YouTube Podcast Ads Deliver Significant Lift, Oxford Road Study Finds.

The audio ad agency Oxford Road has released what it calls one of the first scalable data-driven studies to quantify the impact of podcasts running on YouTube — a platform long seen as a “walled garden” for attribution because traditional third-party tracking pixels aren’t allowed. By using passive panel data instead of pixels to observe ad exposure, the white paper offers what Oxford says is the first directional signals of true “simulcast” effectiveness.

“To our knowledge, this is the first time YouTube podcast impressions have been specifically measured — and we’ve been able to put a number on what they contribute to a client’s business,” said Giles Martin, Executive VP of Strategy & Insights at Oxford Road. The study demonstrates that as YouTube has become the leading podcasting platform it has also delivered significant website lift for video podcast advertisers.

Measurable Lift, Audience Insights

The study first needed to address a long-standing challenge for advertisers: YouTube’s restrictions on third-party tracking pixels have made it difficult to gauge campaign performance, even as the platform has emerged as the leading destination for podcast listening. To do that, the team used datasets from Crosswalk’s Media Identity Graph’s passive monitoring panel. The MIDG panel comprises around 30 million individuals — although a subset of around 10 million that’s weighted to the U.S. population was used for this analysis.

The panelists opt in, allowing MIDG to capture browsing, search, app usage, purchases, video viewing and other digital behavior 24 hours a day. “Once a panelist is in the zero-party data ecosystem, we are seeing every click, every transaction, every moment of their life in this very attention-diffused economy that we live in across all devices and all platforms,” explained MIDG’s Keith Friedenberg the recent Chief Audio Officer Summit. The presentation is featured on Oxford’s latest Media Roundtable podcast episode.

During the study, researchers tracked audiences exposed to “baked-in” host-read ads across 15 to 20 podcast episodes simulcast in both audio and YouTube video formats between September and December 2024. It included big shows like Smosh Moth and Bad Friends, down to small shows with fewer than 10,000 views per episode.

Using a sample of around 165,000 tracked YouTube views from a broader 3.5 million total views, Oxford Road found a statistically significant 7.9% lift in website visitation during a four-month period vs. the pre-campaign period — equating to roughly 23,000 incremental visits nationwide. When benchmarked against declining category visitation, which experienced a 4% average drop, the test campaign’s lift rose to 12.3%.

“There’s a big gap between where the budgets are going and what we can actually measure. And obviously, for us as an agency, we feel a strong sense of urgency to find solutions to this measurement problem for our clients,” Martin said on the podcast. “We obviously haven’t cracked the nut yet, but we do feel we found something that really has some interesting results and points the way to a new era of possibilities for podcast’s YouTube measurements.”

In addition to attribution estimates, Oxford Road was able to work with the panel to gather demographic insights about the audience of the YouTube podcast episodes in its campaign. The data shows that YouTube podcast viewers skew younger with a 20- to 30-year-old sweet spot. They are predominantly male (74%) and are less diverse than the wider podcast audience — 69% White vs. 11% Black and 10% Hispanic. While this is in part a function of targeting and YouTube’s audience profile, the white paper suggests brands may need tailored creative and targeting strategies for video podcast placements.

“It may also point to a potential targeting opportunity to go after broader multicultural audiences in audio,” the report says. It adds that it is also important to bear in mind a bigger-picture potential for detailed audience profiling among listeners, viewers, visitors, and both brand and category buyers.

A First Step

Oxford Road says early indications suggest audio impressions may still outperform video in visits-per-impression, but it stresses that further apples-to-apples testing is needed. The company is calling for advertisers, creators and platforms to collaborate on more robust measurement tools and standardized benchmarks to support growth in the emerging video podcast space.

“We’re just getting started here,” Martin said at July’s CAO Summit, which is included in the Media Roundtable episode. “We are really keen to work with more brands on this, to get more [research] sample to understand what type of consistency there is in the data,” he said.

Oxford Road, which says it is the largest buying agency in podcast media, says the research also suggests an ongoing need for more standardized performance tracking across audio and video platforms to better understand how ads are truly performing.

“This is a data-backed effort to help pioneer a new era of transparent performance measurement in podcasting,” CEO Dan Granger said. “We want to steer the industry toward developing stronger tools and clearer benchmarks for measuring simulcast performance, and I think this analysis marks an important step in the right direction.”

Download the white paper “Inside the Walled Garden: Breaking New Ground on YouTube Podcast Measurement” HERE.