5 key performance metrics for podcasting in 2024

Introduction

So we’ve covered a lot of ground. Now, the main thing that I want to leave you with is metrics.

Key Performance Indicators that you can watch and track. Some are objective, some are subjective, but throughout the years, I found that downloads are very meaningless until you get to a place where you’re making thousands of downloads a month.

It sucks to keep refreshing your feed and focusing on the fact that you got five downloads because everybody is like that at first when you’re starting from scratch.

So it can be demotivating to focus on the wrong metrics.

So my goal is to help save you from that by focusing on stuff that’s going to move the needle forward.

Hitting 100 Episodes

So the first metric that you’re going to want to think about is hitting 100 episodes. So this is very much in your control.

The more you record, the more you publish, and the more you stay consistent with that.

And again, once a week is going to take you two years. If you do it twice a week, you can easily hit that in one year and so forth.

So getting to 100 episodes is a big deal because it shows you’ve covered a lot of ground in your given chosen topics and areas. So that’s going to be metric number one. That’s purely in your control.

The "Hundred Download" Rule

Number two is this metric called the hundred download rule.

The hundred download rule is this idea that on each one of those 100 episodes, you have 100 downloads.

First, the goal is just, in the lifetime of the episode, to try to get it all up to 100 plus downloads.

Over time, that goal will shift where it’s like, try to get 100 downloads within 30 days.

Then, try to get 100 downloads within 7 days.

For example, after seven days, you can rely on that, every episode is typically hitting around 100 or more.

That is a good sign that’s showing you that, you’ve got this consistent 100 people that keep coming back and are interested in this thing you have to say.

It’s a very good metric for you to keep in mind and titrate it back the way I said, which is one is just in the lifetime of its episode, get to 100, and then make it more challenging for yourself by making it 30 days and seven days.

Master Generating Clicks

The third metric that I recommend tracking, which is one of the more important ones, is clicks.

The reason I categorize this as more important is because this is what other companies, brands, sponsors and guests even are coming on to your show for.

They’re coming on with the assumption that, “Hey the links and stuff that I provide and the stuff that I’m also doing, a portion of these people will click over and check out my stuff. Whether it’s now or a couple of months or a year from now, that will happen.”

So if you can generate demand for clicks and you can show that over time, you become a very valuable place to be because people act on what you’re saying.

Where most podcasts go wrong is they don’t track this part, they have a couple of their main links there, but if they’re talking about a microphone or they’re talking about a new course or whatever, like, they don’t have a special trackable link, they’re just telling you about the URL and where to go.

Which makes it harder to track. Yes, they could have been listening, but then they go to Google and search you, and so now Google gets the credit.

So the way to make sure that you see the impact of what the podcast is doing is to make sure you’ve got a trackable link i.e. bit.ly or geni.us. That’s one I like.

What I do to train this early on is, let’s say you talk about in your given area, like, three main books that you’re reading right now.

About, if you’re into hunting and your show’s about hunting, the three top hunting books that help you or whatever. And if you’re in any other industry, same thing.

What this did, in a fitness podcast that I recorded was I talked about those books, I included the links to those books, and yes, I’m making some affiliate money off of that if people buy.

But essentially, I got to see that, the total downloads for this episode, new show, wasn’t expecting much. Was only like 35 downloads. And then on the YouTube version, there were like 50 views.

So it’s like, 85 total people have seen or heard this at the moment.

That’s your total impressions.

Now, when I go look at the clicks in my tracker for those three books, I’ve got 4 clicks on this one, 5 clicks on this one, and 3 clicks on this one. That’s data if you know how to interpret it. “Oh, okay, why did more people click on this book versus this book?”

That gives you something that your audience might be interested in.

But number two, I can say, okay, 6 plus 5 plus 3 is fourteen. I got fourteen clicks out of the eighty-five people on YouTube and on… my podcast that ever saw or heard this thing. If you do the percentage there of what that is, it’s pretty high.

You don’t normally expect more than like 5 percent of people to take action on your things in the internet world.

That’s why you need so much volume so that it filters down into 5 percent being okay, as many clicks as you need.

But now if you go, 14 divided by 85?

That is a 16.5 percent click-through rate.

So 16. 5 percent of people who listened or watched the whole thing took action and clicked off.

Now you know that people could have, like, when I recommend my freebies, they might just type in podmahal.com and go there versus click in the description, but your job as the host is to train your audience to click the links in the description.

The more you do that, the easier it is because you can always change that stuff out too.

If a link gets updated, the domain gets updated, and that stuff can be updated.

You also leave it a little bit more open to, “Hey, other goodies in there are going to be useful for you, depending on who you are.”

And so now you’ve got extra traffic that you’re capturing because somebody stumbles upon it.

So that going to be your third metric is clicks master generating clicks, even if it’s not to your products, you’re selling like points to other resources or shows or places that, people are interested in and get them used to clicking through because when it comes time to sell something now you start asking people to click. It’s gonna take time for them to get adjusted to that.

But if you train them from day one, this becomes a very high value add no matter, if you know what route you decide to go with your monetization goals and your other strategies.

Be Honest With Yourself

The fifth metric that I want you to hold on to is probably one of the more important metrics.

This is going to be a little more subjective, but It’s being honest with yourself about what you want to see happen from your podcast.

