171 | Stop Tracking Podcast Downloads, Track This Growth Metric Instead (You'll Be a Happier Podcaster)

This is Grow the Show, the podcast that helps you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland and today on the show we are going to talk about the new way of measuring podcast audience growth in a way that doesn't just take into account your podcast. By the end of this episode I'm going to share with you when you should be tracking your audience growth and what metrics you should be tracking in my opinion in order to number one, be able to grow your audience faster, but number two, in order to see the audience growth that currently you're getting, but probably not even noticing. So before I dive into all of that, I want to first talk about the podcast download. Now whether or not you've been podcasting for a week, a month, or 10 years, you probably measure your success as a podcaster in downloads. And that makes sense because that is the industry standard for how big a podcast is. How many downloads does it get? But after helping podcasters grow for more than five years, after helping my clients over the years generate more than 20 million downloads and generating over a million downloads for myself on really neat shows, what I've learned is that the podcast to download is not as important and all encompassing as we think it is. And I first became aware of this a few months ago when a couple of things happened to all at once. First, I saw a couple of creators that are much, much bigger than I am, who I really admire, post publicly about how difficult of a time they're having growing their podcast downloads. And I was actually kind of frustrated with what I saw them post because they were basically saying that it's just really hard to grow your downloads and podcasts don't grow. And these were creators that everybody knows and trusts and to see them telling their audience that basically they've kind of given up on growing their podcast downloads and that their audience should too really hurt me because number one, that's what I do is I help people grow their podcasts. But number two, what I found is that podcast downloads are not the best metric of a growing thriving podcast. What do I mean by that? Well, around the same time that I saw this happening with these other creators and I saw them posting publicly about how they were struggling to grow their podcast, I saw another statistic from another creator that I follow. And they said this based on research that they have done talking with other podcasts and their own podcasts, what they've discovered is that only 10 to 20% of a podcast's total audience tunes into their podcast regularly, only 10 to 20%. And when I saw that metric, I had a moment where I was like, huh, that's really interesting. And so I went and looked at my own podcast downloads to see if that checks out. And I compared it to my overall audience size to see, is that true for me? Is it true that only 10 to 20% of my total audience tunes in? And what I found is that it was exactly on track. So the growth of show podcasts gets anywhere between two to four thousand downloads per episode, depending on a few things, depending on the momentum of the show, you know, what the topics are, how active I've been on social media lately, those types of things. And what I also know to be true is that my total audience is somewhere between 30 and 50,000 podcasters. I've got about 25,000 folks on my email list, my social media audiences add up to about 20K. And so that puts it at about 45,000. And so if I look and I say, okay, what's 10 to 20% of 45,000, it's two to 4,000 downloads. It's two to 4,000. That was a big time light ball moment for me. And as soon as I discovered that, I started looking into my client shows as well. I said, okay, what is their total audience size and how many downloads does their podcast get on a regular basis? Sure enough, client after client that I asked, I did this privately, I said, hey, what would you say your total audience size is and how many downloads per episode do you get time and time again, they all fell between that 10 to 20% range where let's say they had an audience of 100K. If you looked at their social media, they were getting about 10,000 downloads per episode. If they had an audience of 10,000, they were getting about a thousand downloads per episode. And I thought, my gosh, that's amazing to really see why this is true. I want you to think about your behavior listening to this podcast. Now, if you're somebody who's just discovered the show, you might be binging it right now. But if you've been around for a while, I'm willing to bet that you don't religiously listen to the Grow the Show podcast every single week. If you do, if you're like, no, I do, I love you. You are awesome. You are keeping the lights on. But for most folks, what really happens is they, you know, listen to a few episodes of Grow the Show. They listen as a part of their routine and then something happens. Maybe they discover a new show, they discover a new creator that they like. They start binging that or they just kind of disengage a little bit and they stop listening to Grow the Show and they listen to other podcasts weekend and week out. And then what happens a couple months later, they might see an email that I sent them or see something that I posted on social media and then be like, oh my gosh, yeah, Grow the Show. Let me go