Round #2

We at Podsights define conversion rate as the number of attributed visitors over total reach. If your podcast ad reached a hundred people and two showed up to the site, then the conversion rate (CR) would be 2%.

The question becomes, what is a good conversion rate? We have done this post (https://podsights.com/blog/conversion-rates/) before, but with many more campaigns under our belt, we felt it time to update benchmarks.

Methodology

Podsights bases its campaign structure on line items. A line item can be a podcast for embedded ads or an order for dynamic insertion. We took line items that met the following criteria.

  • The campaign had at least 10,000 impressions
  • The campaign started in the last four months
  • The line item had at least 1,000 impressions
  • The brand adopted the pixel broadly

These filters gave us a little more than 200 line items encompassing more than 66 million impressions.

Results

The average CR is 1.43% and varied by type. Dynamically inserted ads convert on average at 1.28% vs. embedded ads at 1.98%. Meaning embedded ads are about 60% more effective on average than dynamically inserted ads. Don’t get too excited live read truthers; I’m going to pour some cold water on you in a bit.

Below is a histogram of conversion rates by range:

As you can see, the most frequent CR is in the .5%-1.25% range, it’s the >2% CRs that pull the averages up.

If we break the CRs by DTC vs. everything else, DTC continues to see better results. The average CR for DTC is 1.78%, and for brand advertisers, this is around .99%

We can further break this out by the brand:

What’s interesting here is that a 1% CR is terrible for one brand and great for another. The key for podcast advertising is finding a baseline and targeting buys based on performance against that baseline.

The difference between a 0.5% and a 1% CR may not seem like a ton, but you have just doubled your efficiency.

Cold Water

Lastly, as a peek into what’s to come for the rest of the month, I want to talk a little about the dynamic vs. embedded debate. It’s missing the point. How an ad is inserted is not the determining factor in whether it converts.

Of the top ten best performing line items, six are dynamic. The top-performing line item is using AdsWizz’s targeting segments.

Two significant factors in conversion rates are content/brand alignment and when it runs in relation to the publish date of the episode.

If you have both, your ad will convert well, one it will do ok, neither it will bomb.

In the next post, we are going to talk about how frequency and conversion rates are correlated and after that dive headfirst into ad types (first run, run of network, run of show) and then placements (pre-roll, mid-roll, 1st mid-roll, 2nd mid-roll).

Stay tuned.