When you share your Linkfire links, we collect performance data at every point of your conversion funnel—from traffic sources and locations to volume and type of conversions. This helps you understand how your links are performing and enables you to optimize the performance of your future marketing efforts.
You can access a quick view of these insights via your Dashboard, a more detailed view via your Board Insights, or visualize them for each podcast link you’ve created with Linkfire.
This article deep dives into the insights you can see at the link level.
Table of contents
How to navigate and filter podcast link insights
2.1. Podcast Platforms Insights
Podcast Link Insights
To access the insights page for a specific podcast link, hover over the link image and click on “Insights.“
If you prefer the “list” view of your Links, the “Insights” button will appear on the far-right side of the link’s row when hovering over it, next to the “Export Fans” button.
The Insights page is structured in tabs displaying different metrics:
- Summary: a high-level glance at link activity over time, along with top channels, countries, and content blocks
- Content Blocks: a breakdown of all Content Blocks available on your link, including data per active block
- Podcast Analytics: An overview of your Apple Podcasts performance data, specifically for Podcast links
- Sources: a display of all the traffic sources for your links, as well as the performance of those channels
- Locations: an overview of the geographical sources of traffic for your links, reflected in either Countries or Cities.
- Devices: a granular overview of device types, operating systems, and browsers.
- Commission: a breakdown of your earnings from Linkfire's affiliate partners
- Sales: a breakdown of items sold and earnings on each store (not available on Personal Free plans)
How to navigate and filter podcast link insights
On the left top side of the Insight page, you can see which link's insights you are looking at and quickly visit the link.
On the top right side of the Insights page, you can choose the timeframe of your insights. You can select from various pre-set time frames or custom. This filter will be applied to all the data tabs.
1. Link insights - Summary
Along with fast tracks to your top channels, countries, and content blocks, the summary page offers a high-level glance at link activity and performance over time. Hover over a metric and click the “i” for more information about what it measures.
A list of definitions is also offered below:
- Visits: the number of times the link has been visited by actual people. Repeated visits are counted. Bots, scrapers, and preloads are not included.
*Hover over the Visits overview for the following metrics:
- Clicks: non-unique page views including bots and spiders etc. Repeated hits are counted.
- Sessions: Activity in a 10-minute timeframe in which activity (repeated page views and engagements) is counted as unique.
- Bounce rate: the percentage of visits to your landing page where the visitor closed the page without doing anything.
- Click-throughs: the number of times a visitor has clicked through to a destination on your link.
- Click-through rate: the percentage of click-throughs on your link against the number of visits.
2. Content Blocks Insights
The Content Blocks menu populates and shows all content blocks available to be used. This list will remain the same across all links and users, regardless of the blocks being added to a specific link, and regardless of the volume of traffic received.
- Podcast Platforms
- Recent Episodes
- Release Link Embeds
- External Link
- Image
- Video
- Email Sign Up
- Social
When clicked, within each individual content block you’ll see a breakdown, showcasing all the actions a visitor took within a block, including Click-Throughs, Email sign-ups, and video-embedded play.
Each unique content block will be shown in the breakdown view as a separate row, referred to as a variation when it receives a user action.
If you edit an active content block that is already displaying data, that new edit will be added as a new unique Variation, and will create a new row in the Table Breakdown Page, as illustrated in the below image.
Each of the rows within the Content Block breakdown is clickable and navigates to a more comprehensive details page. Within this page, the primary metrics are shown in a graph, based on the selected timeframe. Episodes, Countries, Cities, and Channels can all be chosen, to be broken down, and displayed in a table view below the graph.
2.1. Podcast Platforms Insights
This content block highlights the podcast platform destinations that are being linked to. For each of the platform destinations, you can see the data sorted into Click-Throughs and Platform Shares. The Platform Shares metric is a static number that shows the percentage of clicks to the specific platform vs. total clicks on all Platforms combined within the unique block.
This content block breakdown differs from the Breakdown logic on ‘Other Content Blocks:’ instead of being one table per block, including services on separate rows available per block. This is done simply to be able to break down all services individually within one block.
Each row in the table is clickable and opens a detailed page with more information about the platform's performance and distribution over time and different groupings.
2.2. Recent Episodes
This content block highlights all recent episodes that have been available on the link and received a minimum of 1 click.
The Recent Episodes content block scans every day to be kept up to date. As such, we only allow 3 episodes on the Landing page, which are reflected in the table view. Episodes currently not active on the link are marked as ‘Inactive’.
This breakdown differs from the Breakdown ****logic on ‘Other Content Blocks:’ with one row per block in one table view, but instead being one table per block including all recent episodes.
Each row in the table is clickable and opens a detailed page with more information about the episode's performance and distribution over time.
With each row representing an episode, you may select a specific platform to be broken down within the details page. By default ‘All Platforms’ are chosen. Simply by expanding the drop-down you can select one unique Platform that was available per episode, which will then be reflected on the details page on both the graph and the table view, with performance and distribution based on time series and groupings.
