Podtrac measurement is certified by the IAB. Podtrac recommends that podcast publishers follow IAB recommendations for podcast Players. The IAB Podcast Measurement Guidelines version 2.2 contain the following recommendations for podcast Players.
Companies that provide a player for downloaded podcast episodes can impact server logs used for determining metrics. We recommend the following guidelines for player set up and operations to minimize any impact on podcast measurement.
Do not implement auto-play except where listener intent is implied. For example, if a listener initiates play for an episode in their podcast player, the expectation is that the next episode will auto-play when the selected episode is complete. In contrast when a set-up that initiates auto-play upon a page visit or opening an app without any other actions to indicate intent, the result is a bad experience for the listener and inflates measurement metrics to include unwanted audio play.
Do not preload podcast episodes unless the intent was clearly to play the podcast.
Use header information located at the start of the podcast to prevent a full download when not needed.
For a full download, ask for the entire file at once. For a progressive download, ask for the file in slices at a byte range that is more than 2 bytes at a time. This way a full download can be distinguished from a progressive download.
Do not modify the enclosure URL when requesting media or add extra parameters.
Do not cache podcast episodes on your servers. Always download the latest episode from the enclosure URL for every app listener initiating a download.
Use the GUID—as opposed to episode URL, title, publication date, etc.—to identify new episodes in the RSS feed that should be automatically downloaded to a listener’s device. The GUID is designed to be persistent regardless of changes to hosting environments, titles, or other details.
Employ an “automatic download unsubscribe” behavior. For example, after a number of inactive downloads (episodes never played), stop auto downloading additional episodes.
Do not automatically download all episodes (e.g. back catalog episodes) by default. This behavior creates unnecessary drain on the publishers’ servers as well as consuming listeners’ bandwidth. It also creates a spike in downloads on server logs that require resources for troubleshooting the spike, explaining it, and addressing it.
Provide enough details in the user-agent header to allow it to be consistently differentiated from the user agent of other devices. See “User Agent Structure” below.
In addition to listener experience issues and slowing down the websites, if these guidelines are not followed, measurement companies may decide to discount ALL the traffic from these apps/sites because they cannot count true downloads or plays.