Analytics Dashboard replacing legacy Usage Reports
  • 25 May 2021
  • 3 Minutes to read
  • Contributors
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Analytics Dashboard replacing legacy Usage Reports

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Article Summary

Our new "Analytics Dashboard" is replacing our legacy "Usage Reports".

History

Our current usage reports has been serving customers for more than 5 years. When we originally implemented them, there was simply no standards available for measuring podcast audio consumption, and stream usage measurements were often drastically different between providers.

We knew we wanted to update our customer's analytics experience to provide deeper insights into their audience, while at the same adopting metrics that are standards in the industry - enabling universally recognised data for all stakeholders.

Our completely reworked analytics dashboard offers all of this.

What has changed ?

The biggest change is that our analytics processing pipeline has been completely rebuilt to be compliant with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) standards for audio measurement.

The IAB Tech Lab offers an official certification program for podcast analytics implementations. Our implementation is fully compliant in that it follows all IAB measurement standards, but is not officially certified. We hope to complete this certification in the future, but did not want to delay releasing this to our customers.

This includes specifically the Podcast Measurement Technical Guidelines specification, but also general rules around minimum listening requirements, session expiry times and audience measurement.

Wherever possible we have implemented podcast and stream measurements using the same standards to be able to present data between these two products in a consistent manner.

Finally, we've also drastically expanded the list of browsers, bots and application we recognise.

How will this impact my stats ?

When changing measurement standards completely, it is expected that there will be differences in the numbers that are reported.

Adopting the IAB measurement standard has the benefit of being universally recognised, but as with all other hosting providers that migrated to this standard, there is a significant difference between the stats reported by our previous usage reports and our new analytics portal. In general, the number of "session" reported for our podcast and stream products are much lower than the "access" values provider on our usage reports.

  • For streams, the previous UNIQUE CONNECTIONS number is now represented by SESSIONS.
  • For podcasts, the previous PODCAST ACCESS number is now also represented by SESSIONS.

For exact details on how these work, see Measuring Users and Measuring Sessions.

The lower numbers are due to the much stricter rules for measuring valid sessions as per the IAB.

These 3 changes contribute the most change comparing to our legacy reports:

  • Stream and podcast access must now consume at least 1 minute of audio to be measured as a valid session.
  • Longer session expiry and exhaustion times for stream and podcast.
  • Stricter and more extensive bot filtering rules to ignore non-human traffic.

While the lower number can seem disappointing to customers, the big upside is that these are no longer simply unqualified "access" counts, but accesses of at least 1 minute of audio - a significant improvement when presenting data to advertisers and other parties.

It is also important to note that podcast syndicators like Apple, Google and Spotify may report much higher numbers, but these platforms typically only use 5 seconds of play to measure a "session", see this article. when comparing our analytics stats to your podcast stats on these platforms.

What is new ?

At the same time, we have also made an incredible number of new metrics available:

  • Unique Users (CUME) and Total Listen Hours (TLH) are certainly the most requested metrics and now available on all packages!
  • Other new metrics: Sessions Starts (SS), Active Sessions (AS), Average Active Sessions (AAS), Average Time Spent Listening (ATSL), Total Bytes Sent, Average Minutes per User, Average Sessions per User, Sessions complete (podcast only), Sessions midway (podcast only).

See our Key metrics page for details on all these metrics and how they are calculated.

In addition to these new metrics and improvements to the data views that was previously available, our dashboard now offers a large variety of new views:

  • Behaviour: Users by time of week, User by day of week, Dropoff rate
  • Day parts: Day part breakdown of content access
  • Geography: Country map, Breakdown by region
  • Referers: Refering domains, Referer pages

How to access these ?

All stream and podcast packages have access to at least the same information that was available on their Usage Reports, while some new metrics and views are available based on the stream package or podcast package.

See our product pages to determine which views are available on your package:

Podcasts - Analytics dashboard package features

Streams - Analytics dashboard package features

Access the new "Podcast Analytics" and "Stream Analytics" tabs on the admin panels for provider, channel, episode and stream pages:

dashboard-streams