Did you know that the average US adult spends 1 hour and 24 minutes daily listening to digital audio? And that’s just the average person. A more active listener might spend nearly 2 hours per day enjoying their favorite audio content, including podcasts, streaming services, or streaming radio.
Despite making up such a significant part of media time among US adults, digital audio advertising only accounts for about 2.4% of total advertising spend. Considering that 64% of consumers pay full attention to podcast ads and 95% of regular listeners take action after hearing one, digital audio is, without a doubt, one of the most underutilized ad channels.
So why might this be?
Attribution for digital audio has historically been challenging, making RoAS difficult to prove and campaigns difficult to optimize. However, digital audio advertising platforms like GroundTruth no longer have such limitations. Now that digital audio can be directly correlated to real business results, like sales increases and foot traffic, we can discover some of the best ways to use digital audio as an ad channel. In fact, a leading food brand, Gary’s QuickSteak, recently completed a campaign that put the power of digital audio on full display.
Using Audio Ads to Drive Sales: A Few Lessons from Gary’s QuickSteak
Through a multichannel campaign leveraging CTV, mobile, and digital audio, Gary’s QuickSteak drove almost 23,000 visitors to grocery stores, resulting in a 30% sales lift. Here are a few key takeaways from the runaway success of Gary’s QuickSteak’s ad campaigns.
Lesson 1: Audio augments multichannel campaigns
Reaching their customers at multiple touch points was at the heart of the Gary QuickSteak campaign. In past campaigns, the brand leveraged GroundTruth CTV and Mobile channels together, achieving a 20% sales lift during campaign flights. After adding Digital Audio with GroundTruth, Gary’s QuickSteak experienced a whopping 30% sales lift. That’s a 50% higher sales lift than the campaign that didn’t use digital audio. By adding Digital Audio as an additional touch point, the brand wasn’t just reaching their audience on an extra channel; they were reaching their audience in a highly engaged and favorable environment.
Lesson 2: Be sure to attribute in-store visits correctly
Because Gary’s QuickSteak campaign was a complex, multi-touch journey across different channels, ensuring that visits were properly attributed to the correct ads was critical. Using GroundTruth’s Blueprint technology, Gary’s QuickSteak was able to correlate a served ad directly to visits to one of the designated Walmart or Sam’s Club locations.
With GroundTruth, you can track and attribute visits, whether they’re driven by CTV, Mobile, or even Digital Audio Ads. Audio advertising’s biggest weakness has always been the lack of visibility into the real, measurable results of a given campaign. Using our Blueprint technology, GroundTruth’s platform provides deterministic, one-to-one audio ad attribution that verifies when an individual listener visits a specific location after listening to an ad, unlocking the value of this underused channel.
Lesson 3: Target your audio ads to the right audience
Digital Audio offers a significantly more targeted approach than traditional, but not all digital audio advertising platforms are equal. With GroundTruth, Gary’s QuickSteak was able to create, launch, and measure their audio ad campaign AND choose between podcasts or streaming audio, topics and genres, ad position, location, and demographic data. Using GroundTruth’s in-depth reporting suite, they gained insight into which podcasts or publishers their ads ran on, listen-through rates, and most importantly, in-store visits. In addition to targeted CTV and mobile, Gary’s QuickSteak used digital audio advertising to target podcasts and streaming music, reaching active listeners within the Oklahoma DMA.
To Sum It All Up…
With the right tools, digital audio advertising presents a huge opportunity for advertisers who want to get the most out of every ad dollar spent. In two campaigns, Gary’s QuickSteak proved the value of digital audio advertising as a multiplier across multichannel campaigns.
Gary’s QuickSteak isn’t the only brand experiencing the benefits of multichannel campaigns augmented by audio. Other GroundTruth users, including a higher education institution, are currently running similar campaigns that use a blend of CTV, Mobile, and Digital Audio that yields incredible results. In the case of the higher education institution, Digital Audio is leading the rest of the channels as the primary driver of visits.
With GroundTruth Ads Manager, you can launch, measure, and optimize audio campaigns with one-to-one, deterministic foot traffic attribution and easy omnichannel integration. Ready to see how Audio ads can drive Real Business Results? Create an Ads Manager account today and launch your first campaign in minutes, or read more about our audio advertising platform.
