Did you know that incremental lift is one of the most valuable metrics in advertising? It refers to the increase in sales, conversions, or other key performance indicators (KPIs) that result from a specific marketing effort.
For example, if a company pays for an ad at the beginning of a podcast episode to drive traffic to a website and someone visits their website after listening to it. The incremental lift — or incrementality — in this context is the website visit that resulted from the ad placement in the podcast episode.
There’s much more to incremental lift in audio advertising, though. Learn more about this topic below and how Backtracks can help measure incrementality in your audio and podcasting campaigns.
What Is Incremental Lift?
Incremental lift is the increase in performance or results above native demand — the actions consumers take without exposure to a marketing effort (e.g., a commercial). Using the example above, the ad in the podcast represents incremental lift because it generated a website visit that wouldn’t have happened without the ad. You can attribute the website visit to a specific marketing effort — placing an ad at the right part of the podcast episode. That means spending money on ad placement was worth the investment!
Tip: You can use research on incrementality in advertising from academic and advertising industry publications to understand the incremental value of views, conversions, and other metrics. Doing so will help you measure incremental lift in your campaigns.
Incremental lift is essential to audio and podcast advertising for the following reasons:
- It helps advertisers optimize ad campaigns with actualized incrementality data, letting them assess what is and is not working.
- It provides insights into audience segments and responses to ad campaigns. For example, you can learn which audiences are more influenced by ads and use this information to spend ad dollars more effectively.
- It provides a direct, data-driven approach to proving the effectiveness of ad campaigns.
- It helps you learn which targeting criteria are the most effective when converting customers during ad campaigns.
- It can help you prove the value of your advertising and marketing to the C-suite. By attributing specific actions to specific marketing efforts, you can demonstrate the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Once you learn about incrementality, you can discover the power of audio and podcast advertising.
How to Measure Incrementality
You can measure and test incrementality in ad campaigns using the following steps:
- Segment an audience into a control group and an exposed or test group.
- Test native demand in the control group and see how many audience members perform an action, such as visiting a website organically.
- Determine which variables — such as placing an audio ad — result in your test group performing an action, such as visiting a website inorganically. You can also ascertain which elements of your ad spend lead to direct actions from the test group.
The results of this study will show you the difference between organic behavior and influenced behavior, allowing you to measure the direct impact of marketing actions and ad spending on your audience.
Measuring incrementality in this way provides a clearer view of the many variables that directly impact conversions, visits, and other metrics in advertising campaigns. You can optimize future campaigns with metrics generated from your incrementality measurements.
Also, share your metrics with team members and executives so that everyone knows which advertising methods are the most effective!
Incremental Lift in Audio Advertising
Incremental lift analysis can provide valuable insights into your audio and podcast advertising campaigns. Using the above incrementality test, you can split listeners into a control group and a test group and measure the effectiveness of your advertising on podcasts and music streaming platforms. You will learn how audio ads impact your test group and which ones encourage them to perform specific actions.
You might want to split audio and podcast listeners into control and test groups and evaluate the effectiveness of different ad versions or formats. For example, you can play one version of an audio advertisement to a test group listening to a podcast and a second version of the ad to a different test group listening to the same podcast. Doing this will determine which ad version results in the most successful outcomes. You can then use the most successful version of the ad to target all podcast listeners.
If all of this sounds complicated, there is another option. You can use an audio and podcast analytics platform, like Backtracks, to help you with lift analysis.
What That Means for Audio and Podcasting
Measuring incremental lift is a game changer for audio and podcast marketing, which is generally behind other mediums regarding campaign measurement. Incrementality allows for deeper insights into the effectiveness of podcast advertising using hard data, making it easier to allocate ad spend and create more successful campaigns. You can use these insights to measure the responses of different segments to audio and podcast ads and connect with diverse audiences.
Explore Backtracks Today!
Backtracks is the world’s most advanced audio and podcast analytics and advertising platform, allowing you to track listener engagement and place advertisements in audio offerings. The platform can pull the following overlap reports to help you track key performance indicators across ad campaigns:
- Use pixels to track clicks and other actions audiences take when listening to apps, podcasts, and music streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. Backtracks’ reports improve audio attribution and help you explore conversion events.
- Use lift studies to measure increases in clicks, website visits, and other actions that result from marketing and advertising efforts. Backtracks’ lift studies and reports help you increase brand awareness, figure out purchase intent, boost brand loyalty, and learn the actions audiences take in response to your ads.
With Backtracks, you can get to know your audience and improve audio advertising success. Partner with Backtracks today!
