Sudden stats drop off

We’ve been using Seriously Simple Stats since our podcast’s inception in August 2017 and have seen steady growth and consistent spikes in listens on Mondays (when new episodes publish). However, our two most recent episodes have recorded significantly fewer Listens than usual and a disproportionate number of Listeners.

On a typical Monday, we see about 1500 Listens (across all episodes in our feed), but for the last two Mondays (3/18 and 3/25), we peaked at 607 and 747, respectively.

There is no explanation for a sudden loss of users like this, nor is this trend present in other analytics (Like Apple Connect’s beta analytics or Stitcher or Spotify).

Digging into the two most recent episodes’ individual stats reveals more weirdness as the ratio of Listens to Listeners (typically 1.5:1.0) is more like 4 Listens to 1 Listener.

The only recent change I can see has been made to the plugin is the addition of Lighthouse to the bot library, but surely this can’t account for such a reduction of Listens, and it also doesn’t explain why Listens attributed to specific sources (e.g. iTunes or Stitcher or Player FM) would be impacted.

I have noticed that this plugin is untested with my version of WordPress (5.1.1), but I’m still getting stats… just not as many as I’d expect.

Any ideas what could be going on? I just want accurate metrics (or as accurate as possible), and this sudden change has caused me to question the legitimacy of analytics captured and trusted prior to this point.

Thank you in advance for any insight or suggestions.