Day 49: Paid Ads

Today, we're going to talk about paid ads and how you can use them to drive traffic to your podcast.

Steps for Skill Mastery:

1. Start using paid ads

Step 1: Start Using Paid Ads

Another option to get the word out about your podcast is paid advertisements on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Spotify, Pinterest, Reddit, and 3rd party podcast apps.

Let me break these down for you.

Let’s start with the most common: Facebook and Instagram

On these platforms you have one big advantage over other platforms in that your targeting (who sees your ad) can be really dialed in. The downside is that your ability to attribute someone clicking on the ad to actually subscribing to the podcast is really challenging. Charitable and some others are working to crack this attribution problem with products like their SmartAds tool. I suspect we will see much more of this coming out over the next months/years and it being more geared towards the everyday podcaster.

Here are some resources for getting started on Facebook.

Next up: Spotify Ads

Did you know that you can run audio ads on Spotify? Well, you can but they are expensive and not very effective in our experience. The click-through rate is quite low relative to Facebook ads but not nearly expensive. If you run Spotify ads, one tip would be to have your CTA in the first 5 seconds of the ad because if people hear the CTA at the end then they will not have time to take action and click on the CTA button.

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Next up: 3rd Party Podcast App

You know the banner ads that you see on most websites promoting things. Believe it or not, people click on those. Various podcast apps have utilized this same strategy as the monetization method for their apps.

Some of those apps are Overcast and Castro.

Depending on the category of your podcast, such as business or technology, these ads can get pretty expensive on Overcast.  You will be paying $10+ per subscriber/follower in several of the categories, which makes it unsustainable for small shows. In our experience, the numbers they show as estimates are pretty close to what you will actually get.

Castro is a little easier for smaller shows to get into since the price point is lower for their “inbox ads”

Like Overcast, we’ve found their projections to be pretty accurate but a little bit cheaper. Their audience tends to be the 30-something techie guy so keep that in mind. I wouldn’t run ads on here if your audience is in the Pre-K niche.

There are other forms of paid advertising in the podcast world called Episode Drops. It’s where you’ll release an episode of your podcast on someone else’s. This exposes you to a new audience and since they are already listening to a show, it makes for a low friction option since they already are in their podcast app.

This is just skimming the surface on the world of ads in podcasting. If you want to learn more, you should subscribe to the Sounds Profitable newsletter. He dives DEEP into the world of podcasting adtech.

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Activity: Start Using Paid Ads

If you have extra money for paid advertisement, try running a few ads on the different platforms to see if they work well for you.

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Although this will help you get subscribers, it is only sustainable if you have money also coming in from your podcast. So we will cover that next!

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.