New research from Podscribe reveals that podcast ad campaigns with high-quality reads achieve over 50% better performance than lower-scored advertisements, while placement timing and ad length emerge as critical factors in campaign success.

The “Q3 2024 Performance Benchmarks” report – analyzing data from 63,000 podcast campaigns and over 200 advertisers – finds that ads scoring 7-10 on Podscribe’s quality scale consistently outperform those scoring 1-6. Top-performing ads feature strong personal endorsements and clear listener benefits.

Mid-roll placements demonstrate superior performance, achieving a 0.35% visitor rate compared to 0.29% for pre-roll and 0.23% for post-roll positions. However, the research indicates that earlier mid-roll placements within episodes perform better than later ones, with conversion rates declining after the third ad in a group.

Source: Podscribe

Podcast Advertising Potential

The study introduces the industry’s first podcast reach curve, showing that 99% of advertisers reach only one-quarter of potential podcast listeners. According to Podscribe, reaching all 130 million U.S. monthly podcast listeners requires more than 1 billion impressions per month.

Source: Podscribe

Episodic buys – ads placed in a single episode for at least 30 days after publication – demonstrate stronger performance metrics than impression-based campaigns across multiple episodes. Episodic buys achieve a 0.40% visitor rate compared to 0.22% for impression-based placements and a 0.024% purchase rate versus 0.011%.

Length emerges as a significant factor, with ads running 60 seconds or longer consistently showing better conversion rates. The data indicates that longer reads maintain effectiveness for both impressions and episodic buys, with 90-second spots achieving among the highest performance metrics.

The research also examines ad stacking and frequency, finding that double-spotted and stacked advertisements perform 25% and 33% worse than single placements. The report defines stacked ads as those with at least three other advertisements immediately preceding them.

Source: Podscribe

Industry-Specific Data 

Health & fitness, spirituality, and education podcasts drive the highest visitor rates, while retail, telecommunications, and fashion retail achieve the most efficient purchase rates. Fashion retail maintains strong performance across metrics, leading in cost-per-acquisition (CPA) efficiency alongside retail and gambling categories.

The report introduces CPA as a new efficiency metric, with a median of $149 across all industries. However, CPA varies significantly by sector, ranging from $20 for online retailers to $1,403 for high-end furnishings.

Host-read advertisements show 1.3 times higher performance than producer-read spots, though their higher production costs result in similar CPA rates ($82 for host-read versus $83 for producer-read).

The study also examines simulcast campaigns, finding that 75% of advertisers now run a combined podcast and YouTube campaigns. Within these simulcast efforts, YouTube accounts for approximately two-thirds of impressions.

The research methodology focuses on U.S. campaigns with over 2,500 impressions, analyzing performance across visitor rates, purchase rates, and cost efficiency metrics. Podscribe notes that future reports will include separate results for international advertisers.

Get the full report here.