Perhaps more than any other marketing channel, podcast
attribution has the ability to get really dark, really quickly.
When we say “dark,” we’re talking about the lack of clarity
and information that often plagues ecommerce marketing teams—especially
as they try to string together a complete picture of how a
consumer goes from hearing an ad read for a product on their
favorite podcast to actually making a purchase.
Historically, this has required a little bit of guesswork and a lot
of extrapolation from direct attribution approaches like tracking
promo code redemption, UTMs, and pixels. But these methods aren’t a
perfect fit for audio-first marketing channels where
a large portion of the consideration process can happen
offline, and where digital attribution doesn’t capture
all the possible customer-reported sources of influence
on a purchase.
Here’s how podcast advertising agency
ADOPTER Media
uses
direct-from-consumer,
zero party
data—captured in post-purchase
“How did you hear about us?” surveys—to take a step into the
light and get a better view of just how much podcast advertising
is actually impacting their clients’ revenue.
When it comes to tackling podcast attribution,
Adam McNeil has been around the block a few times.
As part of the marketing team at Füm, he used Fairing
post-purchase survey insights to uncover grassroots customer
growth via organic podcast mentions—which led to a 25x
increase in podcast spend that ultimately revived Füm’s business.
McNeil now works on the agency side as the VP of Marketing for
ADOPTER Media, where he manages podcast advertising for Fairing
customers like Blissy, Rhone, and other successful
DTC brands—and continues to deploy post-purchase surveys in
Fairing as part of his holistic attribution strategy.
“Podcast advertising is so difficult because attribution is so
difficult,” said McNeil. “It’s this weird mix of being both
digital and offline, being completely measurable in some aspects
and not measurable at all in others. Customer surveys are really
the best ways we’ve found to fill that gap where digital
attribution falls short.”
Here’s how McNeil gets the most out of Fairing for his client companies:
Fairing’s ease-of-use, seamless connection into the Shopify
post-purchase flow, and high response rates make it easier
than ever to simply ask your customers how they found you.
For McNeil, Fairing’s straightforwardness and lack of
complexity is a pro, not a con.
“Every marketer wants everything to feel super complicated,
so they can have some sense that they’re doing this great
job nobody else can do, maybe feed their ego a bit?” said
McNeil. “This doesn't have to be complicated.”
In addition to the bread-and-butter “How did you hear about us?”
question, McNeil’s clients (especially those who devote a large
percentage of their overall marketing budget on podcasts or
creators) have found success incorporating questions like
“What’s your favorite podcast?” or “Which podcasts do you
listen to?” into their
Question Stream.
Next, McNeil takes the zero party data Fairing collects from
customers and reconciles it against all the other attribution
work these brands do. This helps him see where certain podcast
shows are having an outsized impact on sales that traditional
digital attribution tools are attributing to something else entirely.
By surveying his customers directly in Fairing, Adam also uncovers
which “digital breadcrumbs” in attribution tools are actually red
herrings that brands can safely ignore. For example, if a customer
hears about a product on multiple podcasts, but forgets to use a
coupon code, forgets your custom URL and makes it to your site from
a Google Search—was “organic search” really responsible for the sale?
Once he’s validated his attribution data with customer
survey responses, McNeil calculates a “lift multiplier”
to identify both how much his client should be spending
on podcasts as a channel based on more accurate CPAs, and
where they should be spending on the show-level based on
campaign performance.
Simply put, a podcast multiplier (or any attribution multiplier,
for that matter), is the difference in directly attributable
purchases (through tracking links or coupon codes) and indirectly
attributable purchases (post-purchase survey data). For example,
if 10% of purchases used a podcast coupon code, but 20% of survey
respondents heard about the brand through a podcast, the brand’s
podcast multiplier should be 2.0x. For a statistically significant
sample size, this multiplier can then be applied to the podcast
advertising campaign’s metrics.
(Make sure to check out our
full article here for a complete
methodology calculating your multiplier.)
How Fairing Helps Ad Agencies Deliver Better Client Experiences
Fairing doesn’t just help ecommerce companies better track the
performance of their campaigns so they can sell products more
efficiently. It helps their agency partners, too.
McNeil identified three distinct ways that running post-purchase
surveys on Fairing has enabled him to be a more impactful agency
partner to his clients—and deliver better podcast advertising
performance on a consistent basis:
Stacking Wins Quickly Through the Power of Real-Time,
Direct-from-Customer Data
Hesitancy, uncertainty, and misinformation around where your
customers are coming from is a slow death for online businesses.
It can also lead to tension in the agency-client relationship
when promised results aren’t showing up fast enough.
For brands, waiting until a quarterly email survey to gather
direct-from-consumer data could mean that their customers may
have entirely forgotten where they heard about you by then,
or misremembered critical touchpoints that motivated them to buy
Because the Fairing Question Stream is appended right at the
post-checkout experience in Shopify, brands and agencies alike
are able to move quickly with real-time insights. For McNeil,
that ability to provide strategic recommendations and ship
campaign optimizations in hours or days instead of weeks and
months is critical to maintaining satisfied clients.
Identifying Winning Podcasts and Growing Cult
Followings—Then Striking While the Iron is Hot
McNeil not only values Fairing for the insights it provides for
tracking lift on planned campaigns, but for the way it’s able
to uncover unpaid mentions, potentially lucrative new partnership
opportunities, and burgeoning fandoms that his clients would
otherwise have zero knowledge of.
“People will message and leave notes in their post-purchase survey
of this show and that show they heard about us on, and it might not
even be a show we even advertised on,” said McNeil. “But we can
go hunt down that soundbite and reach out to that show for paid
advertisement, because we already know there’s at least some
show-audience fit in place. It’s worked out well whenever
we’ve done that.
McNeil would know—as VP of Marketing at Füm, the brand went viral
thanks to a mention on The Joe Rogan Experience, something they
would not have known about if not for Fairing.
“You get these little anecdotal pieces of content that are so
brilliant, and you can pull so much anecdotal data out of
Fairing to make better buys and be better influenced into
pushing in the right direction. It's like you can start to
see where your audiences are collectivizing under a banner of
different podcasts or content creators.”
Helping the Client Build Trust in Your Agency
McNeil has a hard time imagining he’d ever go back to not
utilizing post-purchase surveys with podcasting ads going forward.
Leave The Dark Ages of Podcast Attribution Behind
Don’t let traditional digital attribution tools leave
you in the dark about your podcast advertising performance.
By using Fairing to ask your customers what’s working, where
it’s working, and why it’s working, marketing teams and the
agencies that support them can properly invest in one of the
top advertising channels in recent years.