How to start using Promotion Analytics: step-by-step guide

Table of contents

Housekeeping

First, let's make sure that you have your ducks in row. To use our Promotion Analytics feature, you need to implement our tracking prefix. If you haven't done so, here's a guide on how to do it. If you're all set, keep reading.

What is Promotion Analytics (aka Attribution)

Whenever you promote your podcast on any given channel (be it your newsletter, website, social media accounts, etc.), you want people to click on a link that will take them to your podcast or a particular episode.

This begs two important questions:

  • How many times was the link clicked?
  • How many downloads did the clicks actually generate?

With Voxalyze's Promotion Analytics, you can measure these numbers accurately. This gives you a clear picture the contribution of each marketing channel to the growth of your audience.

Note: you will sometimes see the word "attribution" mentioned in the Voxalyze app and in our content. Promotion Analytics and Attribution can be used interchangeably. The former is a term we coined that is easily understandable by specialists and laypeople alike, while the latter is the historical, technical term.

How does it work?

Promotion Analytics relies on 3 main components to function:

  • Tracked links (also knows as Smart Links in the Voxalyze interface).
  • The Voxalyze tracking prefix.
  • UTM parameters (for advanced measurement).
  1. When users click on Smart Links, several data points are collected: user IP, user-agent, timestamps*.
  2. When these same users download your episodes, the same data points are collected by our prefix.
  3. Our algorithm compares the data points and matches the clicks with the corresponding downloads.

If you want to learn about this subject in more detail read our podcast attribution guide.

*Note: Voxalyze is GDPR and CCPA compliant. To protect users' privacy, the data collection and matching never happen at the individual level and rather, in pools of users with common characteristics .

Why use Promotion Analytics

Promoting a podcast takes time and sometimes money. To make sure that these resources are well allocated, you need to track the results of your marketing efforts.

Don't just promote your podcast on Facebook because that's what everyone does. Be data-driven. Post, measure, analyze. Based on the results, you can:

  • Find out what posts resonate with your social media audience so you can double down on that type of content.
  • Decide if you should post more on Facebook or explore a more effective channel.

With Promotion Analytics you can track clicks and downloads on every single element that you use to promote your podcast. Even individual buttons in your newsletter. If you promote your podcast with paid marketing, you can tell which ads brought in the most downloads and cut the inefficient ones.

In short, Promotion Analytics gives you the tool to develop your marketing strategy.

How to track your first campaign

1) Go to your projects page.

2) Click on the project for which you want to track marketing activities.

3) Click on 'Attribution' in the top bar.

4) Optional: create a landing page. As the name indicates, this is the page where users land after clicking on your smart links, and where they can decide which podcast platform they want to listen your podcast on. You can customize your landing page so the colors fit your podcast cover art. You can also skip this step and use the default landing page.

5) Create a Smart Link by click on '+ Add New'.

5) Fill out the fields.

Link Settings

  • Name: use a transparent link name that will be easy to recognize when analyzing the data later on.

  • Slug: the slug is what comes after pdcst.to/ in your smart links. If left empty, your smart link will take the format pdcst.to/xxxxxx (where xxxxxx is a unique combination of 6 alphanumerical characters). Our tip: use this option to create a vanity link containing the name of your podcast. For instance if you type 'my-awesome-podcast' in this filed, this is how your Smart Link will look like: https://pdcst.to/my-awesome-podcast

    Note 1: be sure to use dashes between individual words in the slug field

    Note 2: each slug is unique, which means you cannot use it for several tracking links.

Tracking Settings

Setting Purpose Examples
campaign Use this field to pass strategic information about your marketing campaign, like the target country and the starting date. We will release an article on campaign naming conventions soon.
medium Identifies the type of media the traffic came from organic_social, paid_social, owned_media, sem, print, etc.
source Identifies what exact site or property the traffic came from newsletter, blog, website, cross_promotion, instagram, tiktok, facebook, tiktok, etc.
content Filling out this field gives you the opportunity to collect an extra level of granularity. You can type the ad name, or a brief description of the post.

Best practices

  • Don't leave empty spaces. Use underscores (or hyphens) between individual words in tracking setting fields.
  • Don't use special characters or accents such as รจ, *, %, #, {, etc.
  • Only use lower case. Tracking settings are case sensitive. For instance, if you use 'owned_media' and 'Owned_Media' as medium setting, the data will appear on different lines and not be grouped properly.
  • Be consistent with the names of settings. Define a strict internal naming convention and make sure your team follows it. If team member A uses 'email' as medium in newsletter links and team member B uses 'crm', this will make grouping and thus analysis more complicated.

Tracking will not break if you don't apply these best practices, but it can make parsing the data more difficult for your data analyst.

Filling out all fields is not a must. The level of granularity is entirely up to you. For a simple setup, you can choose to only fill out the medium and source field. This will let you track results by promotion channel. Of course the more granular, the better.

Note: Leave the UTM override box unchecked, this will be covered in the advanced measurement section.

6) Choose the players that fill be featured in the landing page. It's important to have at least Apple, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. Don't select more than 5, as giving visitors too many options can result in choice paralysis and lower your conversion rate.

7) Click on 'Create Smart Link'

8) Click on the clipboard icon to copy the link

9) Implement the link

Analysing Results

Now that your link is implemented, you want to see the data. Not so fast! Assuming someone clicked on your Smart Link right after you implemented it, it can take up to ~1.5h for the data to show up in the dashboard.

With that in mind, let's see where you can find your data and how to analyze it.

First click on Analytics at the top of the screen, then on Smart Links on the left-hand side.

Below the graph, you will find a table with all data points. Here's how to read them:

Data Point Definition
Visitors The number of people who visited your podcast landing page via a given Smart Link.
Page Views The number of times the landing page was loaded. The number of visitors and page views can differ if a visitor reloads the page.
Click Throughs The number of outgoing clicks, meaning clicks on podcast platform icons taking visitors from the landing page to their listening platform of choice.
Listeners Unique listeners.
Downloads How many downloads were generated by listeners who came to your podcast via a Smart Link. A given listener can download severals episodes.
Conversion This corresponds to the conversion rate comparing the number of listeners to the number of landing page visitors.

Note: when looking at your data at the daily level, you might notice cases where the number of downloads exceed the number of click throughs. This is to be expected. Some listeners will click on the landing page, get distracted and listen to your podcast the next day.

As usual with our analytics suite, you can slice the data to draw powerful insights. For example, you can:

  1. Filter across 14 dimensions. For instance, you can choose to only look at US, organic social data.
  2. Group the data by any any tracking setting. For instance, if you've used several different Smart Links in your newsletters and promotional emails but you've consistently used the medium 'email', you can see all data pertaining to your emailing activities at a glance when grouping by medium.

Advanced Measurement

Now you might be thinking: what if I need to track dozens of social media posts or hundreds of ads? Do I need to create a link each and every time?

No, you don't! Clearly, this would make it very hard to manage Smart Links in the long run so we came up with a more flexible solution.

Let's look at an example:

Let's assume you want to track all your Instagram Stories individually but you don't want to create a new Smart Link every time you post a story.

Here's how to configure the Smart Link:

  • Campaign: leave empty
  • medium : organic_social
  • source : instagram

  • content: leave empty

    Check the box to allow UTM override

This will give you a Smart Link you can use in your Instagram bio and every story you publish. Now, we only have one link but we still want to track each story individually. Here's the link format you should follow

Each story has its own utm_content parameter, so you can tell them apart easily when looking at your data later on. I also chose to leverage the utm_campaign parameter to pass the month in which the stories were posted. This is not a must but very practical if you want to group the data by month.

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