Today in our series on business-casing a podcast, we’re talking about intelligently measuring ROI and why you shouldn’t put too much stock in downloads and listens.
Sometimes looking into your podcast stats and seeing little numbers can make you sad and stressed out.
Should you care about the number of downloads and listens you get?
Short answer, no.
If you look at purely downloads, which I honestly think is a highly outdated, sad old metric, you need to understand that the reason we’re still measuring podcasts in downloads has nothing to do with quality and innovation.
It has to do with the fact that the podcast platforms just don’t have any other metrics give you.
So how do you actually know it’s working?
To really get an idea of the effect your podcast is having, we thought of a little model we like to call the domino effect.
Think of it like a line-up of dominoes – you knock over one piece, and then from there comes a series of connected things that happen that can include:
2) Dark social – people who aren’t active on your social front, who don’t comment at all or seem to have even seen what you’ve done, but have really been following you all along and who now want to work with you
3) Recommendations and affiliates