Podcast Advertising Benchmarks

September 30, 2020

Podsights Podcast Ad Site Visit Conversion Rate Oct2020Podcast listenership has enjoyed growth in recent years, inspiring advertisers to consider investing in the channel, and, in turn, increasing the long-term outlook of the podcast market. But how are podcast ads performing? A recent report [download page] from Podsights looks at several benchmarks for the period between Q4 2018 and Q2 2020.

Conversion Rates

Podsights collected and analyzed anonymized, aggregated data from more than 500 campaigns it managed for more than 230 brands. Looking at conversion rates — defined by Podsights as “the number of attributed users that visited the [advertiser’s] site divided by the unique users that downloaded an episode” — the data shows that the average conversion rate across all campaigns and industries is 1.13%.

The Retail industry sports the highest average conversion rate at 3.36%. Retail is followed by Personal Finance (2.56%) and Credit Cards (2.53%).

While recent data from the IAB and PwC shows that revenues are close to equally split between embedded and dynamically inserted ads, Podsights reports that embedded ads have average conversion rates 2.1 times higher than dynamically inserted ads.

Purchase Conversion Rates for Attributed Visitors

Going a step further, Podsights also looked at purchase conversion rates. Half of the campaigns analyzed utilized a purchase pixel to follow a user from the point of exposure of a podcast ad to other websites. Of those, the analysis shows that the average conversion rate for people driven to a brand’s website was 7.71%, while the average conversion rate for purchase across industries was 3.12%.

Although Human Resources was the industry with the lowest average conversion rate (well below 1%) it has the highest average purchase conversion rate (~30%), closely followed by News & Politics and Events & Attractions.

Lead Conversion Rates

Ascend2 found that only 18% of marketers felt that podcasts were effective in generating leads that convert. However, of the one-third of campaigns analyzed that included a lead pixel, the report found that the average lead conversion rate for attributed visitors was 9.25%.

The Personal Finance industry is the leader by far when it comes to average lead conversion rate, followed by Retail and Meal Delivery.

Install Conversion Rate

For the roughly 1 in 20 campaigns (6%) that wished to track if their mobile app was downloaded after a listener exposed to an ad, the average install conversion rate came in at 3.24% for attributed visitors, with 61% of install conversion rates being more than 0.5%, per the report.

Average Frequency

Podsights also looked at ad frequency, which “measures how many times advertisers are exposing the same user to the same ad or brand.” Their data shows that the average frequency across campaigns was 2.68. It also found that for more than 9 in 10 (93%) campaigns, an average household was exposed to the same ads between 1 and 5 times.

The report points out that higher priced products tend to have a longer conversion time, and so the fact that the Technology and Home Security industries have the highest average frequency follows suit.

The full report can be found here.

About the Data: Results are based on an analysis of 532 podcast advertising campaigns across 232 brands from October 2018 – July 2020.

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