I truly believe that the goal of podcasting should not be to only amass a huge amount of listeners. However, it’s still important to track and understand your download numbers.
The number of downloads that are good for individual podcast episodes depends on industry standards and your personal and business goals with your show.
Everyone is in a different place with their podcast, and it’s important to remember that these numbers are only vanity metrics. Still, it’s helpful to know how your podcast is performing each month.
Podcast Industry Standards
There are a variety of podcasting products and programs that are leading the way for podcasters, but even more helpful are when they provide transparent data to better understand industry standards. Libsyn has release some really helpful benchmarks when it comes to your download numbers.
Libsyn tracks episodes for 30 days to give you a more accurate idea of how each one is performing. According to their data, if an episode is downloaded 123 times in 30 days, it is in the top 50% of podcast episodes. Like I’ve said before on my podcast, Clocking In with Haylee Gaffin, that’s actually not a hard download number to hit!
That percentage gets even better the more downloads you get, but the download numbers jump up pretty high from there. For instance, to be considered in the top 20% of podcasts, your episode needs to get 1000 downloads in 30 days. Again, that’s a totally achievable number, but it can take time to start hitting that number naturally.
Your Personal Podcasting Goals
Whether or not you have great download numbers ultimately depends on your goals for your podcast. It’s important to remember that podcasting is very different from social media. You aren’t going to get discovered by going viral. You have to use the audience you already have to grow your podcast.
With that in mind, you can use your current audience to identify your download goals. If your goal was for 20% of your social media following to download your podcast episodes, how many downloads would that be for each episode?
It’s Not All About Numbers
I’ll keep shouting this from the rooftops: the success of your podcast does not depend on vanity metrics like how many downloads you get per episode. If you’re a business owner and you want to use your podcast to convert listeners to clients, then that’s a way more important number to track. You could have a ton of downloads, but if none of your listeners turn into clients, it’s time to strategize.
If you want to use your podcast to build a community around your personal brand, then your goals should center around how many listeners join your Facebook group or Patreon. At the end of the day, I think the reason that we should track download numbers is to measure how we’re progressing with our goals.
Track the Right Podcast Metrics
Are you ready to start tracking the podcast metrics in a way that makes a difference? I’ve created a plug & play canva template to track you monthly stats! For $9, grab my Podcast Statistics Report Template from the shop!
