Introducing TapeWrite stats: see who, where and how long listens to your podcast

Constant improvement is high on the priority list of most content creators. After all, who doesn’t want to get better and better at the one art he chose to devote his time to?

There are many paths to get there but a straight way to improving the quality of the content as a podcaster is understanding the audience and how it interacts with the audio. The more information is available on the listener, the more complete the feedback. Our team knows that meaningful statistics are invaluable for every audio publisher.

Still, measuring and understanding the consumption of audio content is a particularly challenging task since it is traditionally free medium, consumed in a distributed way; via embedded players on websites, hosting platforms or RSS based podcast directories. At TapeWrite we commited to creating a tool that respects that tradition and in the recent weeks we’ve been working on providing our publishers with statistics that reflect that complexity, yet make it easy to draw conclusions from listener’s behaviour.

Today I am really happy to introduce what will be available to all our publishers immediately and for free:

Understand the fragmentation

Statistics for all tapes over the course of last 12 months including tape ranking.

As a publisher you certainly are aware that people find and listen to your podcast in different ways. At TapeWrite we are measuring all types of listens separately so you can see what works best for your audience over time. The picture on the left displays three ways listeners can tune into your audio:

• they might play it directly in TapeWrite when finding it on social media or directly on our platform (red dot)
• they might stream it in the embed on a website where your tape is embedded (blue dot)
• or once they subscribe to your podcast via a podcasting app, they will download your tapes on their device(green dot).

It is important to know the numbers separately not only to know your listeners’ preferences but also since they provide different information on listeners’s behaviour.

Understand where people find your content

While the most important information — the number of listens/downloads — is available for all three types of listening, in case of embeds the “referral sources” inform on where the listeners actually listened to the tape and in case of the TW player where the listeners come from. That is super important to understand where your traffic comes from and what works in terms of marketing your podcast, might in be a post in Facebook, a link on producthunt or an embed in “The Economist” (that would be something, right?:).

Understand when people skip

Are there any parts of your tapes that people skip through? If yes, you would like to know which ones so you can avoid boring people to death next time, right? What if people just listen to the beginning but then their interest drops? And what are the tapes that work and people tend to listen from the beginning to the end? Once you choose a single tape you will be able to see number of listens aggregated by cards. The more cards you add, the more information on the listenership we will collect and the more you can learn about what works for your audience (needless to mention the tape will be more beautiful and naturally divided in sections). Yes, it’s awesome. This stats are available for the embeds and listens in the TW player.

Statistics for a single tape for the last 12 months showing the listenership card by card allowing to identify the development of the interest of the listener throughout the tape.

Understand what people love and what not

In the “all tapes view’ you can see what are the favourite tapes of your listeners based on the total amount of listens. Give the new tape a bit of time to get the listens it deserves before drawing a conclusion or play around with the time range to get a more precise picture of the popularity in a given time.

Understand what people use to listen to your podcast

Do your listeners tune into your tapes on mobile or on desktop? Which App do they use to subscribe to your feed? Take a look at your stats. You see lots of mobile app listens? It is pretty likely they are jogging or driving while listening to the tapes. This info can help you adjust your tapes to the actual context in which your creations are consumed by e.g. cutting or extending their length or making comments about the show notes being available for later in TapeWrite cards.

Whether Android or iOS, iTunes or RadioPublic: information on the OS and podcasting app (for downloads only) can give you some insight on the type of listeners you have got in your fanbase.

Understand where people listen from

Finally, available for all there types of listens, location stats inform you where most of your fans are based allowing for better targeting in terms of timezone and potential customisation of the content. And let’s be honest: looking at these stats is a pleasure for the globetrotter in each one of us.

Each statistics section can be seen in a more detailed view allowing for a more in-depth analysis and the time range can be customised to publisher’s needs.

Now, what are you waiting for? Go and check out your new, shiny tapes stats and tell us what you think.

TapeWrite is a modern audio publishing solution. Get a stunning annotated podcast player and an RSS feed in minutes.