Advertising on podcasts is easy enough, right? Running a “host read” ad (an ad where the podcast host reads your spot during the show) is a matter of contacting a publisher, sending a script, signing an IO, and voila! Your ads are live.

For most advertisers, this is where the fun ends. There’s typically no way to measure results, and many marketers will take a  “spray and pray approach” – where they will choose podcasts, hope the host aligns with an audience, and assume that results delivered a positive outcome. Some marketers will work around this opaque measurement by including host-read calls-to-action, like “Text AMERICA” to 12345, but the volume of opt-ins with this approach is low, often resulting in only a couple of interactions from the most engaged fans. 

For Direct Persuasion, the traditional podcast approach did not work for one of our political clients. For this client to continue investing in podcast ads, they needed an easy way to determine the actual value of their placements.

Enter Podsights, a podcast-measurement software recently-acquired by Spotify. Podsights allowed Direct Persuasion to place a conversion pixel on the client’s website and track (in real-time) how listeners behaved after they were exposed to our ads. 

Here’s what the data looked like:

This particular political advertiser was completely new to market, and their ads resulted in a 600-1000% increase brand lift  – which demonstrated the effectiveness of a full-funnel advertising plan for new candidates, products, or initiatives.

Podsights also gave us insight into which other advertising verticals touched site visitors who had been exposed to our spots. In other words, if someone listened to a podcast ad, how did they finally find our client’s website?

In the end, we found that these ads placements worked alongside Podsights to drive users to our client’s website:

Thanks to this methodology, Direct Persuasion is now able to answer these questions for our clients that want to run podcast ads:

• How many people that listened to your podcast ads actually visited your website?
• Which podcast drove the most users to our website?
• How many individual users were reached by our podcast ads?
• How much brand lift did your podcast ads drive?
• Which podcast drives the most lift for your brand?
• What placements worked best alongside podcast ads to drive conversions?