Captivate announced that they have introduced Unique Listener Tracking to Captivate analytics as a free upgrade to all Captivate podcasters. Captivate says that, as podcasters, we’re a little addicted to measuring downloads when really, we’d love to be able to measure people who listen to our show. The new feature can do that.

The data as aggregated as:

A unique listener is defined as a listener from the same IP address and the same device within the presented timeframe. This is a way of estimating the number of people downloading your show. This is based on the IAB v2 guidelines.

Captivate podcasters will see a new section called Audience Overview. Within that section you’ll now be able to see the following unique listener data points:

• Unique listeners today
• Unique listeners yesterday
• Unique listeners over the last 7 days
• Unique listeners over the last 28 days
• Unique listeners over the last 90 days
• All-time unique listeners

This is part one of an analytics upgrade aiming to make it easier for Captivate podcasters to estimate their true audience size. Captivate also added “Last updated” information to the top right of your analytics screen and your main Captivate dashboard so that you can see the last time they updated your data for you.