Understanding podcast episode consumption (or how long listeners will tune in for) is the key for powerful content decisions. Those decisions ultimately help you craft content that will lead to podcast and audience growth.

For years, we've been crossing our fingers that Apple Podcasts would update their analytics... so that we could make this already useful tool, work for us podcasters, versus just a tool that listeners use to play our podcasts.

But recently, Apple Podcasts made a change that is going to change how you look at your episodes.

We're going to focus on where to find these 3 key metrics to understand episode consumption:

• engaged listeners

• followers (these used to be called "subscribers" but it was recently changed to "followers")

• average episode consumption

The very first step is to log in to your Apple Podcasts Connect account. ​

Next, click on "analytics"

You'll see this main dashboard overview. Here you'll find the data about your engaged listeners and followers.

There's little question marks next to each term to explain what it means.

Finally, head over to episodes where you can find out average consumption.

Numbers less than 100% means listeners didn't finish the whole episode. Numbers above 100% means they listened more than once.

Let me break it down on a video:

It's that simple!

If you would like to learn more about how to use analytics in your podcast strategy, you can book a time with us to learn how to ‘read’ numbers: