Podcast Growth Starts with a Health Check
We talk to enterprise podcasters every day, and one question comes up more than any other: our audience has plateaued – how do we grow our podcast?
A simple and reasonable question. Unfortunately there is no easy answer or one-size-fits-all growth playbook. If it did, we would not hear that question every week.
Every podcast needs its own individual growth plan based on the content, timing, talent, budget, competitive set, and many other factors. Bumper creates those growth plans for our clients.
There is, however, a practical starting point: a structured analysis of a show’s past performance.
At Bumper, we call this a Podcast Health Check.
We identify what worked in the past and replicate that success as much as possible. And of course, the inverse can be critical as well: we examine past failures and make sure we avoid those in the future.
Past performance doesn’t guarantee future results. But it’s an incredibly helpful starting point to create a customized growth plan for any podcast. Instead of simply guessing what might work, we can use data as a launch pad.
What is a Podcast Health Check?
A Podcast Health Check is a deep dive into the full history of a show, designed to surface patterns, outliers, and lessons that point to future growth opportunities.
It’s typically the first step in any engagement with Bumper.
Most importantly, when we conduct a Podcast Health Check, we focus on the data that actually matters: people spending time with our podcasts. That means moving beyond delivery-based metrics like downloads and toward consumption-based metrics that reflect real listening and viewing behavior.
In other words, we largely ignore downloads when analyzing a podcast. Instead we look at real people spending time with a show.
The foundation of every Podcast Health Check is based on three numbers which best measure audience engagement:
People
Plays
Time
People
We all want to reach audiences with our podcasts. Whether we are making audio or video, short or long, daily or once-in-a-while, we want to connect with humans through our stories.
It is surprisingly difficult to accurately establish how many people (as measured in real, distinct humans) we are reaching with our show per day, week, or month. Note that this data is not available from most podcast hosting providers. Hosting services might use the IAB definition of a listener (which is actually just a downloader). Not what we are looking for.
Instead we are looking for data from the listening platforms. Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube know how many people have engaged with a podcast and deduplicate that number over time to avoid counting the same people multiple times. We call this number Verified Listeners/Viewers.
Plays
Successful podcasts have audiences that engage with its episodes multiple times. A win is when people come back over and over again, that’s the only way we can sustainably grow a podcast. So, in addition to measuring the audience size, we need to measure how often they show up.
Playback is what we call the number of times someone starts an episode and meets a minimum listening threshold.
Crucially, we normalize play data from the different platforms. A ‘play’ on Spotify is not the same as a ‘play’ on Apple Podcasts which is not the same as a YouTube view. The Bumper Dashboard does the work to harmonize those numbers to make sure we have meaningful comparison between the different podcast players.
Time
Time is the clearest signal of meaningful podcast engagement. Long-form storytelling enables audiences to deeply connect with our content and understand the nuances of any story. This is in contrast to other types of content, such as social media, where the level of engagement can be a lot more “shallow”. Bumper’s clients want audiences to spend time with them.
We measure that engagement through (what we call) Listen/Watch Time. This can be expressed as a total over time or calculated as an average completion percentage.
The power of derived data
The core metrics (People, Plays, and Time) tell us what is happening. Derived data helps us understand why.
In a Podcast Health Check, we analyze a wide range of derived metrics to surface patterns, relationships, and inflection points in audience behavior, including:
New vs. Returning Listeners
Average Episodes Consumed per Listener
Topic Analysis
Competitive Analysis
Audience Demographics over time
This deeper analysis is often where the most actionable insights emerge, allowing teams to move beyond reporting and toward informed decision-making.
From Data to Decision
The best outcome for a Podcast Health Check? An educated conversation about what to do next. Often, not all the answers are in the data. Instead insights come from the discourse that’s been sparked by the data. A Podcast Health Check should always be a conversation so we can make decisions informed by data – not dictated by data.
Bundled or stand-alone service
A Podcast Health Check is the starting point for a broader growth engagement with Bumper – but it can also stand on its own. We work with many podcasters that are not in need of a full growth strategy but instead want to simply find out what the numbers say right now about their show.
Think of it as a diagnostic: it can inform a full treatment plan, or simply help teams understand what’s working, what isn’t, and where to focus next.
Could a Podcast Health Check help you with your growth challenges? Get in touch to find out more.