Podcast Success Metrics For Tomorrow

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You want your show to be successful. I want my podcast to be successful. And of course, I want all of my clients’ podcasts to be successful. But how we define success metrics for podcasts is a big and sticky question.

A lot of the advice on tracking podcast success metrics is centered around some obvious and easy things to count, like total number of downloads over time, or the average number of downloads each episode has after the course of 30 days. Some are slightly more fuzzy things like the ratio of your free subscribers to premium subscribers, or the percentage of your downloads that result in sales of products or services. Or might be simply about maximizing ad revenue per episode.

All of those make sense for some podcasts.

And all of them make no sense for almost every other podcast.

Therein lies the problem.

Your Podcast Success Metric Is Not My Podcast Success Metric

It's fine to use the same metrics as every other podcaster… as long as you’re podcasting for the same reasons as every other podcaster. So long as the business goals and objectives of your podcast line up with the same business objectives and goals of every other podcast, you can track shared goals.

But your goals and objectives are not the same as every other podcaster.

Tracking Outputs Vs Tracking Podcast Outcomes

Tracking things like the average number of downloads per episode is tracking outputs, not outcomes. It’s great that you know the ratio between subscribers to your show and people who pay for your service or maybe sign up for your Patreon content.

I’m good with all of that. But understand that you're tracking an output.

Some outputs are often easily manipulated. Want to change the total number of downloads of your show next month? Change the number of episodes you put out. Others remain outside of your ability to influence. What are you supposed to do if people aren’t signing up to the free trial of your paid newsletter? Ask harder?

But we need to track outputs. And in some cases, we need to benchmark our outputs against the outputs seen by other podcasters. But only to a point. Because it’s much more important to understand what outcomes you’re looking for with your podcast. How you define a successful outcome for your own podcast is complicated enough. Crowdsourcing (or worse, outsourcing) that decision to various Facebook groups, Reddit forums, or Discord servers increases that complexity infinitely. No, not just because of the low signal-to-noise ratio. The bigger challenge is that almost everyone with an opinion has different goals and objectives than you do for your show.

Don’t Stone Me, But Not Every Podcast Should Be Big

There’s a deeper problem with using generally accepted podcast success metrics tracking. They all point to the same assumed growth trajectory. Put more simply: Most podcast success metrics assume you want to make a really big podcast. And while I think most podcasters love the idea of their show getting huge, I think the reality of running a really big show will quickly clash against that romantic notion.

I grew up in a very tiny town. The newspaper for the town went to press every Thursday. Yes, once a week. And though it circulated to a small number of homes, I’m sure the household penetration rate was nearly 100%. But only in that town. Because there's no point in getting that newspaper if you live 30 miles away, let alone 300 or 3,000 miles away. The size of that paper is limited by the geography of the town.

“Podcasts aren't limited by geography!”, you're screaming out there. I get it. But stick with me.

Some of the best restaurants I’ve ever eaten in have 14 seats. Fourteen. Sure, staying open 24/7 or opening up new locations all over town might increase the number of patrons they can service. But at what price to the overall dining experience? And at what cost to the ideals of the people who opened up the restaurant in the first place?

Some of the best solo practitioners made the conscious decision to leave the world of Big Firms behind them to deliver a more personalized or high-touch level of service. All of them are limited by the same number of hours in the day that you and I have, which limits the number of clients they can service. Growth means adding partners, leasing bigger spaces, and other decisions the solo practitioner may not want to deal with.

But all of those -- the newspaper, the 14-seat restaurant, the solo practice -- can be quite successful without getting big. Each can provide successful business outcomes for the people who own and operate those ventures. Those people can make a good living without having their business grow huge. Perhaps best of all, these people do not have to obsess over things like inventory turn, capacity, revenue per subscriber, or any number of output-based metrics that are key to the success of larger businesses in their vertical.

The Never-Fail Success Metric

What matters is something much more simple, and I posit to you that it's a success metric worthy of considering for your own podcast. It’s the success metric that almost all intentionally-small businesses rely on:

“Can I stay in business?”

That’s it. Simple, right?

“Do I have enough ad revenue to keep my small-town newspaper printing weekly?”

“Am I getting enough orders to keep my 14-seat restaurant open?”

