In the world of podcasting, a GUID (Global Unique Identifier) plays a crucial role in maintaining the integrity of your content, ensuring a smooth listener experience, and maximizing your advertising potential. This unique identifier acts as a digital fingerprint for each episode, allowing podcast apps, analytics tools, and ad servers to track and manage your content accurately.
Reusing GUIDs can lead to a host of issues that affect both your listeners and your bottom line. So don’t do it! 🙅
Why You Shouldn't Reuse GUIDs:
- RSS standards: The RSS 2.0 specification requires that GUIDs be unique. This ensures accurate identification, prevents duplication, and enables efficient tracking and syncing of feed items across various systems and devices.
- Confusion for podcast apps: Most apps use the GUID to identify unique episodes. Reusing a GUID might lead the app to:
- Not recognize the new episode as new content
- Overwrite the old episode with the new one
- Fail to download the new episode
- Incomplete listening history: If a listener has marked the original episode as played, the new episode might automatically be marked as played, too, even though it has different content.
- Inaccurate analytics: Reusing GUIDs can skew download and listening statistics, making it difficult to accurately track individual episodes' performance.
- Broken user experience: Listeners might lose their place in an episode, have incorrect playback history, or miss new content entirely.
- RSS feed issues: Some podcast directories and aggregators might reject or mishandle feeds with duplicate GUIDs, potentially affecting your podcast's distribution.
Impact on Ad Sales:
- Inaccurate download numbers: Ad sales often rely on accurate download statistics. Reused GUIDs can lead to underreported numbers, potentially undervaluing your ad inventory and losing revenue.
- Inaccurate Impression forecasting: Creating and using episode drafts with new GUIDs is crucial for Dovetail's impression forecasting. Without this, Dovetail can't accurately predict available impressions, potentially leading to under or overselling of your campaigns.
- Misrepresentation of audience reach: Reused GUIDs can make your audience seem smaller than it is, affecting advertiser interest.
- Compromised campaign reporting: Accurate reporting on individual episode performance becomes difficult with reused GUIDs.
- Ineffective episode targeting: Dovetail can target episodes based on GUID; a reused GUID leads to less effective ad targeting.
- Contractual issues: Inaccurate metrics could put you in breach of advertising agreements that specify expected reach or downloads.
In the end, there are only a few things to remember:
🟢 DO
- When airing a rerun, always create a new episode in Dovetail, this generates a new GUID.
- If you use your own GUIDs, generate a new GUID for your rerun.
- Update any outdated episode information if necessary.
Resource: How to create a new episode in Dovetail
🔴 DON’T
- Republish a previously released episode just by changing the publish date- create a new episode.
- Use a previously used GUID.
Questions? Reach out to our support team at podcast-support@prx.org.