Downloads Jumped 1600%! Too Good to Be True? – Testing Paid Ads, Part 2

By May 11th, 2025, we had grown our podcast to an average of 40 downloads per episode Within the first 24 hours, just two weeks later on May 25th, we hit 689 downloads on the new episode that we published that day.

That’s an increase of over 1600%. How did we do that? Well, we used paid podcast ads, paying to get your podcast in front of the right people and hoping they subscribe. Now, if you’ve been following us for a while, you’ll recall back in February of 2025, we published an episode after spending money on testing five different podcast promotion methods.

We outlined then what worked and what didn’t for us. So today I am here with the results of even more testing and further insights, and I’ll explain how we had that 1600% jump. This is Profits through podcasting where we help health-focused entrepreneurs generate leads and revenue for their businesses through podcasting.

I’m your host, Joel Oliver. Now before we get started, I do wanna mention the same thing that I said last time. Paying for podcast promotion isn’t necessarily the right move for everybody. It depends on your situation and your goals. So I will link to that previous episode in the show notes. If you want to hear a little more about that, I won’t go over it again today.

You can always get in touch with me to discuss it as well. And also, our next solo episode, I’m gonna be discussing if podcast growth is even the right strategy. For you right now, if it should be your priority right now. But for the rest of the episode, let’s assume that you have determined that yes, it does make sense for you to try to grow your podcast, try to do some paid promotion, and we’re gonna look at some helpful insights when it comes to paying to promote your podcast with these services.

The conclusion at the end of the other episode was that we had determined what worked well for us in that situation and what didn’t, and therefore I felt equipped with the data that I needed to do more of what worked and not do any more of what didn’t. Okay. I really didn’t need to look beyond that.

Just based on our budget, we didn’t need to do anything else. We had what worked. So what we found at that time did work really well for us was Overcast Ads. Overcast is a podcast listening and discovery app, not unlike Apple Podcasts or Spotify, but it has some unique features and reasons why people choose to use it.

With Overcast, you can purchase ads in various categories.

You are not limited to the category of your podcast. Prices vary being higher in the categories with higher demand, but once the category opens up, the price will reduce a little out of time until somebody buys it. So what I mean there about the categories is, let’s say that you have a business podcast.

You could actually buy an ad in the kids and family category to advertise your business podcast. And I’ll discuss more in here. Uh, Kind of refresher on why you might want to do that, but it’s unique in that sense because not all the other apps allow that kind of flexibility when choosing your categories.

So since that last episode, we had basically been running overcast ads almost nonstop. And interestingly, as I just touched upon, we did not use the obvious choice of category for us either business or health and fitness for our particular podcast, where you might think it fits in the best. We actually tested some of the lowest cost categories.

Those included fiction. Music and the kids and family category, and for whatever reason, these actually worked pretty well, even better than our initial test. In health and fitness, which I would obviously assume would be one of the best. We have a podcast about podcasting and marketing for health and wellness entrepreneurs.

Now it’s a bit of a niche. Of course, health and fitness is not the exact match because just ’cause someone’s out there listening to a podcast about how to eat well, doesn’t mean they have a business or a podcast or anything to do with what we’d be talking about. But in terms of just trying to pick from the categories available.

I would’ve thought that one would work pretty well, but it actually turned out that it didn’t perform as good as some of the other ones that seemingly are very unrelated. So your results might vary, but for us, these lower cost categories have actually worked quite well for advertising our podcast and have contributed quite heavily to the growth of our show.

A lot of the listenership has come through, overcast about half of all listens now, actually. Well, up until. We had this other big change, which I’ll get to later in this episode, but yeah, it was about half of all the listens were coming from Overcast every week, so whatever’s going on there, the ads seemed to work, and we were able to reach people who were initially interested in the podcast enough to click and then subscribe, and then stay scribed.

The campaigns that we ran on Overcast in the various categories have cost typically between 140 and 180 US dollars, and we get roughly a 2% conversion rate. So people who hit subscribe basically works out to about $8 per subscriber. So overall I’m quite happy with Overcast, and that’s why we kept it going.