“Am I servicing enough clients with my solo practice (or from my professional podcast consultancy) so that I can continue to pay myself, my contractors, my staff, my business expenses, with a little leftover for a rainy day?”

It’s a simple, easy business metric disguised as a simple binary question with a simple yes or no answer.

However, it does assume that you actually want to be in business in the first place. For a lot of podcasters, they really don’t want to be in the business of podcasting. And that’s OK. the vast majority of podcasts today are made by hobbyists because it’s fun.

But that doesn’t invalidate my simple metric. It just requires a slight modification:

“Can I keep having fun?”

“Is making my podcast still fun, exciting, and enjoyable?”

“Am I getting my emotional needs met when I drop a new episode?”

“Do I get the satisfaction necessary by the effort so that I want to keep doing this?”

So whether your podcast is business-based or just for fun, this success metric doesn’t have to change. Can you afford -- either financially or emotionally -- to keep doing it?

Breaking Even vs Making A Profit

I feel the need to return to the question of business for a moment. Because staying in business is very different from covering your costs.

The publisher of that newspaper isn’t trying to break even. The price of a meal at a small restaurant will be much greater than the cost of the ingredients. Solo practitioners in a home-office don’t work for free even though they don’t have to pay for office space.

That’s why, for most, covering your costs is a bad podcast success metric. That’s not how you keep going. You have to stay in business. Or it's about feeling the investment required to make your show is smaller -- significantly smaller -- than the emotional return you receive.

That's really the podcast success metric that matters.

You Have A Choice To Make

Option A: Right now, start a new email. No, not a Tweet. Not a Facebook update. Not a comment. I want you to send an email to one podcaster you know who may or may not be listening to this program. You’re sending them your personal recommendation that they listen to Podcast Pontifications.

Option B: Supporting the show by going to BuyMeACoffee.com/EvoTerra.

You pick which option you like. I'm easy either way.

And I shall be back tomorrow with yet another Podcast Pontifications.

Cheers!

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PP301 - Podcast Success Metrics For Tomorrow

Evo Terra: [00:00:00] Right up there with the meaning of life or the sound of one hand clapping. Is this what podcast success metrics are important to track? The answer may be a lot more simple than you think.

[00:00:20] Hello

[00:00:20] and welcome to another podcast. Pontifications with me. Evo. Tara, look, you want your show to be successful. I want my podcast to be successful. And of course I want all of my podcasts, clients, all of my clients podcasts. There we go to actually be successful. But how we define that is a big and sticky

[00:00:45] sticky question.

[00:00:48] Now, a lot of the advice out there is centered around pretty obvious metric based things. Like tracking the total number of downloads that your show has, or for a comparative sake, track the average number of downloads each episode has after the course of 30 days. Maybe you should really care about the ratio of your free subscribers to the people who are premium subscribers or.

[00:01:17] What percentage of your downloads result into downloads of products or services? Maybe it's something more simple than that. Maybe it's simply how much ad revenue can you make per episode? All of those make sense for some podcasts and all of them make no sense for almost every other podcast. Therein lies the problem.

[00:01:46] It's fine as long as your podcasting for the same reasons everyone else is to use the same metrics that everyone else is, but you are not more to the point. It's fine to track these metrics if your goals and objectives for your podcast are the same as every other podcast goals and objectives, but they are not.

[00:02:13] You see, when we start. Tracking things like average number of downloads per episode, which I do. We're tracking outputs, not outcomes. If you know what ratio you have between subscribers and people who pay for something, like maybe sign up for your Patrion or your a go fund me accounts or whatever it happens to be, that's fine, but understand that you're tracking an output.

[00:02:43] You want to change? Just total. Total downloads is the worst output of all, right? It's easy to get more downloads, just go, just go make more content and you'll have more and more downloads. So these things are all just outputs and outputs are very important to track. Look, I want to know certain things, or there are certain things required to make sure you're tracking towards a certain success level, but of course it's, it's defining that success level that gets really.

[00:03:10] Really complicated. What are you trying to do? And a lot of those outputs we get when we get advice from other people, when we jump into the various Facebook groups or Reddit forums or discord servers, and we start asking questions, Hey, what should I do? You're going to get a lot of mixed advice. You're gonna get a lot of mixed advice because people have different ideas, different goals and objectives they want to do for their show.

