The Locations tab of the Insights dashboard gives you a comprehensive view of where your listening audience is located. You can view location data over a custom period, and either for all episodes on show or specific episodes
Downloads by location map
The 'downloads by location' map serves as a visualisation at-a-glance, a quick guide on where your listeners are most concentrated in the world. Countries with darker colour will have more downloads in your chosen time period than those with a lighter colour.
For countries on the download map in grey, this means no downloads were recorded for that area.
All locations: breakdown by country
Below the map on the location tab, you will see a breakdown of listens by country. This shows total downloads for the time period and episode selection, plus a percentage total of the downloads for each country.
All locations: breakdown by city
By clicking on the country breakdown in the Location tab, you will see a more detailed breakdown for each country by city and the percentage of total downloads recorded for each location.
Exporting data from the Location tab
All the data available in the Location tab is exportable. By clicking the 'Export' button next to the All locations table, your computer will automatically download a .csv file of the data you currently have selected.
A .csv file means 'comma-separated values' file and is a simple form of spreadsheet. It can be opened in spreadsheet software such as Excel or Numbers on mac, or even online services such as Google sheets. There are articles and resources online that can help you to use this data in your preferred software.
Location tab: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
How is location data calculated in Insights?
How is location data calculated in Insights?
To calculate location data in Insights, we use a raw piece of called an IP address, which is sent to Acast by podcast players, apps and platforms. We can use this to figure out where in the world a download is happening.
An IP address is assigned to a specific location, and it's possible to use it to figure out details such as country and city.
Here's an example of an IP address: 192.168.123.132.
For more technical details on how we use IP addresses, Acast uses centralised industry standard services to match IP addresses against location information such as country and city.
Acast also uses a database called the TAG Data Center IP list to check to see if an IP address is valid or from a spam or fraudulent source.
There's some countries with higher downloads than expected. It seems strange, what does this mean?
There's some countries with higher downloads than expected. It seems strange, what does this mean?
If you see certain countries in the Location tab with a higher number of downloads than expected, there's a few potential explanations. Listeners can access your show from anywhere once it's available, so it might be the case that you have fans of your show located across the world!
If the country downloads are small
If the country download numbers are relatively small, either a handful of listens or a low % of the overall downloads, it could also be listeners on vacation or using a VPN. A virtual private network (VPN) is a system used by someone to either disguise their location, or to make it appear as if they are located somewhere else. This is sometimes done to access services or products that are only available in certain countries.
If the country downloads are much bigger than expected
If there is country download data that is much bigger than expected or making up a high percentage of total downloads, there might be an app or platform which is downloading your show more than it should be.
A troubleshooting tip is to see if there is a similar big increase on a particular app or platform, which you will be able to see in the Performance tab.
There might also be a lot of downloads from a particular country on an individual episode, which you can check on the Overview tab. This might be a particularly popular episode with a special guest.
If you still think there is something wrong, please reach out to Acast Support via the messenger chat box in the dashboard. Please provide as much as information as possible, so we can see if there are other explanations.
Under come countries, I can see some cities or locations appear multiple times?
Under come countries, I can see some cities or locations appear multiple times?
In the city breakdown on the location tab, you might sometimes see a location appear multiple times under a particular country. This is because we use external databases to analyse IP addresses, which is the raw data that allows us to see the location of a download. These are industry standard which most podcast services use, but it does sometimes mean that these services label IP addresses with different levels of detail.
For instance, in United Kingdom you might see both 'London' and 'Islington' or in United States you might see 'New York' and 'Brooklyn' which are normally considered the same location, but in fact are areas within those cities.
Unfortunately, as we use external sources to analyse the IP addresses which we use to find location data, we are unable to update this in the city breakdown. However, for most of the data you will be able to clear see the percentage of downloads happening in different areas of the country, and be able to learn about your audience.