Jetpack Podcast tracks download counts, top episodes, listener apps, and listener locations for your WordPress.com podcast. The Stats tab tracks every audio or video file served from your podcast feed.
This feature is available on sites with our WordPress.com Premium, Business, and Commerce plans. For free sites and sites on the Personal plan, upgrade your plan to access this feature.
From your site’s dashboard, go to Jetpack → Podcast, then open the Stats tab. The tab is available once you have published at least one episode.
The Stats tab opens on a Last 30 days view by default. Use the Period dropdown in the top right to change the range.
The page is organized into five sections:
- A Downloads chart at the top.
- Four summary cards: Total downloads, Top app, Top country, and Top day.
- A Top episodes list.
- A By app breakdown.
- A By country breakdown.
A download is counted when a podcast app or browser fetches the audio or video file from your site. WordPress.com counts one download per episode per listener per 24 hours, so a single listener replaying an episode in the same day counts once.
These counts give you a directional measure of how often each episode was fetched. They are not certified to the IAB Podcast Measurement Technical Guidelines v2.1, so the numbers are not directly comparable to numbers from an IAB-certified podcast host.
The Downloads chart at the top of the Stats tab shows total downloads across every episode in your podcast, per day. Hover over any bar to see the exact count for that day.
A spike on a single day usually means one of three things: an episode was featured on another show, a social post drove traffic, or a podcast directory crawler indexed your feed. Compare the spike to your publish schedule and any promotion you ran that day.
The four summary cards below the Downloads chart give you a quick read on the period:
- Total downloads is every download across your show, for the selected period.
- Top app is the podcast app that served the most listens, with the share of total downloads.
- Top country is the country that listened the most, with the share of total downloads.
- Top day is the date with the highest download count, with the count for that day.
The cards refresh whenever you change the Period dropdown.
The Top episodes list ranks your episodes by total downloads. Each row shows the episode title, the publish date, and the total download count. Click an episode title to open the post in the editor.
The By app breakdown shows which podcast apps your listeners use, ranked by download share. Use this to see where your audience actually listens, which helps you decide where to focus promotion.
A few notes about how apps are counted:
- Apple Podcasts is usually the largest app for shows submitted to the Apple Podcasts directory.
- Overcast, Pocket Casts, Castro, and similar apps each show up separately.
- Web browser captures plays from people streaming the episode directly on your site.
The “By country” breakdown shows where your listeners are. Countries are ranked by download share over the selected period. Use this to see how your show is spreading, and to decide whether it is worth promoting in specific regions or adding translated show notes.
WordPress.com counts downloads served from your podcast feed. Spotify hosts its own copy of your audio after you submit your show, so plays inside the Spotify app are counted by Spotify, not by your feed. To see your Spotify listener stats, log in to Spotify for Creators.
Apple Podcasts and most other podcast apps stream the audio file directly from your feed each time a listener plays an episode, so those plays appear in your podcast stats.
The Stats tab shows:
- Total downloads per day, going back to the day you first published an episode.
- Download count per episode.
- The podcast app each download came from.
- The country each download came from.
The Stats tab does not show:
- Average listen-through time per episode.
- Subscriber count.
- Per-listener identity.
