As you can imagine, we get a lot of questions here at Casted. Among the most common is, “How can I show attribution for my podcast?” And that’s a great question, especially when most marketers are stuck with limiting their scope and understanding of their podcast to vanity metrics like downloads and listens.
But friends, there is so much more out there! And when it comes to measuring your podcast’s success, showing your work, being noticed, and being heard (literally) is paramount. Only by having an honest gauge on how you’re doing, can you measure where you are at and have all the information you need to constantly keep moving forward.
Luckily, we’re here to help you implement changes right now that can unlock a new set of metrics and open up your understanding of how your podcast content actually impacts your business.
So what is this trick that you can start doing right now? Embedding your podcast on your own website.
By adopting the practice of embedding into your website, you can move beyond the basic metrics and add a whole other layer of metrics into your podcast. The best part about embedding on your site is that it allows you to see all of the analytics, everything from A to Z. This simple practice will give you an entirely new vantage point into your podcast and help you better integrate your podcast into the rest of your marketing strategy.
As you begin to embed on your website, there are 3 easy ways to keep track of all the traffic heading your way, allowing you to have hard and concrete data to prove to anyone asking that your podcast is attracting buzz and beyond. After all, we all want to know that our hard work is paying off and that all our blood, sweat, and tears invested are all for naught. Okay, okay, maybe I’m being a bit dramatic, but you get my point.
Setting clear and specific goals should be a fundamental and key foundation for any podcast endeavor and any marketing initiative at all, for that matter. But when it comes to sitting down and verbalizing—much less actually writing down—specific goals to shoot for, we at Casted know firsthand just how daunting that can be.
We field a lot of questions about measuring your podcast. “What should I be measuring?” or “How can I measure that?” And our answer always goes back to thinking about why you’re doing it and who is it for. When you stop and think about the purpose and audience of any initiative, it’s usually a lot easier to define what goals or metrics will matter. We of course have identified many different ways you can measure your podcast, but those metrics can be pointless if they don’t directly impact or inform the goals of your effort.
That being said, you don’t have to set 10 goals and track 50 metrics around your podcast. You just need a couple that can help you decipher if your show is doing what you theorized it would. So set one or two goals, and identify the metrics that will impact those goals.
Hear how Meghan Keaney Anderson, formerly VP of Marketing at HubSpot, viewed goal setting around their many different shows.
It’s no secret that we use our podcast to do a lot more than just syndicate it on Apple and Spotify. We use our podcast to fuel our content strategy. Seriously, most things that you read and see on our blog come from conversations we’ve had, either on our podcast, with customers, with prospects, or with partners. We spend a lot of time listening and ideating based on the topics that come up. And we do that because we truly believe this is the future of content marketing.
But… does it work? The answer is yes. How do we know? Because we’ve set goals around that and we’re measuring metrics that impact those goals.
Aside from the metrics we are able to track in the Casted platform that help us understand how this content is performing across all channels, we also look to measure our podcast in a way many of you should be familiar with…. as content.
Too many people get stuck on the word podcast. They think it’s a channel or medium and they treat it as such. But a podcast is content, better yet, it’s owned content that we should very much treat like another tool in our toolbox and measure accordingly. If you start hosting your own podcast on your site, embedding your podcast into your blog content, or start creating content from the podcast - these are all new ways you can look to measure the success of your podcast.
What do I mean?
If you’re looking at brand awareness, the vanity metrics of downloads and listens from the syndication channels are one place to start. But are people visiting your website after they find out about your podcast? That’s impossible to tell via syndication channels. By embedding and hosting your show on your own site, you can actually track the traffic and engagement of pages that house podcast content.
Are you hoping to create really great, engaging content that converts from your podcast? A great beginning would be setting up conversion goals on your podcast pages. Your goals could be in Google Analytics or really whatever integration you’re currently using.
For instance, if we have a form of any kind or a chatbot on our podcast pages or a page that houses podcast content, we can set a goal to track conversions. You can use these chatbots to offer people more information, and then you can see if they convert on-page to the chatbot. You can also even suggest related resources within the chatbot if someone jumped in and wanted to chat with you. For example, when we launched video podcasting, Podcat recommended that you check out our announcement video and other related resources around that launch.
So what about direct revenue attribution? When you start treating your podcast like the amazing content it is, and as an owned channel that you can better track, it unlocks a lot of opportunity to understand how this content is impacting the buying cycle and ultimately revenue.
So, let’s jump into an easy way to start connecting these metrics to revenue.
This next piece of advice is a no-brainer. When we say to create campaigns, we mean creating campaigns directly around podcast content. At Casted, we actually use every season as a campaign—an all-encompassing kind of content campaign.
And we know we’re not alone in this endeavor. Listen in as Lindsey Christensen tells us how they use their podcast strategically as a part of bigger marketing campaigns.
Think of it this way: Every season of the podcast is a content centerpiece, and all of the content that you wring out of it—whether that’s a social post, a blog, an email, another podcast, or anything like that—is part of that campaign. We’ll tag every piece of content into a single campaign so we can see how the content from our podcast is working together to keep our audience engaged and ultimately impact the buying process.
In the report above, you can see that for the selected timeframe, we can see how many sessions, contacts, deals, and revenue was impacted by the podcast content from this campaign.
Campaigns are a great and easy way to start to further uncover how your podcast content is performing against your goals. We also have some pretty amazing reports that help us better understand the podcast’s direct impact on our revenue, but that’s a story for another day. Check it out here.
If you’re looking for ways to prove attribution from your podcast or just prove that your podcast is driving brand awareness, it’s important to start with taking back control of that content. By hosting and embedding your podcast on your own site, you’ll be able to unlock better metrics for your podcast that you can use to gauge your podcast’s effectiveness and its role in and impact in revenue.
If you’re ready to unlock even more metrics for your podcast, let’s chat!