84. How to Rank on Apple Podcasts Charts & Track Your Position (Podcasting Alternatives to Chartable)

Do you find yourself curious about the Apple Podcasts charts and wonder how to see your podcast climb those coveted rankings? In this episode, you’ll learn what the Apple Podcasts charts are, why they matter for your podcasting journey, key strategies to rank on them, and the best alternatives to Chartable for tracking your podcast's chart rankings and reviews across different platforms.

Resources Mentioned:
Apple Podcasts Chart Info: https://podcasters.apple.com/support/3146-apple-podcasts-charts
Rephonic: https://www.rephonic.com/search
PodStatus: https://www.ThePodcastTeacher.com/podstatus (partner link)
Podgagement: https://podgagement.com/

This episode was produced by me, The Podcast Teacher! Contact me at Hello@ThePodcastTeacher.com.

Transcript

Hey. Hey. And welcome back. I have heard from so many people that they are launching podcasts right now, and I could not be more excited for you. Whether you are just launching or you've been podcasting for a while, you might have heard buzz around the Apple Podcasts charts. Today, we're going to talk about those charts, what they are, how to rank on them, and how to track your rankings. I will cover some alternatives to the popular service, Chartable, which was unfortunately discontinued at the end of 2024. So the Apple Podcast charts are the gold standards of ranking podcasts within the industry.

So you can think of it like the Billboard Music charts of podcasting or the New York Times bestseller list of podcasting. Before you ask, yes, there are charts on Spotify as well. They work differently and are much harder to rank on, so most people don't spend time and effort talking about them, Apple Podcasts charts reign supreme. You get major street cred if you can say that you have appeared on the charts, which is incredibly valuable for the marketing of your business and your podcast. It doesn't really mean anything other than that. Some podcasters are not concerned with appearing on the charts, whereas it's really important to others. Wherever you fall on the spectrum, I think it's helpful to at least be aware of them. There are a bunch of different charts on Apple Podcasts.

There's the overall top shows chart and the top episodes chart, which are both extremely difficult to appear on unless you're a celebrity or a pseudo celebrity, but there are also charts for each individual category, such as business, and then charts for the subcategories, such as entrepreneurship within the business category. Additionally, there are charts for over 170 countries. So each country has its own set of charts for each category and each subcategory. That's a lot of charts. I won't say that it's easy, but it's easier to rank on these category and subcategory charts, and it's also easier to rank in countries outside of the US. You select your category within your podcast hosting platform, somewhere like Buzzsprout, and you can change it at any time. 250 podcasts rank on each chart, and the charts are updated several times a day. The secret to ranking on the charts is a big burst of activity over a short period of time, such as 24 hours or less.

Now Apple doesn't give out the exact formula for ranking on the charts for obvious reasons, but it does say that the algorithm considers 3 factors, listening activity, following activity, and completion rate, sometimes referred to as consumption rate. That's how much of the episode is being consumed. So listening to all 20 minutes of a 20 minute episode would be a 100% completion or consumption rate. The higher the completion rate, the better. The algorithm is looking for new followers and content that is being listened to. Given all of the experience that I have with client and student podcasts and my own podcast, I am very confident in saying that a burst of new followers and listening activity over a short period of time gets the algorithm's attention and pushes the podcast up the charts. Side note, did you notice that Apple does not take reviews into account for the charts? A lot of podcast folks will tell you that reviews count for the Apple Podcast charts. I will leave the link to Apple's page in the episode description in case you wanna read their info for yourself, but they say they do not factor into the algorithm for the charts.

Of course, reviews are important for different reasons, so we're not saying you don't need reviews at all, but just pointing out that they don't help you rank on the charts. Anyway, you can rank on the charts at any point in time, but especially as a new not so established podcaster, I think there are a couple of key opportunities. The first is on your launch day. This is the prime opportunity to get new followers and for people to listen because it's their first opportunity to do so. Your podcast did not exist beforehand. Other key opportunities are during special podcast promotions or events. If you rebrand, are celebrating your 1 100th episode, have just hit 10,000 downloads, etcetera, and you're making a big deal about it, that's going to attract new followers and get people listening. Okay.

