How can I track podcast downloads?
August 24, 2015 11:10 AM Subscribe
I've been helping my wife produce a podcast. It publishes through a Wordpress site sitting on Dreamhost. We have Google Analytics set up for the site (which existed as a blog before the podcast came along), but unless I'm reading them wrong, they don't appear to show podcast downloads. What's the best way, either through Google Analytics or some other route, to get reliable numbers on downloads?
We run the feed through blubrry, for what it's worth. My understanding is that, to get stats from them, you need to have the shows hosted on their servers.
We run the feed through blubrry, for what it's worth. My understanding is that, to get stats from them, you need to have the shows hosted on their servers.
Google Analytics tracks hits by javascript code running initiated from a webpage load -- since your listeners are most likely downloading the MP3 file directly, no javascript gets executed, so no 'hits' are recorded.
Doing what you want, on your own server, may need a 'shim' between the listener's download request and the file itself, such as creating a download.php file, which the link looks like http://mywebsite.com/download.php?soundfile.mp3 -- the 'download.php' writes the download to a log file, then hands over the mp3 file. There are Wordpress plugins that do something similar -- this is the first hit googling "Wordpress download monitor" -- but I can't vouch for any of them.
According to this page, Dreamhost has http://mywebsite.com/logs so get you the http logs -- Most apache servers have a "access" log, which tracks every HTTP request sent, which would include the downloaded files. You'd have to find a way of parsing through all that data to find just the files, but it is likely stored in there.
posted by AzraelBrown at 11:33 AM on August 24, 2015
Doing what you want, on your own server, may need a 'shim' between the listener's download request and the file itself, such as creating a download.php file, which the link looks like http://mywebsite.com/download.php?soundfile.mp3 -- the 'download.php' writes the download to a log file, then hands over the mp3 file. There are Wordpress plugins that do something similar -- this is the first hit googling "Wordpress download monitor" -- but I can't vouch for any of them.
According to this page, Dreamhost has http://mywebsite.com/logs so get you the http logs -- Most apache servers have a "access" log, which tracks every HTTP request sent, which would include the downloaded files. You'd have to find a way of parsing through all that data to find just the files, but it is likely stored in there.
posted by AzraelBrown at 11:33 AM on August 24, 2015
You can route through feedburner too and get awesome stats:
https://feedburner.google.com
posted by hz37 at 11:38 AM on August 24, 2015 [2 favorites]
https://feedburner.google.com
posted by hz37 at 11:38 AM on August 24, 2015 [2 favorites]
I use a Wordpress plugin called Download Monitor that tracks both direct downloads and URL referrals (in my case, the files are stored on Amazon S3). The plugin is free and they also offer some paid extensions.
posted by praiseb at 3:18 PM on August 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by praiseb at 3:18 PM on August 24, 2015 [1 favorite]
I use Podtrac for this, and have for years. They've been around for 10 years at least.
posted by Automocar at 5:02 PM on August 24, 2015
posted by Automocar at 5:02 PM on August 24, 2015
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posted by troyer at 11:29 AM on August 24, 2015 [1 favorite]