The Measure Pod: 2 years of podcasting

If you also work in an industry like analytics, there’s generally very few people who you can really talk to about work stuff. I bet most of us have had something like “do you have Chandler Bing’s job?” said to us at some point. Or is that just me?

Anyway, to the point. Almost to the day two years ago I wrote about how we set up and launched The Measure Pod – wow, doesn’t time really fly!

If you’ve never come across the podcast The Measure Pod, you’d be forgiven. Like a lot of things, it was born out of the COVID-19 pandemic where we were in lockdown and I couldn’t get my fix of nattering over a beer (or three) about analytics to my coworkers here at Measurelab.

It acted as a form of venting, socialising and a pretty good excuse to chat to some very interesting people. Apologies for missing some people off, but some of the most memorable and impactful people and conversations that are front of mind are:

• Phil Gomm and Tony Reeves from Ding in #75 Learning design in analytics
• Johan van de Werken from GA4BigQuery.com in #72 A conversation on BigQuery and GA4
• Rowenna Fielding from Miss IG Geek in #62 Debunking common cookie consent, GDPR and ePrivacy myths
• Ellen Cole from Little Seed Group in #59 Digital accessibility in social media and analytics
• JJ Reynolds from LookerStudio.VIP in #57 Who you Lookering at?
• Jim Sterne from Target Marketing in #53 A conversation with the one and only Jim Sterne
• Rick Dronkers from Data to Value in #52 Talking privacy, GDPR and GA4
• Jordan Peck from Snowlow in #47 Digging into Snowplow
• Kelvin Newman from Rough Agenda in #31 The brightonSEO and MeasureFest story

Now two years into the journey, and no longer locked down, we’re still at it. At the time of writing we are incredibly even nearing the 100th episode, and according to Buzzsprout’s data we are in the top 50% of all podcasts! Although that last fact is purely for getting more than 31 downloads per episode – so maybe that says more about the podcasting landscape than us specifically…

Show me the data!

I won’t rehash my original post about the tools we use to host and measure the podcast. Instead, I made things easier to look at and share publicly – here is a dashboard I’ve put together:

(Direct link to dashboard here.)

This dashboard is purely looking at total listen/download numbers for now, and is manually updated by me every month (ish) for now.

My ambition is for one to automate it asap. And for two, include a breakdown per episode. All to come in the future when I can find some time to spend on it!

Listener feedback

Something we introduced a while back is a way for any of our listeners to give us feedback directly, or suggest a discussion topic or guest we should be speaking to.

We did this via a Google Form which we include in the show notes of every episode, as well as in the dashboard as a separate tab. Feel free to give it a spin and let us know what you think.

And ‘#61 WTF Google?! GA4’s Data API quotas are breaking things!‘ and ‘#38 How do you measure the return on analytics?‘ were some of the notable episodes we did off the back of this feedback. Thanks!

The future of The Measure Pod

So what does the future hold for The Measure Pod? Well in short, more of the same. But that’s not a bad thing!

Overall we’ll be keeping it a weekly podcast, releasing every Friday morning. And each ‘batch’ (I still can’t bring myself to call them seasons…) will be ten episodes long, where we have a few weeks off between batches.

At the time of writing we are about to release the next batch of episodes where we’ve mixed things up a tad – we’ve got our previous multi-episode guest Bhav Patel joining myself and Dara as a guest co-host!

Bhav lives in the product analytics world, and has always brought a fresh analytics-y perspective to the very marketing analytics-y side that Dara and I bring.

Check out his previous guest appearances on the pod and the great conversation he brings in ‘#73 Starting a product analytics consultancy‘ and ‘#39 Product analytics and CRAP Talks‘.

This is in partnership with CRAP Talks which Bhav runs. If you haven’t been to a CRAP Talks event before, and you’re near London or Manchester in the U.K., then you have been missing out and absolutely need to go to the next one!

Beyond this next batch of ten, who knows. But we’ll be in your feed nattering away about the analytics industry, Google Analytics and much more. We don’t plan to give it up anytime soon.