So how do you know if you are ranking on the charts? Well, you could go to Apple Podcasts and look, but that is cumbersome for you to do for your own country, let alone others, and Apple does not publish the charts for the sub categories within their app. There used to be an amazing free service, Chartable, which would track your podcast on all of the charts and then send you a daily or weekly recap depending on your preference. Sadly, shut down at the end of 2024, leaving many podcasters wondering what to use instead. I'm gonna share 3 viable options with you and give you the pros and cons of each one. The first option is a site called Refonic. Go to refonic.com/ search, and don't worry. I'll put all the links in the episode description for you. You're gonna go to refonic.com/search and search for your podcast, click on it, and then click on the charts tab.

You will see any charts and countries where your podcast is currently ranking. The biggest pro of Refonic is that it is free. Woo hoo. However, you do have to check this manually. They won't email the information to you, and there's also no historical ranking data. So you can only see if you're ranking on the charts at the moment that you check. Since the charts change every few hours, you could very easily miss some rankings. So Refonic is a viable option, but it's not my first choice.

Another option is a site called pod status. Pod status is a paid tool, but it's only $5 a month, which I think is totally worth it for all the things that you get. Pod status tracks your chart rankings, current and historical, and they send you a daily email of your placements that day. We're talking about the Apple Podcast charts here in this episode, but they do track the Spotify charts as well. You can go into your account and look at your past rankings, and it calls out your peak position on each chart within the past 30 days. And the report for the past 24 hours gives you an hour by hour breakdown. In addition to the chart rankings, pod status also collects your reviews from different platforms so that you have them all in one central place, and you are notified when new ones are added that comes in that daily email. This is especially helpful for reviews from other countries.

In case you didn't know, when you go to your Apple Podcasts app, you can only see reviews for the country where you are currently located. You have to log in to Apple Podcasts connect, the back end of Apple, and manually check other countries to see if there are reviews. So pod status makes this so much easier. They just notify you and you don't have to check. And in case that wasn't enough, you can also download those reviews in a convenient image for social media. Honestly, the only sort of con to using pod status is that it costs $5 a month. But I can't even really call that a con because it's super reasonable for all of the things that you get and the excellent service that they deliver. As for pros, well, those are all the things that I just mentioned.

Plus, I cannot tell you how much I love getting a daily email telling me about any new reviews and that day's chart rankings. I sang my praises to the owner of pod status, Carlos, and he gave me the inside scoop about some new features that he's working on. I can't spill the beans here, but I will say that I am super excited. Okay. So clearly, I love pod status and that is my top recommendation. But for the sake of research, I did check out one more option, podgagement. I'm gonna start with the cons here because, unfortunately, there are a lot of them. This site is not nearly as user friendly as pod status, and, also, its price tag is a little bit higher.

It's $9 a month for the lower tier and $19 a month for the higher tier. I did the 14 day trial to test it out, and then I canceled. My biggest gripe, though, was about the chart data. There was no real time data provided for my podcast unless I wanted to scroll the charts myself and scan for my podcast. During my trial, the most recent data was from 3 days prior. That's not really super helpful when I'm trying to figure out where I'm ranking that day. They also provided historical data, but it never populated more than 6 weeks back for me. It kept giving me a message that the data was still importing.

I would buy that for a few hours, but not for multiple days. Something was not working correctly. Maybe it was just my podcast and this works great for other people, but I did not have an excellent experience. And finally, they do not provide email notifications about chart rankings. They only do that for new reviews. I will admit that there are a few pros. They also collect the reviews from different sites so that they're all in one place, and they also have an image maker that puts the review into a template for you to download. I especially liked that you can slightly customize the template and create the image in one of your branding colors, and that they have different sizes of images available.

There are also a lot of fancy features, such as a feedback page and a quote, unquote love page for your podcast. Some people might consider these pros, but to me, they are entirely unnecessary and just not useful. So there you have it, a little how to information about Apple Podcasts charts and a roundup of the alternatives to Chartable so that you can track those chart rankings. Until next time, happy podcasting.