While the vast majority of your podcast's listening most likely occurs by listeners downloading your media file via your RSS feed (e.g. when they use apps like Apple Podcasts or Stitcher), you may have other places you make your show available.


In order to make sure you are capturing all of your show's listening, you will want to make sure you have the Podtrac redirect implemented every place that your listeners might find and listen to your show.


Here are some common places podcaster's make their shows available that don't use the RSS feed and how you can implement the Podtrac Prefis to make sure your Podtrac reports are capturing all of your listening.



1. Downloadable Files from Your Website

If you have links on your website to allow listeners to directly download your podcast episodes then you will want to make sure you add the Podtrac Prefix to each of these links to make sure you capture all downloads of your show. Here's how:


If your episode's website link would normally be:


<a href="https://www.mysite.com/ep051215.mp3">...</a>

...then use this hyperlink instead:


<a href="https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/www.mysite.com/ep051215.mp3">...</a>


2. Embedded Players on Your Website

If you are using a podcast player to allow visitors to listen to your podcast while on your site, then you will want to make sure the player is accessing your RSS feed to serve up the podcast episode or that the Podtrac Prefix is used by the player in order to be sure to capture this traffic to your show.  


If you use embedded <audio> players on your site that normally look like this:


<audio>
<source src="https://www.mysite.com/ep051215.mp3">
</audio>


...then update the src attribute to include the Podtrac prefix. 


<audio preload="none">
  <source src="https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/www.mysite.com/ep051215.mp3">
</audio>

Note: Be sure to add  preload="none" to the audio tag (if it’s not already there) so that preload requests aren't counted as downloads. (This is required by the IAB v2 standard and Podtrac's Terms of Service.)



3. Custom Apps

If you have a custom app for your show (this usually just applies to large podcast publishers) then this is one more place you will want to make sure you have included the Podtrac Prefix.


Use the techniques as described above to add the Podtrac Prefix to the episode URLs used in any custom apps.


See also:

Tracking Podcast Listens on Your Website