I did assume at some point it would burn out and need a break just because it would become saturated and there’d be nobody left to still want to subscribe to our podcast, who hasn’t done it already through the ads, but. It really hadn’t as of yet. However, we did decide to just take a break after, I think it was five consecutive months.

Not for any real reason. We do plan to use them again. I just thought we would change it up and allocate the budget elsewhere for a bit. ’cause although we were still seeing those numbers roll in, I. I didn’t feel like it was doing anything groundbreaking for us anymore. I didn’t see a bunch of data showing that people were engaging with us or clicking links, that sort of thing.

So I thought let’s just let’s shift that budget around and see if we get different results elsewhere doing something else. That’s all. But I definitely will return to Overcast.

Also since the last episode, we ran another podcast Addict Campaign, and that is also a podcast listening and discovery app. It’s okay. I did about the same as our first campaign with them. The downside that I find with Podcast Addict is you can only advertise in the category your podcast is in. As I mentioned with Overcast, that was a bit of a unique thing that it didn’t work.

So with Podcast Attic, there’s no way to experiment on any lower cost categories. You have to use the category that your podcast is listed in. And for us, that is the business category. It cost us $350 and we got 17 subscribers according to them, and that works out to about $20 per subscriber. Now, are they higher quality subscribers?

I don’t know, but the pricing clearly is much higher than overcast. It’s over double actually. And we’re not doing a fair comparison here because I’m not comparing it to overcast business category, but. Nevertheless, if we just want to take the numbers at face value that though the platforms give us Overcast was able to deliver subscribers for less money.

So I gotta go with that. I wish I could really have a hundred percent certainty in the data, but I just gotta go with what we have here. I. For the reasons that I’ve mentioned. I haven’t run any additional podcast at campaigns, but it’s certainly worth considering if you’re starting out trying the different ones and seeing where you get results, seeing if you get more engagement from.

Subscribers on a certain platform, if you can track that somehow it’s kind of difficult to track. But overall after some time you can kind of see you’re getting new leads and buyers, you can ask, Hey, where did you hear about this? And just even through word of mouth and them telling you, you might be able to figure out that one app helped you more than another.

So with all that said, it brings me to our first service that we had not tested before that I’m gonna talk about today. We did not test this one last time. It’s our first time trying it out. It is called Castro, and this is also a podcast listening and discovery app, quite similar to the others that we tested before in the couple that I, I just talked about.

Castro lets you purchase one week at a time, as opposed to monthly campaigns. It’s $199 for the week. And their whole advertising section was a little bit vague in my opinion. There was no category selection. They have a couple types of ads. I wasn’t fully clear on Now. Maybe that ease of use is better where it just, you have less options to pick from.

You just set it up and go. The one that I ended up selecting was in what they call the inbox of the app. So that displays the user’s new episodes and your podcast gets shown in there. Supposedly from this campaign, we got 60 subscribers, which puts it at just over $3 per subscriber. Now that is a great price.

Compared to the other ones that we looked at so far, I was a little skeptical initially, I thought, eh, it’s probably a little high. When you look at what we got from the other services and compared to the stats that I saw on our feed, but looking at it now over time, I think it was probably legitimate because as I’ve kind of, the theme throughout this in the last episode has been we can’t necessarily verify all of this data.

The platforms are telling us one thing we don’t know for sure especially when it comes to subscribers. You don’t really have your own. Exact subscriber count. So you have to balance with the platforms tell you and then what you see with your own eyes, and it looks fairly reasonable when we compare what each platform told us, and then what the downloads are from those platforms in the weeks following the campaign.

This looks all right to me. With Castro. So the subscribers were quite low cost and it seems like they’re hanging around. We still get downloads from there every week. So I don’t know why, if it just happens that there’s more of our ideal clients on, or subscribers on Castro. Not sure, but if this is all legitimate, I’m pretty happy with that campaign actually.

And we haven’t run another one since. But now that I’m talking about it, I definitely would try out another one. So that’s on my radar for sure.