back and they go back and they listen to episodes and they kind of get caught up and they cherry pick episodes that they missed, but are interested in listening to now. And while that might not be your behavior with this show, I want you to think as a podcast listener. Think about all the podcasts that you know about that you would say, oh, I love that show. Have you listened to every single one of them in the past week? Probably not. What actually happens is you only have so much time in your week to listen to podcasts and you probably listen to maximum four to six different shows across the week. And so anytime you discover a new show, that's going to knock one of those four to six shows out of your weekly rotation. Now, it doesn't mean that you're not a listener that show forever. You're going to come back to it eventually, but we're talking about week in and week out listenership, right? So if we think about our behavior as podcast listeners where no, if we love 20 shows, we don't listen to all 20 shows every single week. We cycle in and out. Then we can probably assume that that is true for our own podcast audience as well. And so if all of this is true, I've thrown a bunch of numbers at you. But if this is all true, which I strongly believe it is, that we can reasonably expect only 10 to 20% of our total audience to be tuning into our podcasts on a regular basis. Then what that means is if you take your downloads per episode, you can reasonably multiply it by 10 or even 20. And that is what your total audience is. Now I don't know about you, but I am not doing this simply so I can get podcast downloads. My life does not change when my podcast downloads go up. My life does change when my show grows. And I'm able to make more money from it, either from people becoming customers of my business or if I'm an advertiser, I get more advertisement revenue, right? But the download itself doesn't change anything. And yet that is what we are measuring our success by. So what does this have to do with those other creators that I mentioned earlier? Well, it's true that they are having a hard time growing their podcast. But that is in comparison to the growth that they are seeing on other platforms, their subscribers on YouTube and their followers on social media and their email list subscribers. But here's the thing about that, all of those metrics, and this is the key. All of those metrics when you get a follower that follower does not go away if they stop consuming your content. You get to keep that follower unless you anger them or whatever and they actively unfollow you or unsubscribe from you on YouTube or unsubscribe from your email list. So when we measure our audience, the people that we can reach on a regular basis, that number are audience following on other platforms, compounds with all of the people with time who have said, yes, I like this creator, I want their stuff, even if they're not consuming that stuff, even if they're not reading the emails, they still count towards your email subscriber count. If they're not watching your videos, they still count as a subscriber on YouTube. And if they're not getting your content on social media, they still show up as a follower. Podcasters don't get this. We don't have a metric that says these are all the people who have ever tuned into your podcast. We can only see the people who downloaded this specific episode this week. And if these numbers check out, that means that for every one person that downloads your episode this week, nine people love your show might even be telling people about your show. They just didn't listen to that episode. So yes, to the bigger creators who are publicly lamenting how hard it is to grow a podcast, I say yes, it is true. The podcast listener is the hardest fought audience relationship you can get online. However, you're not getting the whole picture on other platforms, YouTube, email and social media. You're looking at all the people who have ever opted in to get your stuff, but on your podcast, you're only seeing the people who consumed it this week. So that would be like on social media if you did not see how many people could follow you and you could only see how many people viewed your last post or same thing on YouTube. You couldn't see how many subscribers you have, but you could only see how many views your last video got or on email. You couldn't see how many total subscribers you had, but you only saw how many people opened your last email. If that is all we saw on other platforms, we wouldn't think that a podcast was so difficult to grow because we would be comparing the same metrics. If podcasters had the ability to see all the people who ever opted into listening to the podcast, like you could on the other platforms, it wouldn't feel as though a podcast is as difficult to grow as it feels. So my point to you is this podcast downloads are indeed hard to grow, but they feel harder because it is a different metric than the other platforms and media that we're on where we get that overall follower count. So what do we do about this? Well, starting a few months ago, I started changing the way I coach the podcasters that I work with and I started changing the way I look at my own audience instead of measuring my podcast's success by the number of downloads that it gets per episode. I am measuring my overall success as a creator by looking at my total audience growth over