87. What Is a Good Consumption Rate? | Podcasting Tips for Stats

FAQ Friday answering the podcasting question of "What Is a Good Consumption Rate?"

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Transcript

Welcome to Podcasting for Solopreneurs and FAQ Friday, where I answer a podcasting question in five minutes or less. Today's question is, what is a good consumption rate? This question comes from my client, Lisa, host of the Smart Weight Loss Coaching podcast. Before I dive into the answer, let me set the stage a little bit. Your podcast's consumption rate, sometimes called a completion rate, is how much of an episode is consumed on average. So if you have a thirty minute episode and your audience averages listening to 15 of those thirty minutes, then the consumption rate is 50%. Your audience consumed 50% of the episode. You can find information about your consumption rate in the back end of your Apple and Spotify podcaster accounts. Your consumption rate is a really important analytic because it gives you insight into your listeners' behavior.

If they are only listening to fifteen minutes of a thirty minute episode, that's a problem. We need to ask why that is, try to identify the possible cause, and take steps to improve it. A download counts whether someone listened to a few seconds or all thirty minutes. So downloads can kind of give us a false impression of whether or not people are enjoying our content. The consumption rate tells us if people are really finding our content valuable and worth sticking around for. And if they are sticking around, it's reasonable to say that they are going to be our warmest leads when it comes to buying something from us. Okay. So now that we're all on the same page about what a consumption rate is and why it's important, let me directly answer the question and tell you what a good consumption rate is.

A 70% consumption rate is considered good. If you're a client of mine, I am very happy seeing a number around 70%. I will also say that while 70% is kind of the standard number to strive for, there are always multiple factors to consider, and length of your episodes is an important one to call attention to. If your episodes are super short, like these FAQ Friday episodes, you want the consumption rate to be higher than 70%. If your episodes are super long like over an hour, it's okay if you're not quite hitting that 70% benchmark. But in general, 70% is a good consumption rate. If you have a podcasting question, click the send me your question link in the episode description, and I'll answer it in an upcoming episode. Until next time, happy podcasting.