The Performance tab of the Insights dashboard is where you'll go to understand how episodes stack up against each other over time, and at what rate your audience is listening to your episodes.
Episode Performance
If you want to compare the performance of specific episodes in the Performance tab, simply click the check box on the left-hand side of the episode. The graph will automatically select the three most recent episodes as default, but you can select as many as you wish.
You can toggle the episode performance between showing the first 7 days or 30 days after an episode's release.
These episode performance comparisons will help you understand which episodes performed better over time and can help you in future planning for your show and guide you in how to grow your audience.
Under the episode performance graph, for each episode the total number of downloads after 7 or 30 days is listed, as well as the percentage change.
If you want to understand the technical details of how episode performance is calculated, 'change' is calculated against the median episode's downloads relative to the publish date.
Listen Through Rate
The listen-through rate (LTR) section of the performance tab helps you understand what percentage of listeners finish a particular episode. Listen-through rate data is only available for listens happening on the Acast embed player.
'Listen-through rate' means the amount of an episode an individual listener got through before stopping. This may mean listening to the end, or it might mean stopping halfway through.
If you would like to understand the technical details of how listen-through rate (LTR) is calculated, it is generated for an episode daily, and only one day's worth of data is considered at a time. There is a minimum threshold that needs to be met which is 10 listens on the Acast app and/or embed player per day. This means that if there were less than 10 listens on a specific day, the LTR data would not appear for that day.
Performance Tab: Frequently Asked Questions
Where else can I see data around the performance of episodes and behaviours of my audience?
Where else can I see data around the performance of episodes and behaviours of my audience?
The Insights dashboard is the place to see all the data for your show across all listening platforms, to get a global view. However, there are some platforms that offer additional performance and behaviour data that is not widely available to hosting platforms.
This is because the download is happening on their actual platform, and they can see more of what the listener is doing and how the listen to your episodes. Apple Podcasts and Spotify both have separate analytics dashboards for this purpose.
To access your podcast's Apple Podcasts dashboard, log in to the Podcasts Connect you created when you submitted your podcast to them.
To access your podcast's Spotify dashboard, you need to sign up to the Spotify for Podcasters service:
You will first need to have an active Spotify account. If you To sign up, go to www.spotify.com/signup.
Also ensure the email address you’ve provided under the podcast’s General Settings is correct. Spotify will use this email address to confirm you are the owner of your RSS feed. In Create, go to Settings, then scroll down to RSS Settings to find or change your email address.
Then sign up to Spotify for Podcasters at podcasters.spotify.com. You will be sent a verification code by email to confirm your ownership of the show.
It's important to note that you will need to 'unmask' your e-mail to do this, which means making it public available in your show feed. Read about how to do that here.