of listening. So in the example below: 10,646 events equals 106,460 seconds of listening, or 1,774 minutes.
Podcaster growth tip: add links to your Podsite on all your social media accounts and to the email signature to direct listeners right to your show page.
How much listening happens for each episode of my podcast?
Let’s slice up the listening events data a different way:
- With the “playback” event action selected, add a “Secondary dimension” from the dropdown.
- Select “Page Title” as the Secondary dimension. Now, you’ll see the name of each episode and the total playback events for that episode. (Remember, multiply the total events by 10 to get the number of seconds heard.)
Podcaster growth tip: what podcast episodes have the most time spent listening on your page? Those could make for great “Start Here” episode of your show for new listeners.
Web visitors turned podcast listeners
Beyond time spent listening, your Google Analytics dashboard can also help you understand more about your new listeners arrived on your site in the first place. Remember, the goal of your Podsite is to help people start listening to your podcast, so we’ll continue looking at the listening events, and slice the data in different ways to look at the sources of your listeners.
How effective are my social media posts or emails at converting people into listeners on my website?
- With the “playback” event action activated, select the “Secondary dimension” dropdown.
- Select a Secondary dimension like “Social” to better understand how much listening is happening on your website as sourced from various social media platforms.
Podcaster growth tip: rather than sharing a link to your show on a specific listening platform every time you release a new episode, share a link to that episode on your podcast website to get more useful listening data.
Are Apple or Android devices used more by visitors accessing your website?
Understanding which device someone is using to visit your website can help you prioritize the platforms you’d like to direct your future listeners to use to subscribe to your show. Podcasts are often thought of as being Apple only, but as of now, we see about 40% of mobile traffic coming from non-Apple devices.
- With the “playback” event action activated, select the “Secondary dimension” dropdown.
- Select a Secondary dimension like “Mobile” to better understand how much listening is happening on your website via which devices.
Podcaster growth tip: consider reaching people using Android phones as a means of increasing your audience by including Android-friendly links to your show.
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What other questions do you have about visitor activities on your Podsite? Ask us: help@radiopublic.com