The Bonfire of the Vanity URLs

You hear them on every podcast, but host-read Vanity URLs don’t deliver the level of attribution intelligence advertisers need. Fortunately, there’s a better way.

An effective tool can measure the wrong thing. SAT used to stand for Scholastic Aptitude Test, but they stopped saying that because, it turns out, the test didn’t measure scholastic aptitude. When it comes to audio advertising attribution, the most common tool advertisers use to measure performance is the Vanity URL—special URLs that hosts read out so that listeners can get a promotion tied to the show.

I’m sure you’re already way ahead of me.

Vanity URLs deliver intelligence to advertisers, but not much intelligence because listeners generally aren’t good at following directions: they don’t take the precise actions that advertisers want them to take, even when presented with an incentive for doing so. A wealth of attribution intelligence gets lost at every step between when a host reads out a Vanity URL and when a listener takes (or tries to take) action.

For example, on an episode of the true crime podcast Morbid from Wondery released on March 13, 2023, co-host Alaina Urquhart read an ad for Care/of, the personalized vitamins service, that offered 50% off a customer’s first order. The Vanity URL was “takecareof.com/morbid50”. If a listener typed that into a browser, success! It worked.

However, the hosts did not mention that the URL was case sensitive. If a listener typed “takecareof.com/Morbid50” with a capital M, it went to an “Ooops! You’ve got a broken link” page. The same thing happened if the listener typed “takecareof.com/morbid” or “takecareof.com/Morbid”, forgetting the 50.

Vanity URLs are prone to this kind of problem.

Fortunately, there is a better way for advertisers to determine what works for their campaigns, a way that allows brands to scale up their audio programs with an increased degree of confidence in the results, yielding better business outcomes.

It’s time to toss Vanity URLs onto a bonfire.

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Two-Tiered Customer Surveys Increase Attribution Visibility

A more powerful way to identify the shows where audio ads perform well is to add a two-tiered survey into the new customer clickstream on the advertiser website.

The first tier of the survey is conventional: it asks the new customer How Did You Hear About Us? (HDYHAU). The options include—but aren’t limited to—the shows where the advertiser bought media. If the customer selects “Podcast,” then the survey’s second tier asks about the specific podcast where the new customer heard the ad.

The two-tiered survey isn’t a new invention. However, the two-tiered survey method can be made much better by adding a predictive text layer of technology.

According to podcastindustryinsights.com, there are nearly four million podcasts. And according to Magellan AI, 7,000 of those podcasts contain ads. Whether it’s 7K or even just 100, asking survey respondents to scroll through a miles-long list isn’t practical. Instead, by pre-populated a database with all the available show title options—both shows that the brand advertised on and other shows, because if a listener thinks they heard an ad on Joe Rogan (even if the brand’s ad doesn’t appear there), that’s still important information. The listener types in the first few letters of the show, and then predictive text pops up the most likely name of the show where the listener heard the ad.

The results are phenomenal. By adding these Surveys, it’s estimated that it increased visibility into what shows are working for advertisers by over a whopping 700%! Remember: this isn’t an increase in sales: it’s an increase in intelligence: more insight into where ads are performing best so that the client can double down and accelerate growth.

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Case Study: Bambee    

Bambee is a Business to Business (B2B) Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that’s building HR infrastructure for the small business economy. Bambee was the first advertiser to test-drive this new attribution measurement technique. Here’s how founder/CEO Allan Jones described the results:

The biggest win was that just about half of the people who told us they heard us on radio, podcast, or a different audio channel told us on what show they heard our ad. We went from having something like a 1% attribution rate (where we had to extrapolate out to 100% to make predictions about what shows were working) to working with half of the population telling us where they heard about us. That’s a big win across the board and a game changer for how Bambee tracks show level performance within our audio plan.

As digital tracking becomes more complicated with the coming death of third-party cookies and new privacy legislation popping up all over, a form of attribution that does not require tracking is a powerful new tool. Advertisers can find out what media is working for them simply by posing a polite question: How Did You Hear About Us?

BONUS READ – Jon Miller, CMO at Demandbase chats about the evolution of ABM in this webchat with MarTechSeries: