Podcast listenership is expected to grow this year. This is good news for advertisers who plan to increase their podcast ad spending. Along with benefits such as high engagement, podcast advertising conversion rates are better or on par with other channels, according to recent data [download page] from Podsights.
In Q2 2021, podcast advertising performed a hair better than Google Search in one comparison – with a site visit conversion rate of 1.58% compared to Google Search’s click-through rate (CTR) of 1.55%. Both out-performed the CTR on Facebook (1.11%), TikTok (0.97%), Twitter (0.86%) and Google Display (0.47%). Podsights notes that podcast conversion rates presume greater intent because, while podcast listeners must type in a URL after listening to a podcast, other channels allow viewers a simple click-through action.
Some industries have clearly benefited from podcast advertising, with Restaurants (3.5%), Retail-Brick and Mortar (2.7%), Arts and Entertainment (2.1%), Parenting (2.0%) and Automotive (2.0%) showing above-average site visit conversion rates from podcast ads. (Per Podsights, “An attributed visitor is someone who downloaded a podcast
containing an advertisement, and then visited the brand’s owned and operated website.”)
Purchase Conversion Rates
Overall, the purchase conversion rate for podcast advertising is 0.062%. The Parenting industry sports the highest purchase conversion rate at 0.14%, followed by Retail-Brick and Mortar (0.1%), Retail-DTC (0.09%), Travel (0.08%) and Fashion (0.08%). In this case, purchase conversion rate is defined as purchases divided by reach.
Parenting also performs best in terms of average purchase conversion rate from attributed visitors with a rate of 11.9%. Parenting is followed by Beauty (11.2%), CPG (9.7%) and Travel (8.4%) — all of which are well above the average purchase conversion rate from attributed visitors of 6.8%. (In other words, 6.8% of households driven to a website as a result of a podcast ad make a purchase on the website.)
Finally, the average frequency of podcast ads (“the number of times a household was exposed to an ad) rose to 3.55. Podsights believes that the continued increase in average frequency suggests that advertisers are over-targeting their audiences and not diversifying their podcast buys.
The full report can be found here.
About the Data: Findings are based on an analysis of 2.8K podcasting campaigns across 700 brands that ran from Q3 2020 through Q2 2021.
