Analysis of 834 Million Podcast Impressions in the Last 36 Months Revealed that Podcast Lift Rates are up to 30X Higher than Other Channels

Leading data science company Claritas has released a new report entitled “Podcast Campaign Lift: A Guide to Accurately Analyzing Campaign Conversion Rates.” The report provides new insight into the return on investment (ROI) provided by podcast campaigns. It also shares how marketers can more accurately measure ROI on any marketing campaign.

The number of podcasts have doubled in recent years, growing from 500,000 to more than 1 million. And the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and eMarketer both project marketers will spend $1 billion on podcast advertising in 2021. But historically, marketers had no good way to track the effectiveness of those campaigns.

Lift Analysis: Digital Display, Print and Linear TV Average Around 2.6%.

That’s why Claritas leverages a unique methodology called “incremental lift analysis” that allows marketers to measure the effectiveness of previously hard-to-measure advertising channels such as podcasts. Using its proprietary lift methodology and analytics tools, Claritas set out to answer the question: “How well are podcast campaigns actually contributing to incremental engagements and/or conversions?”

To answer this question, Claritas analyzed 834 million podcast impressions that spanned across 158 campaigns over 36 months and multiple industries. The results were compelling: Lift rates in many key industries – including automotive, insurance, consumer goods, telecommunications and retail – ranged from 23.5% to 79%. That’s up to 30 times higher than the average lift rates for non-podcast channels such as digital display, print and linear TV, which average around 2.6%.

The research for the report was conducted in partnership with Entercom, one of the country’s top media companies and a leading creator, distributor and seller of top-rated podcast content. Entercom is leveraging Claritas’ industry-leading identity graph – which encompasses a proprietary data set of over 255 million consumers across over 600 million devices and 10,000+ demographic and behavioral insights – to compare the buying behaviors of those households that listened to the podcast to those of similar non-listening audiences.

This unique methodology isolates and measures specific marketing campaigns with never-before-available precision, allowing marketers to optimize campaigns as they run to maximize their return on investment.

Currently, Claritas is offering a single-source suite of solutions that give marketers the ability to identify their ideal audiences, deliver multichannel marketing engagements with precision and leverage measurement tools to optimize their media spend across online and offline channels and thus drive better marketing ROI.