Podcasts and Google Analytics?
Me and a friend have a chat show podcast published on iTunes, and I’m wondering if anyone has suggestions as to how best to track downloads (which are published as M4A (AAC) files.
I’m a big fan of Google Analytics, so does anyone have any suggestions as to how I could employ this in monitoring, if it’s even possible? I couldn’t find anything on discussion boards and by searching.
I’m particularly wanting to be able to group my listeners by location.
Thanks :)
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Hi RichardHenry, I have a podcast called Sierra Club Radio. I use Google Analytics to track hits to our website, http://www.sierraclubradio.com
it doesn’t track downloads…but most people who are hitting our site are doing it to listen to the show.
@occ: Using Analytics on the site itself, but the majority of our listeners come via iTunes and it would be good to have more specific statistics. It would be great if stats were available via the store itself, they are already tracked to generate the ‘popular’ list.
Maybe I can use a PHP header redirect if analytics can be reported via PHP… But I get the feeling that its not possible.
Thanks again.
I ran the web analytics program for a large media company and we ran into this issue. We weren’t even able to track podcasts with Omniture Sitecatalyst (high-end analytics solution). The only tracking mechanism I could find was to use the server logs (yuck) and check the number of times each podcast file was accessed.
Google Analytics will show you where your visitors are coming from. If you are looking to count downloads, you might try Podtrac depending on who you are hosting through, sites like Libsyn provde a fairly detailed stats package that tracks the number of downloads, how many came from the web vs subscription, what aggregator was used and more.
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