How Podcast Ratings and Reviews Affect Your Podcast

We use ratings and reviews to vet almost everything in our lives today: the restaurant that was suggested to us, the new dog leash from Amazon, the potential employer, the plumber scheduled to come to our house today.

How Podcast Ratings and Reviews Affect Your Podcast

 

We use ratings and reviews to vet almost everything in our lives today: the restaurant that was suggested to us, the new dog leash from Amazon, the potential employer, the plumber scheduled to come to our house today.

Ratings and reviews have become a familiar way to get a sense of the quality of a service or product before we spend our well-earned cash on it.

Today, Google even ranks and suggests businesses based on how many ratings and reviews they have.

So it’s no wonder that when we look for which podcast show to choose for a potential interview opportunity that we would look to the ratings and reviews to guide us toward what we hope will be the “best” podcast for us.

But before you go choosing the podcast you will appear on solely based on ratings and reviews, there are some critical points to take into consideration when choosing which show to appear on.

 

Let Us Explain.

When it comes to podcasts, ratings and reviews do not influence charts or search, but they can help listeners discover and engage with your show as they explore new podcasts.

 

Podcasts don’t put as much energy into getting ratings and reviews as businesses do because they don’t get ranked by their ratings and reviews the same way businesses do.

How many times have you finished listening to a podcast you love and then you immediately went to leave a review? Odds are, not very often. People listen to podcasts while they are on the move, like when they’re in the car or working out. Usually once the podcast finishes, people aren’t in the best environment to leave a review. And since hosts don’t need ratings and reviews to be the “top podcast,” they don’t put energy into getting listeners to leave new reviews.

 

Dan Misener did a study a few years ago where he analyzed 20 million podcast ratings and found that two thirds of all podcasts had no ratings and reviews and that only the top 2% of podcasts had more than 80 reviews.

If we choose to guest on podcasts based on the review count, we could miss out on guesting on some truly influential podcasts for our business.

More ratings and reviews doesn’t mean that a podcast will get you more sales. Remember, people buy from people they like and whose message resonates with their needs. Maybe a listener left a great review. That doesn’t mean the next listener had felt the same impact.

At the end of the day, it’s the podcast’s audience that is most important to you and who those people are in relation to the service or product you offer. Unfortunately, the review count isn’t going to give you that information. You must pay attention to other—arguably more important—podcast characteristics when choosing a podcast to appear on:

> Find Your People

While reviews are great, they aren’t a predictor of how your guest interview will go or the number of sales you will get. And just because a podcast has a lot of reviews doesn’t mean it has the right podcast audience for you. Remember, you want to speak to an audience that is interested in what you have to say. The number of reviews doesn’t tell you anything about whether your target audience listens to a certain podcast.

Ruling out podcasts based on the number of reviews could mean you rule out a podcast that gets you the most sales. When you appear on a podcast, you are having a conversation with people, not the performance stats. Get in front of the right people, form relationships, and you will do much better than if you were to only pay attention to ratings and reviews of the show.

 

> More Isn’t Better. Better is Better.

A podcast that has more reviews, downloads, and listeners doesn’t mean it’s the better podcast for you. Podcasts that appeal to your audience are better for you, and that could be a podcast that doesn’t have many reviews or listeners. If you talk to hundreds of people but none of them are in your target audience, it won’t have nearly the same impact as if you talked to just 20 people of the right audience. You can’t say enough of the right things to the wrong people.

While ratings and reviews work for other areas of our lives, when it comes to considering which podcast we should appear on next, ratings and reviews aren’t a great indicator of whether we will hit the interview out of the park and make a ton of sales. We don’t need to appeal to the masses or be everywhere when we appear on a podcast. We simply need to show up on a podcast and form relationships with the people to whom our products or services make a difference.

That is how we move the needle. That is how we make the biggest impact. And that has nothing to do with ratings and reviews.