Most podcast download charts suck. So we built our own.

Here at Pacific Content, we look at podcast downloads a little differently.

Every morning in Slack, we get a flurry of messages from our in-house MetricsBot that look like this:

These charts aren’t complicated. They simply show cumulative downloads over time, relative to release date. But they’ve become an incredibly useful tool for benchmarking podcast success for our clients.

Episode trajectories help in a number of ways. They let us:

• Benchmark episodes against each other on a unified time scale
• Notice when an episode is underperforming, and adjust tactics accordingly
• Run time-based marketing experiments and easily correlate results

In the chart above, you can clearly see the impact of Mozilla’s email marketing on downloads for “Face Value” and “Cloak of Invisibility” a few days after launch. You can also see the bump in downloads for “Ctrl+Alt+Facts”, which coincides with IRL’s win at the Webby Awards.

We think episode trajectories are an improvement over series-level daily download charts, which don’t let you compare episodic performance (and can also include misleading peaks depending on the time of day you release an episode):

And episode trajectories are way better than a flat list of episode titles and download counts, which can be misleading because they don’t clearly illustrate the passage of time.

Inspired by Apple

If Pacific Content’s episode trajectory charts look familiar, it’s because they’re heavily inspired by a mock-up Apple showed at WWDC 2017:

Apple didn’t include these comparison charts in their Podcasts Analytics beta when it shipped in December. So, we used Simplecast’s API to build our own version.

Why this matters

Benchmarks are important. But it’s also important to choose the right benchmarks.

The next time you check Podtrac’s Industry Audience Rankings, remember: every podcast is different. Every podcaster’s goals are different. Not every show will reach a mass audience like This American Life or Serial.

While it’s appealing to compare your show to others’, it’s also important to benchmark against yourself. Our episode trajectory charts are just one of the ways we try to do that.

Set goals, reach them, then set higher goals.

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