#28: Podcast Analytics: Setting Goals That Align

In this opening episode of the analytics series, Ed Barker, founder of Studio 1878, starts with the question most brand podcast projects never answer properly: what does success actually look like?

Excitement and a strong concept are a reasonable starting point, but vague goals like awareness or thought leadership lead to measuring the wrong things and wasting time. The episode covers how to connect a podcast's goals directly to business outcomes, how to design a format around intent rather than instinct, and how to think about measurement across three time horizons. The frameworks here are aimed at teams who want to build something strategically coherent from the start, rather than reverse-engineering the rationale after the show is already in production.