Spotify rolls out trackable sharing links
Spotify has started to roll out a new marketing and measurement tool for podcasters: trackable sharing links.
My colleague Jonas noticed this new feature in the Spotify for Podcasters dashboard, under Analytics → Discovery, where two new sections appear: “Sharing” and “How sharing led to consumption.”
Podcasters can create show-level or episode-level links. For example:
Show-level: Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids
Episode-level: “I don’t feel like celebrating”
These links seem functionally identical to standard Spotify sharing links, with one important difference: they’re trackable. This means podcasters can create Spotify sharing links, then see how much on-platform consumption resulted from traffic to those links, including:
People who clicked: “These are unique people who have clicked your links on external platforms.”
People who showed interest: “These are unique people who started an episode in this show and streamed for more than 0 seconds on Spotify.”
People who streamed: “These are unique people who came from your shared links and have streamed an episode in this show for at least 60 seconds on Spotify.”
Attributing consumption back to the sharing link seems to be accomplished using an additional query string parameter. For example, a standard Spotify podcast sharing link looks like this:
https://open.spotify.com/show/0tKu6eD6VDfxboZoWd0j6H
But a trackable Spotify sharing link includes an si parameter:
https://open.spotify.com/show/0tKu6eD6VDfxboZoWd0j6H?si=R-NzN3ddQW2dbfsGOTyEdg
This extra bit of data in the URL is what allows Spotify to associate on-platform consumption with traffic that originated outside of Spotify.
Déjà vu?
If this functionality sounds familiar, it might be because in August 2023, Apple announced very similar capabilities for traffic sent to Apple Podcasts from Linkfire links:
Using the Linkfire Insights dashboard, creators will be able to measure real-time user engagement with these links and pages, including anonymized visits and click-through rates. As listeners use these pages to access Apple Podcasts, creators can view all-new engagement insights, including whether a listener has played an episode or followed a show on Apple Podcasts.
Spotify’s new sharing features offer the same basic benefit to podcasters: the power to better answer these types of questions:
If 100 people clicked/tapped my podcast link, how many of them actually listened?
Which social platforms are most effective at driving traffic to my show?
What is the ROI on including podcast links in my newsletter?
Do podcast QR codes actually turn into real listeners?
For external traffic that leads to Apple Podcasts, Linkfire for Podcasts has been providing answers to these questions for more than a year. Spotify’s new trackable sharing links seem to offer the same benefit for external traffic sent to Spotify.
Worth noting: if you’re a Linkfire user (as many Bumper clients are), there seems to be no reason you couldn’t include a trackable Spotify sharing link as a destination URL from within an existing Linkfire podcast link, though you’d need to check both the Linkfire and Spotify dashboards to see the whole picture.
Attributed downloads listeners
To me, Spotify’s new sharing features represent a significant milestone in the evolution of podcast marketing measurement.
For years, tools like Chartable SmartLinks have allowed podcasters to attribute podcast downloads back to specific marketing initiatives. As I wrote back in 2019, this was revolutionary, because it helped our industry quantify the impact of podcast marketing, and afforded a kind of “dollars in, downloads out” approach to paid media.
But today, in late 2024, there’s a growing understanding that downloads aren’t people. And that not every download gets heard. And that unscrupulous marketers use all sorts of shortcuts and shenanigans to boost download numbers. In 2024, downloads are an increasingly poor way to understand the true size and composition of a podcast’s audience.
That’s why Bumper is such a big fan of what we call verified listeners:
For both Apple Podcasts and Spotify, listeners are qualified by consumption, and verified by device playback telemetry. When Apple and Spotify talk about listeners, they’re talking about a reasonable proxy for “people who hit play on an episode.”
In 2024, verified listeners are the gold standard for measuring actual audience size, and are one of the primary metrics included in the Bumper dashboard.
Now, with Spotify joining Apple Podcasts in offering directly attributed verified listeners, we’re another step closer to measuring audience size in people, not downloads.