Spotify Podcast Analytics to Grow Your Audience: Guided Steps

As a podcaster, you’re well aware that delivering engaging content is an art. However, it’s easy to forget that it’s also a science. This is why your podcast analytics matter. You’ll be able to understand who your audience is and how much they engage with your podcast.

If you’ve put in the work to host your podcast on Spotify, then you need to be taking advantage of the valuable analytics they provide for you. Don’t know where or how to start? No worries! In this Cleanvoice guide, we’re going to show you how you can access and understand your analytics to grow your podcast.

Ready? Let’s dive in!

What is Spotify Podcast Analytics?

Your Spotify Podcast analytics is the listening data, audience demographics, and insights that arise from your podcast listeners. You can access it from your Spotify for Podcasters Dashboard.

The most essential podcast analytics you’ll get are:

• Your audience demographics: This will let you know if you’re actually reaching your target audience. It’s a breakdown of your listeners, providing insights on age, sex, location, etc.
• The number of plays: It’s really important to find out how many times your episodes have been listened to, so you can identify the most popular topics amongst your listeners.
• Average listening time: With this, you’ll be able to see how long your listeners stay engaged with your podcast and if there’re specific places they drop off.
• The best-performing episodes: Knowing your best hits is super helpful in shaping how you plan your future content.

Why is Spotify Podcast Analytics Important?

Helps you cater content to your listeners

Your analytics give you a better vision of how your listeners are structured, so you can see what type of audience your content is attracting and what locations they typically come from. By knowing this useful information, you’ll know whether you need to adjust your content to suit them better or go in a different direction to attract other demographics during your podcast planning and scripting.

Helps you measure your growth

As you start tracking your analytics on a month-to-month basis, you’ll start to identify whether your podcast audience and engagement are growing. Even if it’s not growing, it’s still useful information, as you’ll know that you need to improve or reorganize your content.

Helps you track your earning potential

An extremely beneficial use of your podcast analytics is to help you track the earning potential of your Spotify podcast. As a podcaster, you’ll want to acquire sponsors who purchase ad spaces in your podcast. However, to prove you’re podcast’s usefulness, you’ll need to pay attention to analytics such as listener retention and the number of listens and downloads you get per episode.  

With these important metrics in hand, you’ll be able to showcase to potential sponsors the value of your podcast with hard numbers. Listener retention and the number of listens are important in regards to podcast marketing, as sponsors want reassurance that their ads will reach a sizable, engaged audience.

How to Access and Understand Your Spotify Podcast Analytics

Step 1: Access Spotify for Podcasters

To access your podcast analytics, all you need to do is log into your Spotify for Podcasters’ Dashboard on the web. You can also access your analytics from your phone or tablet with Spotify for Podcasters’ mobile analytics if you’re on the go. However, the web version is more in-depth.

Step 2: Navigate to Analytics

When you navigate to Analytics on your dashboard, you’ll find that your podcast stats are divided across the three following tabs:

• Overview: This will include total plays, plays per episode, and total audience size.
• Audience: This will include important listener information like gender, age, geographic location, and apps and devices that they listen from.
• Episode Rankings: This will help you identify your most popular and least popular episodes, identifying the type of content your audience is most likely to engage with.

Step 3: Explore Episode-Level Data

In your Episodes tab, you’ll get a comprehensive overview of the performance of each of your episodes within a specific date range.

You can take a closer look at insights for each episode by clicking on its title. The insights you’ll get are:

• The average listening time
• Episode completion percentage by listeners
• Episode starts and streams

By knowing which of your episodes performed the best, you can plan your future content according to that. For instance, if in most of your episodes, you’re speaking solo, but you see a spike in performance on the episodes where you have a guest, consider bringing in more guests.

Step 4: Analyze Audience Analytics

The two types of audience data you should start prioritizing are age and gender because they have the biggest impact on how you structure your content. For example, if you see that the largest percentage of your listeners are women between the ages of 21-28, you can plan episodes with guests that are relevant to them. It will also help you tailor any promotional content with them in mind.  

Next, you should look at the geographic trends. This data will show you where in the world your listeners are coming from, which can impact how you tailor your content and promote your podcast.

If you’re looking to expand your global audience, paying attention to the different countries your listeners are emerging from is extremely helpful. You’ll know which countries to focus your advertising efforts on so they feel more included in your listening community. For instance, you can research different influencer collaborations you could create that resonate with the countries you’ve identified.

Step 5: Track Listener Engagement

Listener engagement is quite essential to keep track of because you need to know which parts of your podcast episodes are engaging and which need to be improved. Fortunately, Spotify provides you with drop-off data that will showcase a second-by-second breakdown of how many listeners stay on throughout an episode. You’ll be able to identify at what points your audience becomes less engaged as well as the points that encourage the most engagement.  

Your listener engagement metrics will include likes, saves, and shares. Take note of the episodes that produce the highest engagement so that you can replicate some of the tactics you incorporated to make that happen.

Step 6: Review Listening Platform Data

On the Listening Platform section of your analytics, Spotify will give you data on how people are listening to your show as well as the type of devices they’re using. It’s easy to overlook this info, but it’s very important to help you enhance the experience of your audience.

If you create video and audio podcasts on Spotify, look at how much of your audience watches the video and which ones just listen to the audio.

For instance, if more of your audience is listening to the audio, then you need to be mindful of using fewer visual cues during your episodes because they are probably listening on a mobile device while on the go. On the other hand, if you notice that most of your listeners are listening from a desktop, then you should consider creating more video podcasts.

Conclusion

Essentially, your podcast analytics is a great tool you can use to help you provide more value to your audience. There’s no point in spending so much time planning and creating content that’s not resonating with the people you want it to connect to. So, make sure to keep reviewing your Spotify podcast analytics as often as possible so you create episodes that have an impact.

If you want more sure-fire ways to elevate the quality of your Spotify podcast, you should turn to Cleanvoice. Our powerful tool uses AI to clean up your audio so it’s filler sound and stutter-free. You can also get an AI-powered podcast audit to evaluate the listening experience of your podcast free of charge! What’s the catch? There isn’t one! Try it out for yourself.