Zack Reneau-Wedeen, Google Podcasts Product Manager, published yesterday a post on Google‘s blog announcing the release of Google Podcasts for Android.
In his post, Reneau-Wedeen said the Google Podcasts app for Android (which is already available in the Play Store globally) is integrated with the Google Assistant across all devices and highlighted personalised recommendations as main feature. Google‘s Product Manager promised it will be easier than ever for Android users to discover and listen to podcasts.
Google Podcasts app uses artificial intelligence to offer smarter recommendations based on listening habits. Google is also launching a program to increase the diversity in the podcast industry by enabling skills development and experimentation from underrepresented voices.
Reaneau-Wedeen‘s blog post included a link (this one) to the guidelines for podcasters to optimise their content for Google. These guidelines are actually an updated version of the ones previously published for developers, now including instructions for prompting Google to index new podcasts, generating direct links to podcasts, and tracking analytics from Google Podcasts app.
Let’s stop there. When Apple Podcast announced they would start sharing analytics through Podcast Connect, it was a huge thing for the industry. A similar move from Google is not a minor step.
How important is that Google Podcasts is letting you track its analytics?
As we explained in a previous post, listening time is the most important metric for measuring listener engagement. It’s critical for evaluating your content and providing your sponsors with valuable data for assessing their ROI. In that previous article we also explained the difficulty for extracting listening time, which requires collecting data from the player side where the listening happens, instead of from the hosting server. The fact that major distributors like Apple and Google decided to share their analytics with creators, is the first step towards the standardisation of this metric for the monetisation of podcasting.
In addition to analytics from Apple Podcast, and now Google Podcasts mobile apps, it’s crucial that your organisation measures actual listening time on its own mobile app where your core audience engages with your content and your brand. Please, contact us if you would like to learn how.