The next one is Player fm, another podcast app and the difference with Player FM and the other ones that we’ve talked about. The other platforms we’ve tested is Player FM actually reached out to me, but they were not aware of this podcast.

They were not coming to say, please try this out. And. Publish the results. They were just doing some friendly cold outreach and happened upon my profile. I guess they knew that it, there was a podcast there, but they didn’t know that we had done these episodes looking at the advertising platforms or anything like that, that they didn’t come to me with that intent.

They just. Saw another potential customer and offered me to try out the service. So I was happy to do that. And I actually had a call with their rep. I didn’t even disclose that I was gonna be testing it up until a certain point, so I paid full price for the campaign. There was nothing free, nothing like that.

We’re not an affiliate and they’ve had no input on this episode whatsoever. I just wanted to provide full disclosure that they were the ones that originally reached out to me. And I hadn’t considered their app, I know I had heard of it before, but in terms of this advertising stuff that we’ve done, I just didn’t think to look them up.

It’s been a while, so I’m glad that they made me aware of their app. Now, the first thing that I wanna note here is that crazy stat that I opened the show with about how insanely high our download numbers jumped.

That was because of this Player FM campaign. So let’s get into this a little bit and start out with their campaign and costs.

Player FM does have some higher ticket offerings, if that’s what you’re looking for, but they do also have a self-serve model at a lower cost, and that’s what we tried out because I wanted to keep it comparable to the other platforms. I could be mistaken, but I think the self-serve part was a newer thing.

So originally it had only been accessible to higher level advertisers and not so much people who were just looking to spend a few hundred dollars on a campaign so that maybe. Why they’re coming around. Now, I’m not entirely sure on that, but I think that was the case. So in this self-serve tier, you can select packages from $250 up to $2,000, and we went with the two 50 because that was in the ballpark of the other platforms.

I like to test the lowest cost thing and see what we get from that. And the way it works with them is just the more you pay, the more impressions you get. Otherwise it’s all the same concept. You’re getting the exact same ads. You just get displayed. More and more people see it. They do show sample ad placements clearly on their site, which I really like because you get to see exactly what you get, where your ad is gonna be shown in the app.

Similar to these other apps that we’ve talked about this episode, the ads are non-intrusive. They are not audio ads, they just show up. In various places in the app when the users are browsing or looking at things so it doesn’t interrupt their podcast and there’s no audio portion, they’re not hearing anything, it’s just they’re in the app.

So the numbers here for our $250 two week campaign, that’s how long it was. According to Player FM’s stats, we got a whopping thirty two hundred and seventy eight subscribers in 2,814 downloads. Now, I didn’t give any of the campaign numbers for the other platforms in this episode because we went over all that already in the first episode, so I didn’t want to say the same thing again.

But if you wanna compare, go back and check out that other episode about the paid ads, and you can compare The results from Player FM were quite high when we look at subscribers. I mean, that was massive. Over 3,200 subscribers. Very, very big. Now, even once I started seeing the downloads roll in on our stats service, I was astonished and naturally a little curious if these were actually all legitimate because it was so much higher than the other platforms that we had advertised on.

And as you know, we didn’t spend really any extra, it was the same ballpark in price. It was massive. I opened the stats and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw all the downloads. On that episode. Do find it interesting how we got more subscribers and downloads. Maybe that’s just a thing. You would think that if someone’s gonna subscribe, they would’ve heard an episode first, but whatever.

Okay. That was interesting. And the number overall seems really high for a niche podcast like ours. We’re just, the type of content that we have. We’re for health and wellness entrepreneurs who have podcasts. I was a little surprised that we just run a campaign like that and over 3000 people immediately wanted to subscribe to the podcast.

But in any case, whatever those numbers are, it’s the retention that I really care about and what’s really gonna show the truth as the weeks progress. Do we lose all of those subscribers? Are we seeing any increase in the actual downloads week to week? Right. That’s really what we. Can judge this by I was advised or I saw in their content with Player fm, they have a 40% subscriber retention rate over 30 days.

