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We have podcast listens, downloads, subscribers and more. And all of those are good metrics for podcasts to keep an eye on. But let’s looks at podcast impressions, a measurement that wasn’t as readily available in the past.
What are podcast impressions?
The measurement of impressions has been around digital marketing forever. This social post appeared in x many timelines. I say it appeared because just because it’s in front of somebody, doesn’t mean they saw it nor does it mean it left an impression! Serving an impression is way different from leaving an impression.
But to be able to say a website’s content showed in a feed or Google search x many times has value in seeing where things stand. The metric, despite some people not loving it, shows progress. For example, my content strategy blog had almost 2.9 million impressions in a recent time period on Google. The click-through rate was 1.5 percent with 43,000 actual clicks to the website.
The point here is that it’s a process to get people to pay attention to a company in the digital environment. And yes, impressions, are way less impactful than a sales-conversion, but they still help podcasters understand how often their show is being shown to people.
Podcast impressions on Spotify
This metric shows up in the Spotify for Podcasters dashboard. Here’s an example from my podcast – The Business Storytelling Show:
Officially, Spotify defines this as, “This is the number of times your show or any of your episodes were shown to anyone on Spotify over the last 30 days.”
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Spotify also tells you where those impressions occurred, for example, the user’s Spotify home, Spotify search, Spotify Library or other. So for my podcast, the majority of search impressions happen when people are searching for either my podcast or a related topic.
How to drive up podcast impressions AND listens
I have no inside knowledge on this, but I presume that some of these strategies can help:
Use the right keywords that a) people search for and b) that match up to other similar podcasts to ensure you show up as a recommendation when people listen to those other podcasts.
Make cover art stand out and unique. Too often I see podcast art that can’t be read and is too busy. Ensure that yours can be read and makes sense to people scrolling along and who are shown your show or an episode. You want to draw them in!
Read next: Be unique: How to use specific podcast episode artwork (Template)
As always and with any (top-of-funnel) metric, let’s not overthink it. And much of this number is influenced by Spotify’s decision to (or not to) show episodes to users. If nothing else, podcast discovery lacked as a whole and can be an uphill battle. So understanding how often a show is seen and recommended to listeners is a step in the right direction.
