What Are Digital Audio Ad KPIs and Benchmarks?

What are the digital audio advertising benchmarks? And how do you know your campaign is performing well? In this article we explore the basics to get you achieving success!

All digital audio advertising, be it podcast, music, digital radio, etc. will support your marketing goals. At both upper and lower funnel levels. How? Well, it’s an uncluttered space that’s intimate in nature and has phenomenal targeting capabilities and expansive reach.

To effectively achieve your goal and optimise the audio campaign for success you need to get to know all the key audio advertising metrics. The KPIs to work with and the benchmarks you’re looking to achieve.

What are the key digital audio advertising metrics?

• Audio Reach: The reach metric is the number of unique listeners who heard your ad.
• Listen Through Rate: The percentage of listeners that heard your audio ads, in full. Audio Listen Through Rate (LTR) is calculated by dividing impressions by the number of completions. By nature a high LTR is standard.
• Audio Impressions: No surprise here. Audio ad impressions are the number of times your ad is heard in total.
• Completion Rate: Also refereed to as 100% completed metric. Used in the LTR calculation, this represents the number of times your ad was heard in its entirety.
• Click Through Rate: Yes even in audio we have a CTR! This is used for audio ads with companion banners. As you’d expect CTR is the number of clicks your banner got divided by the number of impressions.

Using some of these metrics to form your audio KPIs will give you deep insights and evidence you’ve achieved your goal.

Reach Campaign: KPI’s and benchmarks

If you are planning a reach campaign, we suggest these metrics and targets:

• Reach and Impressions: You want to aim for a low ratio between impressions and reach. A good reach campaign will have your ad heard between 1- 3 times for each listener. To do this you will want to be broad with your targeting.
• Listen Through Rate: Adding LTR to your KPIs will quantify EFFECTIVE reach. We like to work with a benchmark of 94%. To get this you will need to ensure your ad has high-quality audio quality and you are targeting isn’t too broad.

Awareness Campaigns: KPI’s and benchmarks

For a quality awareness campaign, we suggest these metrics and targets:

• Reach and Impressions: For awareness, you’ll want to be louder than you are for a reach campaign. Aim to be heard by each listener 3-5 times during the campaign period. We suggest narrowing your target audience as much as possible to achieve this.
• Completion Rate:  Ads played right through have EFFECTIVELY been heard by your customers (a few times too!). We like an audio completion rate to be high, our benchmark is 94%.

Conversion Campaigns: KPI’s and benchmarks

Want to convert listeners and driven action? We suggest these metrics and targets:

• CTR: Audio click-through-rate will only apply if you are using banners to accompany your audio campaign. A good CTR benchmark is between 0.20% – 0.25%. Increase the chances of a click by including the call to action in your audio ad.

The issue with CTR and Digital Audio

Behaviour research tells us when it comes to audio, action often comes later and on a different device. Therefore CTR will not give you the full conversion picture. It will tell you something, just not everything. So to further quantify digital audio conversions we use other tools:

• Post listener surveys: Third-party questionnaires will measure brand recall and purchase intent with those who heard the ad and those that didn’t.
• Audio Ad Attribution: We use audio ad attribution tech to accurately attribute audio campaigns to purchases as well as the path to conversion. We do this with cross-device audio ad tracking with attribution reporting on the same platform. With our setup, you can accurately measure return on ad spend with data for actions such as app downloads, website visits, sign-ups, add to cart, and purchase confirmations.

In addition to the above, internally you can observe uplifts to sales, visitors, and leads, or use promo codes and vanity URLs. Calling out unique codes or URLs within the ad will segment audio conversions.

Digital Audio ad results

Audio advertising can absolutely support both upper and lower funnel marketing goals:

• Brand lift – Nielsen Media Lab data shows audio ads have a 24% higher recall rate than traditional display ads
• Engagement – Midroll Media data shows 60% of podcast listeners made a purchase after listening to an audio ad.
• Conversions – A 2021 audio performance study found that on average e-commerce brands were generating 6 incremental conversions for every 1,000 impressions.

Using the right KPI’s and knowing what the benchmarks are, is the first step to realising the power of audio!

Want to learn more?

We have some great marketing campaign guides – check them out here:

• Awareness Campaigns
• Customer Acquisition Campaigns
• Customer Retention Campaigns
• Thought Leadership Campaigns
• Geographic Campaigns

We shared the above insights, plus how to optimise campaigns if you aren’t achieving the results with Communicate Online. Check our featured article here.

We have an audio ad manager, so businesses of any size can easily start utilising audio. Visit admanager.fm