Cast Update: Historical & Comparative Stats For Pros, and Improved Stats for Everyone!
You record your podcast, edit it (maybe with the help of Cast’s Intelligent Noise Reduction 🤫) and publish it for the world to see — of course, the next thing you’re going to want to know is whether people are listening!
Cast has always provided download stats to let you dive into the numbers behind your podcast listeners, but today we’re announcing that we’re improving both what we can show and how we show it (and, as a bonus, how quickly we do all of the above).
Tables, Please Take a Seat at the Table
Cast not only shows you your raw download counts over time, but we also look at the user agents that each downloading app uses to identify itself, as well as the requesting IP address, and we use this data to give you helpful pie charts that show your listener breakdown by their operating system, downloading app, and by their country. (We’ve also got a great reference article that delves into how this works, and the limitations of this data.)
One problem with viewing this data as a pie chart is that it makes it harder to see the raw numerical breakdown, and small cohorts are hard to render visually.
That’s why we’re excited to announce that now you can view any stats data that is available as a pie chart in table form as well.
As an added bonus, every table is instantly downloadable as a CSV file. This improvement to Cast’s stats is available to every Cast user on every plan — Hobby, Pro, or even our newest podcasters on the Trial plan.
Pros: Look Up All Your Historical Stats, and Compare Episode Downloads Across Your Whole Podcast
By default, Cast’s stats go back 12 months and make it easy to look at your stats over a few different time periods (the last 24 hours, the last 30 days, and the last 12 months).
We’ve found that this provides great insight for most podcasters, but you might be a real stats pro and you want to go all the way back to the beginning of your Cast account and look up historical stats.
We’re excited to announce that now that’s possible for all Cast users on a Pro Plan: now you can pull up all-time stats, which will show you monthly download stats going back to the dawn of your Cast account. Further to that, you can now drill into the daily stats (and monthly category breakdowns) for every single month since you first created your Cast account.
We’ve also added a whole new stats page that shows up for Pro users when you’re viewing the stats for a feed, which we’re calling the Compare View. This gives you a quick way to compare the total download count for every episode published in that feed. In the Compare View, you can scroll through the comparative download counts across your feed, and hover for additional info like each episode’s download ranking in the feed.
Oh, also, Everything Is Faster 🚀
Finally, while we were building these improvements to Cast’s Stats, we spent a bunch of time optimizing how quickly Cast can display various stats for you. The result of this is that all stats lookups (whether you’re looking at yesterday’s downloads, or pulling historical data from March 2016) load and display faster.
We’re so excited about this announcement, because we know it’s going to make Cast’s stats even more useful for all of our podcasters. Head on over to your stats page right now to check it out!
I’m on Twitter at @JulianLepinski, and when I’m not writing this article, I’m working on Cast — a product that makes it easy and fun to record, edit and publish a podcast.
