Podcasting Metrics Series Pt 7 | Measuring Podcast Subscriber Stats
So far we’ve discussed how to measure the size of your audience by tracking downloads and bandwidth.
Another important podcasting metric to track is the number of subscribers that you have. Even though subscribers only represent a portion of your total listenership, it’s worthwhile knowing how many of your listeners have taken the step to automatically receive new content from you. It can be argued that this is typically a more engaged listener.
So how do we identify a subscriber and distinguish him/her from other listeners? A subscriber is someone who has entered your feed address into a podcatcher. A subscriber can be identified as a unique user (probably identified by unique IP address) who is checking your feed on a regular basis.
Proper tracking of subscribers requires filtering out aggregators, directories and other automated bots accessing your feed (these don’t usually represent actual listeners). For this reason, it’s difficult to track subscribers by simply looking at hits to a feed file. Some web analytics platforms are not equipped to give you accurate insight into your subscriber stats. You need tools that are geared specifically to feed metrics.
FeedBurner is one such tool. They watch a list of over 8000 (and growing) different automated bots to help sort out hits to the feeds they host. They recently provided this excellent inside peek into their methodology.
Other tools/services for tracking subscribers include RadioTail Ripple and Podpress.
January 16th, 2007 13:57
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