Streaming Audio Advertising Metrics: How to Measure Success

With 214M+ streaming listeners and averages of 4:49 hours per day spent with digital audio, streaming audio advertising can and should become a significant part of many marketing campaigns. But assembling an ad creative and pushing it live isn’t all there is to it. The magical, fun part comes with tracking and data analysis.

Let’s go through a few key reasons why audio measurement—accurate, relevant, insightful measurement—is important to your overall marketing program’s efforts. Then we’ll get into the good stuff: The metrics to consider tracking for your audio ad campaign and how to best go about it.

Why Measure the Success of Your Streaming Audio Ad?

If you want to hit the right notes as you manage an audio advertising campaign, you need to know if it works well with your audience. In fact, measuring your ads’ performance is not just beneficial—it’s crucial, and it can be a game-changer for your overall marketing strategy. Here’s how it can help.

Maximize ROI & ROAS

Perhaps the most important reason for measuring audio advertising campaign performance is to maximize your return on investment (ROI) or, more specifically, your return on ad spend (ROAS). For example, by tracking conversion rates and engagement levels across different audience segments, you can tweak your targeting to focus on the groups that are more likely to be involved with your ads. Or, you can monitor ad frequency in relation to audience behavior to maximize impact while avoiding ad saturation and fatigue that may hurt your campaign. These and other similar data-backed activities will allow you to make the most out of your streaming audio ad budget.

Optimize Campaign Performance

By measuring your audio advertising campaigns against industry benchmarks and your own past performance (both in streaming audio and through other marketing channels), you can get a crystal-clear view as to where there’s room for improvement. You’ll be able to make data-driven decisions to tweak any currently running campaigns to squeeze even more ROAS out. Use these findings to make informed decisions on future campaigns, and you’ll help to ensure your ad spend is driving real results.

Demonstrate Impact

Working in marketing and advertising always involves budgeting, from allocation, to optimization, to forecasting, and beyond. Measuring the performance of the streaming audio advertising channel can help streamline your next budgeting discussion. For example, it can help illustrate the channel’s value to your stakeholders, prove the effectiveness of your audio advertising strategy, and help you allocate spend for upcoming campaigns. Focusing on the right metrics and weaving them into a story with your larger business goals will help to highlight the audio advertising channel's value.

Understand Engagement

Measuring the performance of your campaign can help you recognize and appreciate how the audience interacts with your ads. This is where metrics such as listen-through rate (LTR) or audio completion rate come in handy. These insights will help you identify how compelling your ads are for the listener and whether some work better than others. With this knowledge, you can fine-tune your creative approach and, with the right adjustments, increase engagement and improve campaign results.

How to Measure Key Streaming Audio Advertising Metrics

We know the why, so now let’s move on to the how. Here are some of the best ways to gauge the metrics that matter most when advertising on streaming audio.

Creative Testing

Each streaming audio ad creative will resonate with its audience to some degree. But, to be able to get actionable insights into how effective your ads are, testing multiple audio creatives is important. Which script is driving engagement? Which voice actor is better at getting the message across? How does the number of brand mentions, the ad length, or musical inclusion factor in? These are some of the questions you’ll be able to answer with creative testing and measurement.

Brand Lift Study

Is your ad creative having a positive impact on your target audience? That’s where a brand lift study comes in. Essentially, when a creative goes live, data collection begins, split into two primary groups: a control group of those in your target audience eligible to hear the ads but haven’t yet, and a sample group of those who have heard your ad. When both groups are surveyed on awareness of your brand, favorability toward it, and other considerations, the difference that emerges between the two groups is the brand lift.

Location Analytics

For brick-and-mortar businesses, understanding whether (and by how much) audio ads are driving foot traffic can seem complicated. SiriusXM makes it easy for you to accurately attribute percentage increase of in-person visits with running or recently-run audio ad campaign creatives.

Conversions

Conversion is an important goal for every marketer, if not the primary one. After all, it signals the success of your advertising efforts and illustrates the impact of your audio ads on business outcomes. Some examples of successful conversions might include product purchases, in-store visits, website visits, contact form fills, or another designated action a listener takes after hearing your ad. Advertisers can track this metric from streaming audio ads in a couple of ways, for example, through unique promo codes or tracking pixels.

Sales Lift

A sales lift study measures business sales changes after an audio advertising campaign goes live. Usually, a sales lift study will compare baseline sales data to see whether it changed during or after the campaign. Similar to a brand lift study, it uses a control group and a sample group to separate the impact of the campaign from other factors.

Discover High-Impact Audio Advertising with Us

Working with SiriusXM Media, our advertisers can receive high-precision data for the most in-depth targeting and comprehensive information on campaign results. For example, Pandora’s audience data was measured to be 3.8x more accurate than the average publisher’s data. After all, conclusive insights bring you one step closer to wrapping up an effective campaign.

Ready to see how SiriusXM can help you with your next audio advertising campaign? Let’s talk.