Understand Average Consumption — Podcast Analytics Basics

When it comes to measuring your success as a podcaster, there’s so much more to consider than downloads. One of the most popular metrics podcasters use to measure their success is average consumption—the amount of an episode your audience listens to, on average.

If you’re deep in the world of podcast analytics, you know that most metrics are captured on the platform level. Sure, our hosting service can give insights into what content folks are downloading, where in the world they’re downloading it from, and on what platform. But to understand the kind of deep information about our audience that their IP address won’t tell us—gender identity, age, etc.—we rely on platform analytics.

If you’re a new podcaster and you haven’t set up your analytic accounts, get started right now. Google, Spotify, and Apple each have their own podcast management platforms, which offer robust audience analytics for that specific platform. One of these is average consumption, and while each platform tracks this metric somewhat differently, the resulting data is comparable enough for most people’s standards.

So then, with all that being said, what’s good average consumption rate goal to set?

The Infinite Dial®, published annually by Edison Research since 1998, is the longest running survey of digital media consumer behavior in the United States. It offers insights into podcast listener behavior. The 2019 edition of The Infinite Dial® polled a nationally representative sample of podcast listeners. 

Among other questions, they asked respondents how much of an individual podcast episode they typically listen to. The overwhelming majority, 93%, reported listening to most or all of the podcast episodes they typically listen too. 

Even accounting for participant bias—where survey respondents give the response they feel is socially appropriate rather than strictly true, like “of course, I typically listen to the entirety of every episode. I finish what I start!”—even accounting for this type of bias, it’s clear that as podcasters, if we’re setting a goal to increase average consumption for our own podcasts, or those of our clients, that goal should be at least 80-90% average consumption.