Host-Read Ads 4

Ad tech is fairly new to podcasts and has only been around for a few years. We are currently using Podisights, and I wanted to give an overview of how it works and why we offer it to our partners at TWiT.

Podsights has pixels in all of our podcast audio feeds, and as we sign partners, we offer it to help show attribution throughout their campaign. For it to work, our partners need to place a Podsights pixel on their website, and it needs to be ROW to work. Podsights can only track our audio feeds, and they must reject downloads outside of the US from cell towers and business IPs. They only track US household IP addresses. They then show a gross-up if they could count everything they ingested. They cannot count YouTube, Spotify, or any podcatcher without an API, and they do not ingest our video feeds. Therefore we provide an additional gross-up to count ALL downloads that we report to our partners.

Podsights is important to use at TWiT because our audience is sophisticated and tech-savvy - they don't visit landing pages - they google our partner names, and only those super dedicated will remember to go to our custom landing page if they make a purchase. We know this because we ask our audience in our annual survey reaching 10K fans, and most do not bother with landing pages or offer codes. Since brands want to gauge traction from podcast campaigns, adding Podsights gives them more insights into how many fans we send to their website.

Podsights works by tracking the IP address when an episode is downloaded with a partner's ad read in it. They then track that IP address for 60 days to see if it visits our partners website. We require our partners to place the pixel run of website to capture all of the traffic we send to it. This way, when our fans google the partners name, they can see the traffic we sent to their website.

Since privacy is a HUGE concern with our fans, the only thing a partner sees is the traction to their website, meaning nothing about the IP address is being shared - only if someone downloaded an episode with their ad in it and went to their website. That's it. We use ad tech because we know that we send 3x more traffic to partners websites than landing page visits on direct response campaigns, and it's 6-7x greater on branding campaigns. And also, because our network name is the same as our biggest show on our network, several fans will visit the TWiT landing page, and without Podsights, you can't be sure which shows are driving the most traffic. We know this because our fans have told us they use TWiT by default.

Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/host-read-ads