Spotify for Creators vs Podsights: two Spotify jobs

Spotify for Creators vs Podsights is a comparison between two Spotify products that answer different questions. Spotify for Creators tells you how your show performs inside Spotify. Podsights, which Spotify's transition guide states is now Spotify Ad Analytics, tells an advertiser whether an audio ad produced a result on their website.

The useful thing to know before either one: neither reports your total downloads. If you are looking at these two tools to find out how big your audience is, you are in the wrong aisle.

What Spotify for Creators reports

This is the dashboard for your own show, and the data is good because Spotify owns the app it comes from.

Spotify's creator growth page documents plays and followers for tracking growth over time, audience analytics covering retention on every episode, and impression analytics that show where your content appears on Spotify and connect discovery to consumption. On the interaction side it documents comments you can moderate and reply to, polls, and clips that put a snippet of your show in front of new listeners.

Impression analytics is the one most podcasters underuse. Knowing an episode got 4,000 impressions and 300 plays is a different problem from knowing it got 400 impressions and 300 plays, and the fix is different too. The first is a title and artwork problem. The second is a discovery problem. Spotify podcast analytics explained covers how to read those screens, and the Spotify for Creators review covers where the product stops.

The limit is in the name. Everything here is Spotify. A listener in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, or Pocket Casts is invisible to this dashboard, and for most shows that is a large share of the audience.

What the Podsights job became

Spotify Ad Analytics is the continuation of Podsights, and the mechanism is the one Podsights built.

A pixel sits on the advertiser's website and connects conversions back to audio campaigns. Spotify states it tracks conversions from audio campaigns wherever you are buying, on and off Spotify, so the attribution is not limited to inventory sold by Spotify. Brand measurement runs separately through Spotify Brand Lift, covering ad recall, awareness, and consideration.

Spotify describes the service as available to brands, agencies, and publishers worldwide, operating in ten markets: Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Spain, the UK, and the US. Spotify states there is no cost associated with using it. Publishers can activate attribution with the Spotify Pixel across an unlimited number of campaigns and impressions, and opt their shows into Advisor so advertisers can find them.

That free publisher access is the part worth acting on. Offering a sponsor pixel-based attribution costs you nothing and changes the renewal conversation, because the sponsor stops having to take your word for the result. Podcast attribution explained covers how to read what comes back, and what a podcast attribution pixel is covers the mechanism without the sales framing.

Why neither one is your audience number

The error happens when a podcaster treats either output as a show-level total.

Spotify for Creators counts plays by Spotify users. That is a real number about a real group, and it is a fraction of your listeners. Quoting it as your audience understates you if Spotify is a minority of your distribution, and misleads a sponsor either way.

Spotify Ad Analytics counts conversions attributed to campaign impressions. It observes the people who acted, not the people who heard. A campaign with 200 conversions tells you nothing about whether 10,000 or 200,000 people were exposed.

The total lives somewhere neither tool reaches: a prefix on your feed, counting media requests across every app. How to measure podcast downloads covers how that number is built and what it legitimately claims.

Do not stack the figures

The reporting mistake that costs deals is addition. A Spotify play and a prefix download are different events observed by different systems, and a conversion is a third thing entirely. Adding any two of them produces a number that describes nothing.

Keep three labelled lanes. Downloads from your prefix, with the provider named and the install date recorded. Spotify plays from Spotify for Creators, labelled as Spotify only. Conversions from Spotify Ad Analytics, labelled with the campaign they belong to.

An experienced buyer will ask how a combined figure was built, and there is no answer to that question that survives the follow-up.

Which one to open first

If you are deciding what to make next week, open Spotify for Creators. Retention and impression data answer editorial questions faster than a download total does, because they tell you where attention broke rather than how much of it arrived.

If a sponsor has asked whether their campaign worked, activate the Spotify Pixel through Spotify Ad Analytics. It is free, it works on campaigns you sold yourself, and declining to offer measurement when the free option exists weakens your position at renewal.

If you need to say how big your show is, install a prefix and wait for it to accumulate a month of data. Spotify for Creators alternatives covers the cross-app options, and the Podsights review covers why the old name still shows up on shortlists.

Spotify tells you about Spotify. Start tracking your show with Podder and you get the download total across every app, plus the audience detail that turns a number into a rate you can defend.