understanding analytics and vast gulf in unique listeners between Captivate/Spotify/Apple
Hi,
We're 36 episodes into a politics/current affairs show, now looking to try and ramp promotion, etc., and obviously understanding the analytics is a key part of that.
one issue we're running into, however, is that our unique listener figures, in particular, are bizarrely different between the host (Captivate.fm) and Apple & Spotify.
Over 60 days, Captivate says we have just shy of 3,000 uniques. Apple says we have 304, Spotify 262.
There is some room for uniques outside those platforms (we did an ad campaign that sent traffic to the website, for instance, and from play data that clearly contributed to the Captivate number but was tracked as Chrome/Safari/web player), but not nearly enough to explain the massive gap between the host and the end platforms.
I know data varies between hosts and platforms around plays and the like, but my sense is that the unique listener definition should be relatively standard here. (And, oddly, Spotify is showing more streams than does Captivate, while showing far lower unique numbers.)
trying to Google this issue I don't really find much that is a concrete explanation here. And the problem is that the differing data leads us to wildly different conclusions.
The platform-level data suggests we have pretty committed listeners, and just not enough people sampling. (Episode retention data supports that, FWIW.) The Captivate data, however, suggests that our conversion from uniques to followers is much lower, which tells a different story.
any thoughts on why this gulf and which one to trust?