Two spots – one pre-roll and the other mid-roll – is the optimal podcast advertising strategy. That is according to a new Podsights study that examined the number of ads placed in an episode and where they were inserted to determine the best return on ad spending for marketers using the medium.
The data shows, not surprisingly that the more ads run during an episode, the higher the conversion rate climbs. For three ads it was 1.46% followed by 1.29% for two ads and 1.12% for one ad. In each case the study measured how many episode listeners visited an advertiser’s website or app.
“While three spot placements yield the highest conversion rates, they have a lower return on ad spend due to their higher price,” the study says, concluding, “Return on ad spend is highest for two spot placements in pre-roll and mid-roll.” When just a single placement is used, Podsights said the data shows the next-highest returns are in mid-rolls and pre-rolls.
Moving beyond conversion to actual purchase, Podsights said its data shows once again the average purchase rate is higher for multiple spot placements than single placements. “Sequential ads and mid-roll performed higher than the average purchase conversion rate across campaigns,” it said.
For generating leads, mid-roll spots did better than the average. And once again, more ads did better than fewer spots.
On average, Podsights said conversion rates were 86% higher for direct-to-consumer brands than business-to-business ads.
Podsights said that sports, retail and credit card advertisers had the highest conversion rates for dynamically-inserted ads while sports, retail, and meal delivery services did the best for embedded ads. But overall, embedded ads had a higher conversion rate (1.38%) than dynamically inserted ads (1.07%). “The high conversion rates for sports is likely due to the excitement around the return of sports,” the report added.
The study is based on data collected and analyzed in aggregate from all Podsights campaigns between fourth quarter 2018 and third quarter 2020. That includes 804 campaigns covering 305 brands and a combined 1.6 billion ad impressions. The aggregated data has been anonymized and does not identify individual brands that Podsights said spent $38 million with the company. To conduct the research, Podsights utilized IP matching to identify distinct households, but it said it did not collect any demographic information from listeners other than their approximate location at the time of impression.
The data also suggests large campaigns – those with 1.5 million ad impressions or more – had a better conversion rate than smaller efforts by a 1.68% to 1.41% advantage.
Download the full analysis HERE.
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