You would be surprised that Radio advertising is actually pretty stable. Even though Podcasts have been growing rapidly - Radio advertising budgets have not lost sever market share over the past 10 years, based on a study by Raconteur. Radio advertising depends on sales lift measurement.

Radio is regional, which means that national or international advertisers have some major logistical challenges trying to arrange a large scale campaign.

With that said - a regional approach is part of how and why tracking the performance of radio is simple by monitoring the delta in sales performance from the region advertised in.

Podcasts and Digital Audio Ads have become an important channel for Advertisers. The most savvy users are using podcasts, Pandora, Spotify - and those are the most desired customers Advertisers are after.

Podcasts growth rate is astonishing, with over 1.8M podcasts and over 45 million episodes available - podcasts are becoming a commodity, fast. 

What is great about podcasts is that they are available across several platforms, and as they attract a captive dedicated audience - Advertising on podcasts became a highly effective method.

While most Podcast advertising space is sold as sponsorship opportunities, programmatic audio ads have become standardized and are growing in inventory and opportunities for marketers.

Podcasts & Audio Campaign Measurement

Incrementality Testing

Incrementality testing provides operational insights for optimization. This method uses regular campaign changes to continuously provide insights over the value of paid media. 

This method works across platforms and can provide valuable insights at the granularity of campaign, demographics, media vendor, and medium.

Incrementality testing has been a holy grail in marketing , but only very few invested the resources required to evaluate it. 

With the current market conditions eliminating identifiable data companies are forced to make the effort of researching incrementality as the best alternative to measurement.

Switch On, Switch Off

Blackout is done by switching off Advertising for a period of time, reviewing sales lift, and switching campaign advertising back on to monitor the delta.

Blackout is probably the most common method of radio advertising attribution - and for Advertisers who use radio extensively - this is a very good way to run measurement. 

For Advertisers who use multiple mediums and a media mix model - this method is not effective, and creates a potential opportunity cost that exceeds the gains.

Control Group

The United States alone, has over 15,000 radio stations across the country. Radio wavelengths are limited to around 40 mile radius, allowing (and forcing) Advertisers to take a regional approach to radio Advertising.

This can be used to the advantage of an Advertiser by creating experiments where Advertising campaigns run only in several regions, comparing the sales results of regions with campaigns on, vs. regions where there was no advertising activity.

The same approach is more difficult with Podcasts and Audio Ads, as user level targeting becomes less available with user identifiers becoming obsolete. 

INCRMNTAL is an incrementality measurement platform allowing advertisers to know the value of their marketing activities across all channels. Podcast is one of the fastest growing mediums and Advertisers should have a way to measure their campaigns across it.

If you want to learn more, visit INCRMNTAL or book a demo today!