2.3. Other Content Blocks
The Content blocks mentioned below all follow the same logic, including one row per unique block which received a minimum of 1 user action. If edited, it automatically creates a new row with new unique Variations.
The one part that differentiates them is how the user actions per block are tracked.
Release Link Embeds
Release link embed features previously created content on a Linkfire release link.
Each of the release block embed has its own dashboard that presents a list of top services with their corresponding CTR and service share. When clicking one of the services, a detailed breakdown for that particular service will follow. From there, you can drill-down the data points even further - you can measure each DSP’s CTR across various channels, devices, and locations (country and city).
External Link
- Tracking Click-Throughs
Image
- Tracking Click-Throughs
Video: A video block contains 3 visual options. Which are tracked differently:
- Link-out:
- Clicking takes you directly to Youtube
- Tracked Metric: Embedded Play
- Embed
- The embedded widget on the Landing page is “owned” by YouTube but can be played on the page. This means that any clicks on the widget to YT cannot be tracked.
- Tracked Metric: Embedded Play
- Expandable Embed (Playable on the link)
- The embedded widget on the Landing page is “owned” by YouTube but can be played on the page. This means that any clicks on the widget to YT cannot be tracked.
- Tracked Metric: Embedded Play
Email Sign up: This content block highlights the user's action of signing up to your email list, and provides you with the count of emails collected from each block variation on the link.
Socials This content block allows you to look into which of your social profiles generates the most Click-Throughs and helps you understand which socials your fans are engaging with most.
When creating this block, you’re able to select as many socials as you wish. Each of these social media platforms gets its own variation and row inside the table. If the URLs of the social platform are changed, that automatically adds another Variation to the table.
3. Breakdowns
3.1. Podcasts Analytics
Discover which of your links are actually driving engagements on Apple Podcasts, and which countries and marketing channels those engagements are coming from. You can now match your off-platform campaigns with on-platform behaviour and cut down on budget burners.
When you promote your Podcast show or Episode, you will receive exclusive analytics data collected by your campaign. These are defined as:
Followers = The total number of people who followed a show. Plays = The total number of times people pressed “play” on an episode. Listeners = The total number of people who listened to an episode. Engaged listener = someone has listened to at least 20 minutes or 40% of an episode, depending on its length (read more here).
All of these are shown with activity trends in the graph, with the ability to break down the data even further by using the underlying groupings of Products (Shown as Episodes or shows), Countries, and Channels. These extend to a table view, with a breakdown of all products related to the selected metric.
If you are a member of the Apple Podcasts Affiliate Program*, you will also receive valuable insights on Commission and Sales, which will correspond to what is also reported in Partnerize, but will be limited to what was driven through the Linkfire promotions:
*If you are not a member yet, but want to be, joining is free. Click here to sign up.
Subscription Trials = The total number of people who started a subscription trial Subscriptions = The total number of people who have subscribed Subscription Revenue = The total revenue generated by a subscription Affiliate Revenue = The total commission revenue from the Apple Podcasts Affiliate Program
For a more detailed explanation of Apple Podcasts Analytics, you can learn more here.
3.2. Sources
This section provides an overview of your traffic sources, including activity IDs, board-level channels, and automatically detected link referrals. The data is organized into three tabs where you can see the data sorted into: Visits, Click-throughs, and CTR (click-through rate).
- Channel distribution: The channels section displays the number of visitors that reached your link through specific channels, as defined in your board settings or at the link level - Learn more about how to set up Channels for detailed tracking.
- Referrer distribution: This section displays the distribution of visitors who have been referred to your link from specific sources. Referrers are automatically detected by Linkfire, and when it is impossible to detect the source of the traffic, the data will be displayed as “Unknown.”
Note: We are not able to differentiate between different internal sources on the same platform. For example, if you share a link across two different Facebook pages at three different times of the day, you can track all six instances using a combination of Channels and Activities. All six instances will be filed as “facebook.com” on the Referrer overview - learn more on how Referred information is collected and reported.
- Activity tracking: In addition to tracking your traffic by Channels, you can also associate a certain Activity with your link each time you share it. You can, for example, use activities to track the performance of the same link shared at different times of the day - learn more about how to use Activities.
3.3. Locations
This section shows where your link visitors are located. All the data is displayed by Visits, Click-throughs, and CTR, and you can choose to view either Countries or Cities.
3.4. Devices
Under devices, you’ll find data on your visitor’s device type, operating system, and browser. Toggle between the different sections on the upper right hand.
3.5. Commission
The Commission section shows you a breakdown of the products, services, stores, and tokens responsible for the commissions earned on your link. Learn more about how to integrate with affiliate programs here.
3.6. Sales
This insights section will display an overview of the items sold and total earnings for the past months as well as a sales breakdown of product types or stores.