Stats make podcasters happy. Without them, podcasters feel like they’re talking into a black hole.

The thing is, many more people listen to podcasts than comment – and often it’s the same chatty people who leave a comment, to let hosts know they’re listening.

Without stats, you really don’t have any objective measure of whether you’re reaching your goals, increasing your audience, or improving your reach geographically.

Recently I had a question about my post about changing your feed URL.  The reason for moving to feedburner was to get better stats.

In my response to Rob T, I questioned whether Feedburner was the right way to go for an end game of statistics.  In my experience Feedburner stats fluctuate quite a bit, and appear to be skewed by engines that consume the feed (like Friendfeed for example).

My suggestion to Rob was to try Podtrac.

Podtrac was originally setup to bridge the gap between podcasters wanting sponsors and the advertising world wanting to spend their advertising dollar on podcasts.  As a service it was probably a little ahead of it’s time and setup pre-GFC when people were splashing money around, and experimenting with podcast advertising.

Personally I have never received any advertising offers from Podtrac.

What I have received however, is some great statistics about my show downloads, and also geographic information about where my listeners come from.

Podtrac does this with registration of your podcast with the Podtrac service, and a suffix added to your standard podcast episode URL.

Once these two things are in place, Podtrac faithfully starts recording every episode download, and segmenting it into geographies.

For stats it’s worth the little bit of effort because it gives you a wealth of information including numbers of downloads, where in the world your listeners originate from, and what players they are using to listen to your show.

The other thing you can do with Podtrac is establish listener surveys, so you get a more balanced mix of objective and subjective feedback about your show.

As well as subjective information and what people like about your show, the survey gives you a breakdown of demographic and spend data which can be useful if you’re trying to attract sponsors for your show.

However you slice and dice your data, Podtrac is a great service for podcasters – you can find out more at podtrac.com.

Do you use a different service?  Have you used a great service we haven’t talked about yet? Please contact me, to let me know or click the comment tab to leave me a message.