So for me, when I first started my podcast, my first one ever, it helped me get my dream internship. And it helped me get my dream job at a Bay Area startup.

At the time in that season of life. I was younger, I was trying to make my own thing happen, but also I was willing to learn from people, willing to work for free, and I wanted access to opportunities beyond my area.

And so, I was able to do that, by episode 15 and by episode 32.

So, within a year of actually starting my show, I had gotten the dream internship and was starting the dream job 15 days before one full year would have hit.

So that’s an example of knowing what I wanted from that and being able to kind of create episodes with experts that help me on the back end.

For you, if you are in a season where you might want to create a community.

He might be like, I just want like-minded people to talk to and to engage with who is kind of just as into comic books as I am.

I have helped somebody do that, who wanted to start a show about comic books.

And it’s very cool to see, a year, two years later now, that he’s still doing it. He’s connecting people in his area. He’s leading in a community. He feels confident in it.

And this is from a person who wasn’t very confident in a lot of other areas of his life, and it gave him this creative hobby that allowed him to work. His warehouse job allows him to have this side hustle and hobby that, allows him to keep going. He enjoys sitting down and editing it, working on it, and recording it.

Podcast Goal and Purpose

So that is a purpose, It’s like, “Oh, I want this for creative fulfillment. I want to take risks and see what I build” or, “Hey, if you say upfront, I want more leads from this, I want more people who will be interested in my product or service.”

Then there’s a game where you can play a promotion strategy that you can deploy based on that purpose.

But until you’re honest with yourself and you don’t know that, or you deny it, you might find yourself chasing empty goals like, Hey, I’m going to try to sell a t-shirt.

And it’s like, okay, that might be cool, but what end purpose or result does this get towards for you?

And so if your goal is to turn this into a lead generation machine, which is entirely possible to do, then you just have to take those steps that align with that goal.

If you know on the back end, “Hey, my goal is one day, to get sponsors through this.” If you want to get sponsors, we’ve already talked about the metric that you need to hit, 25,000 downloads to 50, 000 downloads per episode. You know that, you can now aim for that purpose.

I know somebody, who owns like 10 businesses. And a couple of big buildings and stuff. But for him, the podcast serves as a place to have meaningful conversations with people. And he does want it to come back and benefit those 10 businesses.

But it’s serving as a home base for what this person does. So yes, they’re involved in these 10 other things, but this is the home base where they get to discuss and share and talk about, all the stuff that’s going on within those 10 businesses.

So, podcasting, a lot of times, for people, let’s say it’s not even a lead generation machine, let’s say that it’s going to be a, just a content marketing system for you.

So you want to be able to create content in a place consistently for someone and you know that’s something you need to do whether it’s on Instagram or YouTube or wherever.

Podcast is the place that a lot of people pick because only the right people find you. It’s not something you’re on a spang and a loudspeaker speaker. “Hey, come listen to my show.” You’re only attracting people who are into what you’re going to be paying for people who have this fear of putting stuff out there. All my friends and family and coworkers are going to see it.

Instagram may not be the place for you to create in that way because that’s a little bit more out there and upfront, but maybe podcasts.

It’s only reach and YouTube. It’s only reaching the people who are actually into that thing. It’s invisible to everybody else.

So that is an example of a purpose.

Using this as a content marketing system.

So using the podcast with a purpose, allows you to take your mind off of the vanity metrics because if you just pay attention to vanity metrics like how many downloads I have and how many likes do I have and followers are they growing, yes that’s cool that might be important to some people but really what it does is it distracts you from staying focused and connected with creating the stuff that you want to create.

And choosing focus from the beginning instead of, what am I supposed to do? What is this podcast supposed to do for me?

We’re beyond that point in the podcasting world.

In 2023 and beyond, you’re using podcasts as a tool. To deliver information. Lecturers in Ivy League universities are delivering their lectures and things like that through podcasting, that’s not a way that we used it before.

It’s the same way Instagram wasn’t used for video. It wasn’t used for multiple carousel-style text posts. But over time, as the market matured, people now use it for that. It’s used in a million different ways.

So I hope this opened up the possibilities for how you can use a podcast, how you can use it as a very fulfilling place and rewarding place to create for either your hobby or your business goals.

And hopefully, this gave you a map from start to finish on how to get this idea off the ground.

I do have another video that is once you’ve implemented a lot of these ideas and tasks and concepts I talked about.

In that video, I show you step by step how to upload into Buzzsprout and launch onto all the different platforms like Apple and Spotify.

So I will link that up in the description below, that’s one you should give a watch after this, but I hope you’re able to jump around and make it and act on some of the items that I’ve outlined here today.

If you want a checklist-type format, the podcast launch checklist I was referring to, make sure to download that in the description below as well, or head over to podmahal.com.

I have a bunch of free tools for anybody who’s starting a podcast or growing one there as well.

And of course, if you need any help at all, you get stuck in certain parts, definitely hit me up. I would love to hear from you, but my intention with this was to try to make it accessible for more people to start a podcast without having to pay for consultations and my time and having to kind of coach them through it.

So hopefully you’ve listened to this. You can absorb some of it, you can act on it.

If it helped you even 1%, I would love to hear from you. Make sure to drop a comment. It makes it worth it for me to put out and create stuff like this, and I’ll continue to do so. Thanks again for hanging out and spending the time.

I know this was an in-depth video, but I appreciate you, and I will talk to you next time.