Amelia Cumber, I'm the head of growth and marketing here at Podscribe. We are a third party independent IAB certified, I love to throw that in, podcast advertising, attribution, analytics, and verification company and provider.
So you do a quarterly performance benchmarks report. What were the highlights of it for the last quarter of 2023?
Yeah, so some interesting things we saw here, you know, primarily, and I think one of the important things to call out is, you know, there's been a lot of discussion around some of the iOS 17 updates.
And, you know, looking at visitor rate, conversion rate, and some of those, you know, sort of, let's say, higher funnel metrics that are, you know, really critical to understanding, you know, not just like how things are performing, but where, where they're going, where there's room to optimize.
We saw some improvements there. And obviously, we can't pinpoint this, you know, 100% to one given thing. It's, you know, the ecosystem is evolving in general. But when it comes to visitor rate, you know, in Q3, we saw about a 0.47% visitor rate.
And again, visitor rate is really how many visitors that were exposed to an ad over the impressions that were delivered, you know, came to the site. So it was about 0.47% in Q3 of 2023. And since Q4, it actually went up to 0.56.
And again, with, you know, the iOS 17 updates removing, I believe it can be about 10 to 30% of these back catalog automated downloads, we saw an improvement, which I think is a real indicator that the industry is moving in the right direction.
We're standardizing, you know, what a download means. And again, we're actually able to attribute and we're seeing higher rates of genuine visitors going to people sites.
Yeah. So although the Apple podcasts changes have resulted in, you know, significantly fewer podcast downloads, we do know from your data release that they are being listened to, which is really helpful, actually.
Which is huge. Yeah. You know, and I think again, like as an industry working together, because this was the iOS 17 stuff was really a collaborative effort across the board, you know, outside of those download numbers being a little bit decreased, I think we expected and we were hoping to see better performance because these were genuine people listening to podcast episodes with ads that, you know, again, these ads had impacts and drove people to the site.
So again, a really strong sort of top of funnel metric that we were able to see. But we also saw James conversion rate increase as well. So not as high from that 0.47 to 56. But we saw it go in Q3 from 0.24% to 0.27%.
So not only are we driving more genuine people to site and we're driving them to site at a better rate, but we're also converting them at a higher rate as well, which again, it's just, you know, one step after another, you know, to continue driving and improving out the impact of podcast ads.
So podcast advertising is working better, which is always a good thing to know.
Pre rolls and mid rolls and post rolls. I know you don't call them that anymore because it's not always very clear what's a pre roll and what's a mid roll. But which of those sorts of things work better?
Does it work better the further the further in you are to a podcast or the or, you know, as close you are to the start of the podcast?
Does that work best?
Yeah, so again, we saw that what we call the first group, which typically is a mid roll because, you know, pre roll, mid roll and post roll.
I mean, everybody has different terms for how they categorize them.
So we look at it as those ad groups. And, you know, in Q3, we saw the first group really outperform the second group in the third group.
And this quarter, it still was, you know, the highest performer, but by a much lesser degree, which was really, really interesting. It's, you know, to the point that, you know, we almost can't make the definitive conclusion that placement one or that first group, you know, outperforms the others,
which I think, again, speaks to a lot of different things.
But, you know, add creative is becoming an important topic and people are really optimizing for that, especially if they can see some of those top of funnel metrics from a pixel based attribution provider, whether it's us or Spotify or you name it.
And so that was interesting because, again, we saw that it's still, you know, was sort of the leading performer, but it was it was much less of a degree when it came to its performance compared to the other placements.
Yeah, which is really useful to learn. And actually, you know, so so mid rolls and pre rolls, or at least the first and the second placements seem to be very, very close now in terms of in terms of how well they perform.
Very, very close.
Two other things that I'm interested in, one of them is host read versus well, presenter read or pre recorded ads. I always find it complicated because, again, our industry hasn't yet worked out exactly what we want to call things.
But host read, i.e. a live read versus a pre recorded read, which some people call a presenter read, which I find very confusing.
What works better in terms of that? I mean, I guess host read ads, live reads work the best, right?
Yes. And that is what we found. And we actually saw the percentage of performance where those host read ads were used actually increased.
So in Q3, it was almost a 50 50 split, 44 percent that were not host read. They sort of performed worse and then 52 percent of all of the ads performed better and they were host read.
And we actually saw that switch. So, you know, answering the question is host read better in Q4, about 67 percent of all the ads that we looked at, you know, comparing both host read and producer read, they performed.
So we did see that uptick. And I think, you know, the interesting sort of next step to break that down a little bit more is are we seeing more host read?
Are we seeing less host read? And we obviously take those things into account when we're looking at this data.
But I think that understanding the impact of what, you know, a host read ad and that influencer, you know, that is a podcast host talking about a brand and how it can be easier to convince people to purchase when they hear it from that third party.
You know, we're continuing to see really outperform. Yeah, which is really good. And ad length, the longer the ad, the better it works, kind of up to a point. Right.
Yes, yes. So this one was tricky. And we used what was called like a correlation coefficient analysis.
And so it's basically a way to compare or measure two variables across a certain data set. And so we saw that the ad length had a zero point eight percent or a zero point eight.
It's basically a number correlation between the length and the visitor, which in layman's terms basically means as ad length increases, visitor rate also increases.
And what we also saw more interestingly was that on average reads that are two plus minutes long, one hundred and twenty seconds plus actually outperformed anything that was 60 seconds or less by about 20 percent.
So, you know, the longer the ad read, we are seeing a direct correlation to that improving performance.
And I think, again, that speaks to a lot of different things. But, yeah, there is a strong direct correlation between the length and then how well you can drive visitors to site.
Yeah. And I guess it's you know, if you're talking for more than two minutes about a particular product, you're giving more and more reasons why somebody should go and have a look at the website.
And so therefore, actually, you know, it's it's it's it's just because you can give more reasons, I guess. Is that right?
Yeah. And I think, you know, a lot of it is exactly that. But, you know, we'll see ad lengths that again are above those two minutes.
Sometimes we saw the one hundred and five seconds spot actually have the greatest correlation to increasing visitors to site.
And people don't sell or publishers don't sell one hundred and five seconds spots. Right.
So I think it really speaks to the fact that exactly what you said, you know, these hosts are or their pre-produced hosts are talking about the brand and the product.
They're sharing their personal stories. You know, they're going really above and beyond just whatever that script.
So those talking points were because they personally resonated with that product.
Well, it's a great report. And I know that it comes out every quarter.
There's quite a lot of detail in there. And it's sometimes can be quite complicated for somebody that's not embedded in this kind of stuff to fully understand.
I'll be honest. But where but where can we find the report and learn a little bit more?
Yeah. So all you have to do is go to Podscribe.com.
We've got an announcement banner on there. It's pretty hard to miss. And you'll be directed to basically a button that allows you to view it.
All we ask is that you enter your email and you'll be able to view and download the report right there.
So, yeah, Podscribe.com. Super simple. And like you said, we'll be putting these out every quarter.
We're continuing to improve them not only from an analysis perspective, as we're looking at more data and taking into consideration what both buyers and sellers are looking to have answered.
But we're also adding in new things. So this quarter, we added in some more details about how podcasts versus streaming performed and what are the top performing show genres.
So we're always interested in improving these. And we encourage everybody to drop us a note if they have anything that they'd like specifically to be analyzed or to look at.
But yeah, they've been really, really great so far and I think are helping sort of just push really how podcast advertising is performing and helping more buyers get into the space.
Well, it's super useful stuff. Amelia, thank you so much for your time today.
Of course.