Audio campaigns work.

If you want your podcast to reach new listeners, one of the most effective things to do is appear in other podcasts. For example, take these “preach to the converted” tactics:

• Promo swaps
• Episode swaps
• Paid trailer or episode drops
• Paid audio ads
• Guest appearances

There’s plenty of prior art and anecdotal evidence to suggest these tactics can be effective.

However, they can be tricky to measure.

If I spend $50k on mid-roll promo spots inside a big, popular, well-aligned show, how do I know if it was money well spent? How can I measure whether any of the impressions I paid for yielded a new listener?

Calculating ROI on audio campaigns has been a longstanding challenge for the podcast industry, and the team at Chartable is addressing it with a new service called SmartPromos.

Here at Pacific Content, we’ve been experimenting with SmartPromos for a few weeks, and we’re really excited about how podcasters, agencies, and media buyers can use it to run smarter, more effective, more measurable audio campaigns to promote their shows.

I recently asked Chartable’s co-founder and CEO Dave Zohrob a few questions about SmartPromos, and how podcasters can move towards direct attribution for their paid audio promo dollars.

Dan Misener: Historically, why has podcast-to-podcast promo attribution been a challenge?

Dave Zohrob: Podcast-to-podcast promotion has been a great growth channel for years, but attribution was challenging because there wasn’t a way to directly measure impact — until now.

Before SmartPromos, the best methods were probabilistic, looking at download numbers around the time the promo ran and comparing to historical traffic patterns. This allowed for an estimate, but any number of things could skew the numbers: a holiday weekend reducing download counts, running two promos in a short timespan, a press hit or mention elsewhere. SmartPromos takes the guesswork out of podcast-to-podcast promotion.

How does SmartPromos address the attribution problem?

SmartPromos offers direct podcast-to-podcast attribution built on Chartable’s analytics infrastructure.

If Podcast A drops a trailer in Podcast B’s feed, we look at all the listeners (as defined by the IAB — unique IP address & user-agent combinations) who downloaded the promo from Podcast B, and see which of them ended up downloading Podcast A afterward.

SmartPromos works both within your own network and across networks, on nearly every hosting provider (e.g. Podcast A can be on Libsyn and Podcast B on ART19).

It also works for all promo types. That means baked-in ads and dynamically inserted ads, regardless of where the ad is placed (preroll, midroll, postroll), as well as episode drops.

And if you’re running a large audio promotional campaign across many podcasts, SmartPromos offers multi-touch attribution. So if you’re dropping a trailer not just on Podcast B but also Podcasts C, D, and E, we’ll properly assign credit for downloads across all impressions.

If I use SmartPromos to measure my campaigns, what type of metrics or reports can I expect?

The primary metrics we offer are:

• Impressions: the total number of downloads or impressions across all promos. This can be a mix of baked-in ad downloads or dynamically-inserted ad impressions.
• Reach: the unique number of listeners reached across all impressions (using the IAB definition of a listener)
• Unique conversions: The number of unique listeners that downloaded your podcast driven by this promotional campaign.
• New conversions: The number of unique listeners who have never downloaded an episode of your podcast before driven by this campaign. In other words, this allows you to differentiate between reacquiring existing listeners, and acquiring an entirely new audience.
• Conversion rates: We break out conversion rates for both unique and new conversions.

All campaigns offer multi-touch attribution, so if you’re running multiple promos, we’ll distribute the “credit” for a unique/new conversion across all the promos that listener was exposed to.

What types of campaigns are publishers measuring with SmartPromos? Promo swaps? Paid campaigns? Guest appearances?

SmartPromos is really new but so far, we’ve seen:

• Podcast networks measuring effectiveness of trailer drops in existing feeds
• Dynamically-inserted and baked-in promo swaps across major networks
• Dynamically-inserted paid campaigns across major networks

SmartPromos should also be useful for guest spots, and we’ve also got pilots in the works for attributing from streaming radio promotion to podcasts. We’re excited to see what other uses the ever-creative podcast community will find for this tool!

It’s exciting to have a “dollars in, downloads out” way to measure the success of paid audio campaigns. But as with any measurement product, there are questions about benchmarking. How do you think podcasters should gauge the success of campaigns they measure through SmartPromos? What benchmarks can you share?

This is a great question! Because SmartPromos is so new, we don’t have a massive data set to pull benchmarks from. Conversion rates can vary wildly depending on a number of factors:

• Episode drop vs. ad — episode drops tend to perform better (perhaps for obvious reasons; it’s an entire episode of a podcast that’s an ad vs. 30 seconds)
• Genre and audience alignment — it’s perhaps not surprising that true crime fans love true crime, but if you drop something totally unrelated into a true crime feed, you won’t see amazing results
• Frequency — how often is someone hearing about your podcast?

As a very general baseline, we see conversion rates of 0.25–1% for ads, and 1–10% or more for episode drops. The wide range for episode drops in particular reflects the importance of audience alignment. If you’re a podcaster interested in doing a case study with us, get in touch! We love working with forward-thinking creators.

SmartPromos is part of a larger suite of attribution tools from Chartable. How does it fit into your vision for the future of podcast measurement?

Chartable’s goal is to help publishers and advertisers understand the entire listener journey — from the web to a podcast, from a podcast to another podcast, and from a podcast back out to the web. SmartPromos fits right in the middle of that journey:

• Web-to-podcast: Whether it’s paid social media ads or an organic email newsletter, our SmartLinks tool helps podcast marketers grow their shows by discovering which marketing channels drive the most downloads, not just clicks.
• Podcast-to-podcast: This is what SmartPromos is all about 🙂
• Podcast-to-web (and apps): When a listener hears an ad for a product in a podcast, do they then go buy the product? Our SmartAds product helps publishers, brands and advertisers understand the effectiveness of their podcast ads. It even works for mobile app downloads and installs. With thanks & apologies to Bob Pittman, we all know that podcast ads work like magic — SmartAds brings the math to the magic of podcast ads.

SmartPromos is launching in limited beta today — so visit your Chartable dashboard to sign up for the beta, or visit https://chartable.com/publishers/smartpromos.

We’re incredibly excited to keep building and improving these tools so that creators can grow their shows and advertisers of all kinds can unlock the power of podcast advertising.

Here at Pacific Content, I’ve been part of many different podcast media buys. I’ve seen big buys and small buys. Smart buys, and complete wastes of money.

I’m excited about tools like SmartPromos because they can help podcasters make smarter decisions about where to spend their time, attention, and money.

How do you measure bang-for-buck on paid audio campaigns?

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