the course of a month. That combines my audience growth on social media, my audience growth on YouTube. So if you're on YouTube, that counts too, and how many emails that I got. And what I found is that when you do that, you actually begin to see how much faster your audience growth is as compared to if you were just staring at your downloads every single month. And with this, you can see your audience compounding instead of only seeing the people who listen to your last episode. So here is my challenge to you and here's what I think you can do to adjust the way you measure your success as a podcaster, unless you're somebody who has sworn off of every other media, you say, I'm not doing any social media, I'm not doing any YouTube and I'm not doing any email, which I am sorry to tell you you're going to have a really hard time doing this. The more and more I do this, the more I see it is a 360 degree endeavor, we need all of those pieces. We need long form. We don't need YouTube, but it's nice. We need social media and we need email if we want to turn this into a thriving business. And so my challenge to you is moving forward. Don't just look at your podcast downloads every single month to measure whether or not your audience grew, understand that if you combine your podcast downloads with your social media overall audience and your YouTube audience, if you have that and your newsletter subscribers, you will get a much more accurate picture of how many more people you reached over the past month and how much bigger your audience got over the next month. And keep in mind that your podcast downloads are really only a reflection of the 10 to 20% most engaged members of your audience. And that every new podcast download can really be equated to 10 new people that are now in your audience that now know you that now like you that now trust you. And if you're a business owner are a potential client or customer. This episode is being published on April 30th tomorrow is May 1st. So my challenge to you is beginning tomorrow. I want you to look and see how your podcast did in April. But I then want you to look how many followers do you have on all of the social media platforms that you are regularly on Instagram, TikTok, threads, X, LinkedIn, whatever, something else. Add all of those up if you're on YouTube, add your YouTube subscribers and add the number of subscribers to your newsletter as well. Add up all of those metrics, take that number, add it to your podcast downloads. And that is a good estimation of what your total audience is. And once you do that multiple months in a row, you'll be able to see how much your audience actually grew and where it grew. Moving forward on this podcast, you're going to hear me talk about total audience more because get this since we started tracking total audience here at Grotha Show. I'm going to provide a master of the show clients who I worked with directly to implement this. What I have found is that they are happier. Why is that? Well, it's because now they're able to see how much faster their audience is growing than they thought. They're able to see it all in one place. And they're no longer looking at the 10 to 20% metric that podcast downloads are. They're now looking at the overall picture and they can see the gains that they've made over the last month. And I can tell you right now that is extremely motivating and it makes you more excited and your audience grows faster because you can actually see it growing as compared to only looking at podcast downloads when it really looks like it's growing in a snail's pace in comparison to everything else. Now if you want help tracking this for members of the Grotha Show Academy on Wednesday, April 1st, I'm going to be hosting a session where we all together calculate our total audience size. So I just created a brand new spreadsheet template for Grotha Show Academy members to use where all you have to do is plug in your numbers on Instagram and YouTube and newsletter and stuff like that. And the spreadsheet will actually calculate your total audience for you. And it's got a line for every month so it can be, you know, your go to tracker month after month after month. And it's going to also calculate your growth rate. So it'll show you, hey, look, your audience grew 5% this month. Even though it looks like it didn't grow as much, look how much it grew. So that tracker template is available for Grotha Show Academy members. If you're not in the academy, I highly recommend you join us. The link is in the show notes for how you can jump in. And if you hear this before May 1st, 2024, I would love for you to join us hop in. And if you want, I can guide you in filling out that tracker when we do that live session this Wednesday. So that's going to do it for today. Remember, above all else, track your total audience. Yes, we want our podcast downloads to grow, but that is only a part of the picture. And hopefully now, when you look, you will be able to see you are doing much better than you think. That's going to do it for today's episode one more time. I would love to have you at our Grotha Show Academy session on May 1st. The link is in the show notes to hop in. We'd love to have you in there. You also get access to tons and trainings and events and everything blah, blah, blah. You can look at the page to see what you get. And yeah, start tracking that total audience. I'll see you next week.