[00:03:40] And here's the real thing to keep in mind with all this. A lot of the metrics based tracking, of course, you can only track metrics. A lot of the focus on metrics, success metrics, what I was trying to say assumes that you want to make a really, really big show. And while I don't disagree with the notion that most podcasters would sure love it if their show got really big and huge, I can't say that's always the case.

[00:04:11] I mean, just think about it for a moment. If you were the, and I was thinking about this over the weekend, I grew up in a very, very tiny town, and we had a newspaper that was printed every Thursday. That was that one newspaper came out every Thursday. I don't how many pages on a 10 15 pages, something like that.

[00:04:29] But it had a subscription rate of everybody. Well, you know, it was a small number. It was a number in the, you know, small thousands. But you know, that was as big as it possibly could be because there's no point in getting this newspaper. If you live 30 miles away, let alone 300 or 3000. So the S the size of that paper could, is limited by the geography.

[00:04:57] Podcasts aren't limited by geography. You're screaming out there. I get it. But in your niche, it very well might be, you don't need to appeal to everyone. Maybe you've got a 14 seat restaurant. How big do you want that to get? You've got 14 chairs, you know, unless you are deciding to open up new locations all over the place, and that's a huge amount of work and maybe not why you got into the restaurant business after all.

[00:05:26] So maybe that's not the smart thing for you to do. Maybe you have a solo practice, whatever it is that you do, and you're limited by you, your limit type limited by the number of hours in the day that you. Can perform the services. So do you need to grow really huge? Does your show need to grow really huge?

[00:05:50] That newsletter, excuse me, that news paper, that 14 seat restaurant, that solo practice can be quite successful. The people that run these things make a good living at the thing without having it grow huge. They don't have to worry nearly as much about other big businesses on about things like inventory, turn capacity, a revenue per subscriber, all those various things.

[00:06:21] No. For them, what matters is something much more simple, and I posit to you that it's something worthy of considering for your own podcast and the success metrics that these intentionally small. Businesses use is this, can I stay in business? Period? The end is enough revenue coming in. Yeah. From my small town newspaper, from my 14 seat restaurant, from my solo practice, from my professional podcast consultancy where I can continue to pay myself.

[00:07:00] Okay. Perhaps a small number of employees. Put a little in savings. All of these things. Now, of course, this simple, easy business metric. Am I able to stay in business? Yes or no? Binary question. Okay? Assumes you want to be in business in the first place. And I know that not a lot of podcasts want this. In fact, the vast majority of podcasts are hobbyist basin.

[00:07:27] And for them it's fun. So for them, it's kind of the same thing. Can I stay having fun at this particular thing? The thing that I'm doing right now, is it still fun and exciting and enjoyable for me? Am I getting my emotional triggers tripped when I do it? If so, that's your success metric. If you need it to bring in significant sources of revenue so you can continue on to live, that's your success metric.

[00:07:59] I'm not saying it has to be one of those two. I'm just saying think about something as simple as that. Just tracking. Are you able to, I don't care as much about like am I paying for itself? That's one thing. Look, a newspaper doesn't exist because it can cover its own costs. Rarely do restaurants stay in business when they do that.

[00:08:20] It's not about covering your costs, it's about staying in business. Or it's about am I feeling good about that investment that I made so that my emotional return is great. That's what matters. That's really the podcast success metric that matters. I want to ask you to do two things for me. Well, I, one of two things.

[00:08:42] It's going to be simple. One of two things. You choose option a. I want you to right now, fire off an email. No, not a tweet, not a Facebook update, not a comment. I want you to fire off an email to one person, one podcast, or you know who you are. Not sure whether or not they listen to the program and tell them you recommend them listening to podcast pontifications.

[00:09:01] That's option a or one option B. If you don't want to do that, that's perfectly fine. Would you mind supporting the show by going to buy me a coffee.com/evo Terra. That's it. Simple enough. Your choice. Tell someone about it. A personal recommendation about the show or toss a couple of bucks in the coffers at, buy me a coffee.com/evo Tara.

[00:09:23] I'm easy either way and I shall be back tomorrow with yet another podcast on defecation. Cheers.

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