Chartable for Podcasts: A Deep Dive into Analytics, Attribution, and Its Alternatives

For podcast agencies, the pressure is on. It’s no longer enough to produce a beautiful, high-quality show for your B2B clients. You’re in the hot seat to prove its value, demonstrate growth, and speak the language of ROI to budget-holders who are more accustomed to performance marketing spreadsheets than podcasting purism. In this high-stakes environment, data is your best friend.

For years, Chartable (now part of Spotify) has been a go-to tool for agencies looking to bring some level of analytics and attribution to their clients' shows. It represents a critical step forward in trying to measure the impact of podcasting. But does it solve the core business problems that lead to client churn and canceled shows?

Let’s take a deep dive into what Chartable offers, where it shines, and where its data falls short—especially for B2B agencies that need to guarantee results.

What is Chartable? An Overview for Agencies

Chartable is a suite of analytics and attribution tools designed to help podcasters and advertisers measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts. For agencies, its primary value lies in its ability to connect promotional activities to listener actions, moving beyond the basic download numbers provided by hosting platforms.

Key features typically include:

SmartLinks: These are trackable URLs that you can use in your marketing campaigns (social posts, newsletters, ads). When a listener clicks a SmartLink, Chartable directs them to their preferred podcast app and logs the click, giving you insight into which channels are driving traffic.
Chart Tracking: This feature allows you to monitor your podcast's rankings across various charts and categories on platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It’s a way to benchmark performance against competitors and track visibility.
Ad Attribution: For sponsors and advertisers, Chartable offers tools to measure the impact of ad campaigns running on podcasts, helping to prove the value of their ad spend.

Essentially, Chartable aims to pull podcasting out of the data dark ages and into the world of modern digital marketing. It provides a dashboard that helps you start answering the question, "Is our marketing working?"

The Pros: Why Agencies Turn to Chartable

It’s easy to see the appeal of a tool like Chartable. For agencies trying to professionalize their reporting and add a layer of data to their client conversations, it offers several clear advantages.

Centralized Campaign Tracking

Before tools like Chartable, tracking podcast promotion was a messy, fragmented process. SmartLinks brought much-needed order to the chaos. An agency can create unique links for a client's newsletter, LinkedIn profile, and Twitter campaign, and see at a glance which channel is generating the most clicks. This provides tangible data to guide future marketing efforts.

Competitive Benchmarking

Clients, especially in the competitive B2B space, want to know how they stack up. While chart positions can often feel like a vanity metric, they are a visible indicator of momentum. Being able to show a client that their show has entered the top 100 in their niche category can be a powerful way to build confidence and demonstrate progress.

A First Step Toward Attribution

Chartable was a pioneer in trying to connect the dots between marketing spend and listener growth. It helped shift the conversation from a vague hope for organic discovery to a more structured approach of measuring specific actions. This is crucial for justifying the time and resources spent on promotion.

The Cons: Where Chartable's Data Falls Short for B2B Clients

While Chartable is a valuable tool, it doesn’t solve the fundamental problems that cause B2B podcasts to lose their funding. Its insights often raise more questions than they answer, especially when a client’s VP of Marketing is scrutinizing the budget.

The Click-to-Listen Gap

Here's the rub: a click is not a download. Chartable excels at tracking clicks on your SmartLinks, but the attribution trail goes cold right after. You know someone clicked, but you have no guarantee they ever pressed play, let alone listened for a meaningful amount of time. You’re left with correlation, not causation, which is a tough sell in a budget meeting. You can’t tell your client, "We spent $1,000 on ads and we hope it led to new listeners."

Anonymous Audiences

Chartable might give you broad demographic data, but for a B2B client, that’s not enough. They don’t want to know if they reached "males aged 35-44." They need to know if they reached mid-level engineering managers at aerospace companies. Chartable can't provide that level of firmographic or job-title-based intelligence. You can’t definitively prove the podcast is reaching its Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), which is the number one question leadership will ask.

Inability to Guarantee Reach

Chartable is a measurement tool, not a growth engine. It can report on the performance of your existing promotional efforts, but it can’t guarantee that those efforts will produce a specific number of new listeners. You’re still at the mercy of social media algorithms, email open rates, and the general unpredictability of organic marketing. This leaves agencies in a vulnerable position, unable to promise a baseline of performance for their client’s investment.

Beyond Chartable: A New Model for Guaranteed Reach and Demonstrable ROI

The gaps left by traditional analytics tools highlight a deeper need within the podcasting industry: a shift from measuring unpredictable results to delivering guaranteed outcomes. What if, instead of paying for clicks and hoping for downloads, you could pay directly for the download itself—and know exactly who that download came from?

This is the foundation of a performance-based podcast growth model. It’s an approach built not on guesswork, but on certainty.

Shifting from Measurement to Guarantees

Imagine being able to tell your client, "Our package includes a guarantee of 500 new downloads per episode." A performance-based partner operates like an insurance company for downloads, using sophisticated ad tech and data modeling to take on the financial risk of a campaign. You pay a fixed price per download, and they are responsible for delivering it, regardless of the underlying cost-per-click or impression. This completely changes the conversation from "let's see what happens" to "here is what will happen."

Transforming Anonymous Listeners into Targeted Intelligence

The real game-changer is connecting those guaranteed downloads to business-class data. By leveraging the power of ad networks like Google and LinkedIn, it's possible to go beyond vague demographics and provide deep audience intelligence.

With a true podcast growth service, you can get white-labeled reports showing you the exact job titles, seniority levels, industries, and even company names that your campaign reached. This transforms a download from a vanity metric into a strategic intelligence tool, giving you the concrete data needed to prove the show is reaching its ICP.

Completing the Marketing Mix with White-Hat Paid Media

The podcast industry has long operated on an unstable, "three-legged stool" of earned, shared, and owned media. Paid media is the crucial fourth leg that provides stability and predictable growth. However, many "growth" services rely on shady, black-hat tactics like bots or incentivized plays to inflate numbers. A legitimate approach uses the world's most reputable ad networks to get a show in front of real, relevant listeners in a transparent and verifiable way.

How to Grow Your Show and Prove Its Value with Listen Network

At Listen Network, we built our entire platform to solve these exact problems for podcast agencies. We provide a 100% white-hat, performance-based podcast growth service that transforms your client's show from an unpredictable expense into a strategic asset with demonstrable ROI.

By building our service into your packages, you can:

Demonstrate Clear ROI: Walk into client meetings armed with business-class reports that prove you’re reaching their exact target market.
Increase Client Retention: Solve the number one reason B2B podcasts get canceled by speaking the language of performance that budget-holders understand.
Add a High-Margin Revenue Stream: Our agency partners typically earn a 50% or greater gross margin on our services, helping to offset the declining profitability of production alone.
Differentiate Your Agency: Stand out from the competition by offering what they can’t—guaranteed distribution and targeted audience intelligence. See how we've helped other agencies succeed in our case studies.

Your Agency's Next Move: From Hopeful to Guaranteed

Measuring your podcast’s performance is important, but it’s no longer enough. The most successful agencies are moving beyond simply reporting on what happened and are instead delivering guaranteed results. By embracing a data-driven, performance-based model for podcast growth, you can stop the cycle of client churn, build trust through business-class reporting, and confidently prove the value of the incredible shows you produce.

Ready to transform your agency's offering and secure your clients' long-term success? Schedule a free strategy call with Listen Network today to learn how guaranteed, targeted distribution can become your ultimate differentiator.