Resonate Hosting offers detailed podcast analytics. Because of the distributed nature of podcasting and RSS, podcasters need lots of tools in their arsenal to get a complete picture of listener engagement. The Resonate Hosting dashboard is a great place to start. And you will find more detailed analytics in each listening platform — Apple, Spotify, and Google. Follow the links on your home screen in Resonate to drill into each platform.
Resonate Hosting Analytics
From your Resonate home screen, tap the Hosting tab. This will take you to the analytics dashboard for the active show. In this article, we breakdown what each chart means and how to interpret the data. Let's start at the very top and work our way down chart by chart.
What is a Download?
Before jumping into the chart, it's important to explain what a "download" is inside the Resonate system. It's not a listener, subscriber, or feed refresh. A download event is logged when an episode mp3 is downloaded by the Apple Podcasts app, Castbox, Google Podcasts or any of the other podcasting apps used to download episodes. We log that request, summarize, and report that information in the dashboard. This also includes downloads from the Resonate embed player.
What about Spotify downloads?
Spotify downloads do not appear in the Resonate Hosting Analytics dashboard. Spotify is unique because listeners streaming episodes on Spotify are not downloading the episode directly from Resonate. Spotify downloads the episode once, and streams that episode to all the listeners on their platform. This makes the listening experience better for Spotify users, but for podcasters, the streams and downloads that happen inside the Spotify app can only be tracked by Spotify. Please login to the Spotify Podcaster dashboard to view Spotify analytics for your show.
Daily Downloads
All dashboard charts are controlled by the filters at the top. We support filtering analytics by:
Episode — Drill down into the analytics for a specific episode using the All Episodes drop down filter.
Date Range — By default, the dashboard will show the last 30 days. Change the Start and End Date to adjust the time period.
The Daily Downloads chart is a line graph where the y-axis is the total number of downloads and the x-axis is a specific day. Hovering over any dot in the graph will show a tooltip with the date and the total number of downloads for that day.
Total Downloads
The Total Downloads card is a single number representing the total number of downloads for the selected time period and episode (or all episodes).
Top Episodes (by Total Downloads)
Top Episodes by total downloads is a table listing the top 25 episodes with the most downloads. The first column is the ranking of the episode. The episode in the #1 spot is the episode with the most downloads. The second column is the date and time the episode was published in Eastern Time. The last column is the total number of downloads for each episode.
Where is your audience listening?
This table breaks down where the episodes are being downloaded. In this example the Apple Podcasts in the #1 spot with 843 episodes downloaded using the Apple player. The Podcast Player is the app or browser that downloaded the episode mp3. And the final column, Downloads, is the total number of downloads initiated by that app or browser.
% Played in Embed Player
The Resonate Embed Player measures how much of the episode listeners are finishing. In the example above, two listeners finished 100% or more of the episode. Percent played is tracked in four buckets — less than 25%, 25-50%, 75-100%, and 100% or more. The goal is to have this chart be as green and yellow as possible.
Embed Player Engagement
The Embed Player Engagement chart is a stacked line graph measuring the average listening session in the Resonate Embed Player. Track the average amount of time a listener played, scrubbed, and seeked in each episode. In the example above, the average listener completed 100% of episode 5, they played the full episode in the embed player.
The y-axis in this chart is relative to the duration of the episode, 100% is 100% of the duration of the episode. For example, the first episode on the left-hand side of the chart above has more than 100% played. This means that the average listener listened to the episode more than once.
The "Scrubbed" line measures the amount of time that the average listener scrubbed over. Scrubbing over a section of the episode is the act of clicking and dragging the little circular handle on the embed player timeline.
The "Seeked" line measures the amount of time the average listener seeked or skipped through the episode. The embed player has 15 and 30 second seek buttons next to the play button and when listeners tap either of these buttons, Resonate logs this as a seek event.
Embed Player Engagement Data
We know there's no substitute for Excel. At the bottom of the analytics dashboard, there's a button to download all embed player engagement data as a csv export and slice and dice the data for yourself. For subscribers using the Resonate Embed Player, we offer detailed metrics on every listening session that happens inside the Resonate Player. This dataset includes:
session_id — The unique listening session id
episode_id — The unique episode id
episode_season — Podcast season
episode_number — Podcast episode number
episodes_title — Episode title
total_scrubbed — (seconds) Total duration that was scrubbed over
total_pauses — Total number of times the listener paused playback
total_seeks — Total number of skips or reverses using the skip and reverse buttons
total_scrubs — Total number of times that the listener dragged the handle on the player to skip or rewind
total_seeked — (seconds) Total duration that was skipped or reversed
total_played_percentage — Percentage of the episode that was played
total_played — (seconds) Total number of seconds spent listening
total_duration — (seconds) Total duration of an episode
platform_os — Operating system where this listening session happened
platform_os_version — Version of the OS
platform_name — Name of the app (Chrome, Safari, etc)
platform_version — Version of the app
platform_description — Label for the app where the listening session happened
platform_ua — The original user agent string sent by the browser to identify the app where the embed player was used
timestamp — A UTC timestamp when the session took place