AnalyticOwl: For Cause Marketers, Radio Offers ‘Personal’ Engagement.

A new entry to RAB’s “Radio Matters” blog by AnalyticOwl General Manager Rick Kestenbaum makes the case that broadcast radio is a solution for charities that want to deliver a message to a mass audience but face challenges engaging individuals personally and emotionally.

“No other medium engages in a more personal way than broadcast radio,” Kestenbaum writes. “As part of the local community, it is the duty of the radio station to generate awareness of issues that impact the community in which a radio station’s listeners live, work and play. Radio inspires listeners to get involved with charities, religious institutions and causes. AM/FM radio reaches 86% of adults 18+ who have contributed to any religious or social care/welfare organization in the past year,” he writes, citing Scarborough’s USA+ 2024 Release 2.

AnalyticOwl’s Industry Insights report for the Charitable/Religious/Nonprofit category based on 2024 calendar year data, finds that during that date range, 65% of charitable, religious or nonprofit website visits that took place immediately after commercials aired were from search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Just 32% of visits came from users who entered a specific website address.

Writes Kestenbaum: “Why is this important? In Google Analytics, the ‘Referring Source’ metric identifies the last website a visitor was on. That can give the impression that all that traffic should be attributed to search engines, when in reality, many visits are from people who had just heard a commercial and then used a search engine to get to the site.”

He continues: “Understanding that people will overwhelmingly behave this way no matter what call to action is used is key to understanding the full impact of radio. Hard-to-remember website or landing page addresses, dedicated phone numbers and response codes all attempt to create a narrow response path that most people simply won’t go down.”

Among other key insights from AnalyticOwl:

• For both categories, response rates were highest on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

• The best daypart overall was Midday. “Afternoon and Morning Drive both contributed at a nearly equal level, which is unusual since Morning Drive usually drives higher numbers later in the day as a benefit of reach and frequency,” AnalyticOwl explains. “Evenings and Overnights often prove to deliver good value given lower rates. And :60 was the best performing ad duration, driving 6% lift in web traffic.” (The attribution and analytics platform notes that cause marketing commercials appear to benefit from delivering a more detailed message, a key consideration for those using 15- and 30-second durations.)

• Radio visitors also drove quality visits. Kestenbaum says session durations were an average of 2 minutes, 20 seconds, with an average of 2.2 pages viewed, “indicating serious interest and response.” Bounce rates were 34%, suggesting that fewer people just visit a single page before leaving the site. More than half of site visitors used a mobile device.