While you likely have a thorough measurement agenda for the rest of your digital media, it is possible that audio has you a little stumped. After all, you can’t apply viewability standards or clickthrough benchmarks to audio, so comparing your audio performance to video, display, search or social might seem like apples-to-oranges.
This perception that audio measurement is different, or worse, impossible might account for your brand being underinvested in audio. WARC found that while listeners spend about 31% of their time with audio, brands are spending less than 9% of their total media budgets with the popular, fast-growing channel.
In fact, streaming audio has many well-established third-party measurement options that put audio at parity with display and video and surpass CTV. When you execute audio programmatically, you unlock even more cross-channel capabilities.
Streaming audio capabilities
SXM Media had been in business with digital audio for over a decade when it finally made programmatic audio available. Clients expected that if they were going to test a new media type, they should be able to see proof of success. So, SXM responded by developing a robust, full-funnel playbook in cooperation with measurement vendors and demand side platform (DSP) leaders to ensure that clients can measure audio accurately through their vendor of choice.
While listeners spend about 31% of their time with audio, brands are spending less than 9% of their total media budgets with the channel.
Paired with DSP execution, audio inventory is compatible with reach and frequency measurement, brand lift studies, foot traffic, sales lift and digital conversion measurement. Not only can you manage investment across channels, but you can leverage the same independent tools that you’ve come to trust, including Nielsen, Upwave, KMB, Claritas, Placed, ArtsAI and more. Audio has a huge set of audience data thanks to a logged-in user base across all the leading streaming services. This high degree of privacy-compliant audience identification means more of the campaign can be measured, so you can be confident in the results.
While audio measurement capabilities exceed industry standards, there are some channel-specific considerations to keep in mind. For upper-funnel campaigns, using the DSP to measure brand lift or consideration across audio and CTV will help you identify the right media mix for your brand. Audio is not typically the final touch (or last click) for a conversion, so it’s important to select appropriate measurement tactics. For example, TheTradeDesk (TTD) has developed a path-to-conversion report that is compatible with audio listening. Clients can measure listen-through rate in the DSP and measure incremental reach and frequency against their CTV campaigns.
SXM Media’s partners have shared results that demonstrate a substantial reduction in the cost of conversion when audio is added to a TTD campaign. Some additional nuances may seem obvious, but avoid optimizing toward viewability, using display-specific lookback windows and measuring clickthrough rate.
So, what about podcasts?
While podcast execution is relatively new to programmatic, podcast advertising was born out of measurement. Direct-to-consumer brands saw success using promo codes to understand listener conversions. As the market has matured, SXM Media has been able to look back at its well-worn path to full-funnel audio measurement and repeat that playbook on podcasts. Those trusted measurement partners can evaluate Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend alongside Midnights and understand overall success.
Thanks to podcast consolidation and programmatic enablement, marketers can now place a single media campaign across hundreds of shows, offering scale that makes podcast content viable for major advertisers running national campaigns. To make sense of that large, diverse content landscape, SXM Media has established standards around content signals in a programmatic auction. Now it’s possible for the DSP to report every publisher, show and episode within a programmatic podcast campaign. This means your media team can confirm that you’re appearing in the shows you expected, not in the shows you want to avoid.
In CTV, you can easily go through show-by-show and manually pick out those that align with your brand identity, but the breadth of podcast content makes that impossible.
To solve the challenge of content curation, SXM Media partnered with Barometer and ArtsAI on AB Daily, a pixel-based tool that provides brands with not only a brand suitability score but also context and insights for campaign optimization. Barometer has led the way with an analysis of speech-to-text transcriptions of podcast episodes. The company measures when sensitive topics are broached and determines the context in which they appear, enabling you to make channel-appropriate brand suitability decisions in this new environment.
Cross-audio measurement matters
Whether you are placing a campaign on streaming audio, podcasts or both, there are programmatic measurement solutions to prove success throughout the funnel as well as make sense of the variety of content available. Don’t let measurement be the reason your brand misses out on audio.
