Podscribe Finds What Moves Podcast Performance.

Podscribe says podcast advertisers looking to improve campaign performance may want to pay more attention to where listeners live, their ability to spend and whether they have already interacted with a brand — and less attention to some targeting signals that have traditionally shaped media plans.

The company’s new Q3 Performance Benchmark Report analyzes the factors that have the greatest impact on advertising performance, finding that geography, recent website visits and consumer buying power emerge as the strongest signals. By comparison, frequency, day of week, time of day and gender had substantially less impact in Podscribe’s analysis.

The findings come as podcast advertising continues shifting toward more audience-based buying, giving marketers the ability to target individual impressions rather than simply selecting shows they believe will reach the right consumers.

Podscribe Senior Director of Partnerships Camden Weber said the company used its SmartServe technology to analyze millions of impressions across hundreds of advertisers, looking at which characteristics were most closely associated with stronger campaign result. He said during a webinar presenting the findings that DMA, buying power score, and occupation had some of the biggest impact. But geography stood above the rest.

“Austin, L.A., New York, Raleigh, San Francisco are some of the DMAs that we’ve seen driving the strongest performance across a wide array of advertisers,” Weber said. Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Minneapolis-St. Paul and Sacramento-Stockton-Modesto were among the weaker-performing markets across the advertisers studied.

Podscribe cautions that those results are aggregated across advertisers and should not be interpreted as a universal ranking of markets. The characteristics that matter most can vary substantially depending on the advertiser and its objectives.

Weber offered the example of a local auto dealer, for which geography would naturally carry far more importance than it might for a national advertiser. “If I’m a local market auto dealer running a national campaign probably isn’t the most efficient for me,” he said. “So location may be most important for my campaign needs.”

Another powerful signal is whether someone has recently visited an advertiser’s website. That finding builds on Podscribe’s previous research showing that retargeting consumers who have already interacted with a brand can produce significantly stronger response rates than campaigns aimed at the broader podcast audience.

In the new analysis, a recent website visit ranks just behind DMA in its potential impact on performance, followed closely by what Podscribe calls its Buyer Power Score. The latter uses household wealth and disposable income to estimate consumers’ ability to spend.

Occupation also showed a relatively strong relationship with performance. Podscribe found tradesmen and machine or labor workers, professional and technical workers, and upper-management and executive households among the stronger-performing occupational groups in its analysis. Retired households and those associated with beauty, cosmetology and barber occupations were among the weaker performers.

But Podscribe says the larger opportunity comes from combining signals rather than relying on any single demographic characteristic.

“Where we see these used in aggregate is where we’re seeing on average two- to three-times the conversion rate,” Weber said. “We’re getting sort of surgical with which impressions we should be focused on serving ads to.”

That increasingly granular approach also exposes limitations in some traditional targeting measures.

Podscribe ranks gender near the bottom of the factors it analyzed, but CEO Pete Birsinger cautioned that the finding does not necessarily mean gender is unimportant to advertisers. Rather, the available signal itself can be imprecise because podcast targeting often attempts to infer gender at the household level from an IP address. “Gender actually is probably a really important one,” Birsinger said.

That limitation may help explain why contextual targeting remains important even as podcast buying becomes increasingly data driven. During the webinar, the company identified content genre as their most commonly used targeting tactic. Yet the results point toward an increasingly hybrid approach to podcast media buying by using the content and audience characteristics that have traditionally guided show selection while layering in impression-level data about geography, purchasing power and previous brand interaction.

Download the latest PPB report HERE.