Understanding Your Analytics

Your Analytics workspace shows how your podcast is being delivered and who's listening: downloads, apps, countries, episode performance, and more. This guide explains what each number means (and, just as importantly, what it doesn't).

Open it from the sidebar: pick a podcast, then click Analytics.

At the top of the page you can pick a date range, from the last 7 days up to all time depending on your plan, and export your data as a CSV (Studio plans and up).

The three headline numbers

• Downloads: how many times episodes were delivered to listeners' apps and devices, counted to industry (IAB v2.2-aligned) rules: known bots are removed, tiny probe requests are discarded, and each listener counts once per episode per day, no matter how many times their app fetches the file.
• Peak daily listeners: the highest number of distinct devices that downloaded from your show on a single day in the selected range.
• Feed polls: how often podcast apps and directories checked your RSS feed. A rough signal of subscription reach: big platforms like Apple and Spotify check once on behalf of all their listeners.

Downloads measure reach, not listens

Podcast apps often download episodes automatically for subscribers. Some of those episodes never get played, and no hosting platform can see whether they were. Every number here is honest about that: downloads tell you how far your show travels. For actual listening behaviour, see engagement imports below.

Tap the small ⓘ next to any number for a plain-English explanation of exactly what it counts.

See where your audience is

The Audience section breaks the selected range down by listening app, country, and device type.

Use it to decide where promotion effort pays off. If most of your audience listens in one app or one country, that's where links, ads, and collaborations will land hardest.

Plays from your embedded player and public listen pages appear here too, under Sources and Embedded on. See Player and embed attribution to learn how to read them.

Numbers update hourly

Analytics refresh on the hour. A brand-new download appears within about an hour, and "today" keeps filling in as the day goes on (days are counted in UTC).

Compare your episodes

The Episodes table ranks every episode by all-time downloads, alongside two more useful columns:

• In range: downloads within your selected dates.
• First 7 days: downloads in each episode's first week. Because older episodes have had longer to accumulate downloads, this is the fairest like-for-like way to compare launches.
• All time: the lifetime total.

Click any episode title to open its own analytics page, with a daily chart, a launch curve, and per-episode audience breakdowns. See Episode analytics for the full tour.

What's included in each plan

Your data is always collected in full, whatever your plan. Upgrading instantly unlocks the history and features below, retroactively.

	Free	Creator	Studio	Production House+
Downloads, apps & countries, episode rankings	✓	✓	✓	✓
History window	90 days	1 year	Unlimited	Unlimited
Advanced insights (launch comparisons, full geography, devices, content & collaboration analytics)	–	✓	✓	✓
CSV export	–	–	✓	✓
Apple & Spotify engagement imports	–	–	✓	✓
Shareable client report links	–	–	–	✓

Bring in listening data from Apple and Spotify

Apple Podcasts and Spotify know how much of each episode people actually play, but they only share it through their own dashboards. On Studio plans and up, the Engagement section lets you import their CSV exports so everything lives in one place:

1. In Apple Podcasts Connect, open Analytics → Episodes and export as CSV. In Spotify for Creators, open Analytics → Episodes and download the CSV.
2. In your Analytics workspace, scroll to Engagement and click Import CSV for that platform.
3. Rows are matched to your episodes by title. Anything that can't be matched is listed so you can fix and re-import.

Re-importing replaces the previous import for that platform, so your view always reflects the latest export. See Reports for the full walkthrough.

Spotify counts differently

Spotify counts a "play" after 30 seconds of listening, so its numbers won't match download counts. That's expected, and each figure is labelled with its source.

Share a report with a client

On Production House and Enterprise plans, click Client reports to create read-only report links, perfect for agencies:

1. Give the link a label (e.g. "Acme quarterly") and pick its date range.
2. Click Create link, then copy it to share. Anyone with the link sees a live, read-only report. No account needed.
3. Revoke a link at any time; it stops working immediately.

Reports respect your white-label branding, and only ever show aggregate numbers, never listener-level data. Reports covers exactly what your client sees.

Automate on your numbers

Analytics can drive your automations: trigger a workflow when an episode passes a download milestone you choose, or when a day's downloads spike far above your recent average. Look for the Analytics Triggers group when picking an automation trigger. You'll also get a celebration notification automatically when an episode passes 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, or 1,000,000 downloads. No setup needed.

Troubleshooting

I published an episode but see no downloads

Downloads appear within about an hour of listeners fetching the episode. A brand-new episode also needs listeners' apps to poll your feed first, so give it a few hours. If the whole page says "Collecting listener data", no episode has been downloaded yet since your show joined PodcasterPlus.

My download numbers are lower than my old host reported

That's usually a good sign. PodcasterPlus filters to IAB v2.2-aligned rules: bots removed, one download per listener per episode per day. Unfiltered "raw hits" can run 30–60% higher and are what some dashboards show. Advertisers and the wider industry expect the filtered number.

Why do days seem to shift?

Days are counted in UTC (the industry convention), so if you're west of the UK a late-evening download may land on the "next" day.

What's Next?

• Episode analytics: dig into how a single episode performed
• Reports: CSV exports, engagement imports, and client report links
• Player and embed attribution: see which websites drive plays
• Set up automations: put your milestones to work
• Publish your next episode: more data starts here