So essentially they’re saying that of all the subscribers that you see show up on that campaign. 30 days later, you should still have 40% of them, so we’re gonna lose 60% and whatever. That’s power for the course. So that’d be how many people actually stick around on average, if you pay for a campaign and you get a ton of downloads during, you get a ton of subscribers, but you’re wondering who’s gonna actually be here afterwards, you know, if they completely all drop off, you do the campaign and then at the end of say, a 30 day cycle, you have the same number of listeners as you did before the campaign.

That’s not very good. So that was all the real test. Now we’re not quite 30 days out of the campaign yet, but I have been able to get some numbers from our episodes that went live after the player FM campaign had ended like two, three weeks after. And there’s still higher for sure. There was absolutely a drop off from that peak when we had the campaign active.

Again, totally expected, but for now we are getting download numbers that are much higher. Than before the campaign. So I have to take that as a good thing. We’ll see as time goes on. But yeah, I’m really impressed. Honestly, we’ll see where the dust settles. It’s even difficult to compare these numbers to the other platforms because the number was so high.

I. And the cost was so low relative to the subscribers and the download numbers. So, If we take their 40% number. So of our 3,200 or so subscribers that we got 40% of that, that would leave us with 1300 subscribers. They’re suggesting after 30 days.

Now based on download numbers I’ve seen so far, that doesn’t really seem right to me either because we’re not getting near 1300 additional downloads per episode. Not that you would necessarily see that exact number, but we’re seeing such a lower amount than that. I’m not really buying that.

We got them to stick around, but again, we’re a niche podcast and I can’t get too obsessed over what should or shouldn’t be here with the numbers, but if you pay. What you believe is a reasonable price for a campaign, and you end up seeing that your stats overall stay up and after a month, people are there and you’re finding that your audience is growing over time and these campaigns are boosting it and perhaps you’re getting some sales through the audience, that sort of thing.

I take that over overall as a good thing. I know there are many people out there that will say, we need better data, we need to look at it even closer. And maybe there are ways to do that. I’m not that concerned. I am open to spending some budget here trying these things out, seeing how the numbers hold up and looking at that over time.

We definitely wanna, in my opinion, have a bit of a marketing budget every month that you are able to just set aside and say, okay, it’s fine if I lose this money if we don’t get anything back from it. The ultimate goal is to optimize and turn it into revenue, but I have a little bit here for experimentation and that’s the way I see these platforms.

So we’re just gonna see over time what happens. But. I don’t wanna get too far into the weeds on numbers. I can just see our spend versus the downloads that we get and it looks worth it to me unless these numbers just completely all drop off. So with all that said, I would definitely try another Player FM campaign and see if we get similar quality results every time.

Or if it burns out quickly and we’re not getting that and if we are able to consistently increase the downloads regularly of the episodes, like if we get to a certain point, now we do another campaign and that boosts us again and it stays there. I’d like that, especially for this type of pricing.

I think it’s quite good.

So that’s everything I’ve got for you this episode in terms of new data and insights on those additional platforms that I tested out. But there are a couple more I’d like to comment on. That I haven’t tried, but I have some thoughts about based on what I’ve seen. This may not be of interest to you, but if you’re curious, definitely stay tuned and I’ll go over my thoughts on these, a couple other platforms if what we’ve put out there already isn’t satisfying enough to you in terms of where you might like to promote your podcast or if you’ve maybe seen these platforms and wondered if they’re any good.

So the first one is called Audience Lift, and I had known of them for a while, but. I’ll be honest, I didn’t really understand how it worked. They place your podcast trailer as an ad on various websites, which seem to be generally high quality.

And then from there, a reader could be interested in your podcast content. So imagine they’re reading a news article on a website and as they’re scrolling, they see an ad, which is your podcast trailer, that click play on that, and then they become interested in your podcast. That’s how these work. The downside.

That I saw with audience Lyft is it didn’t let the user subscribe in their favorite podcast app. Instead, what it did is set up a push notification that I later found out actually shuts off. If you don’t have an active campaign, I unfortunately cannot be a fan of this at all because. First of all, you’re not getting subscribers on Apple or Spotify.

The other platforms, yes, is the same thing. Like on Overcast. You’re not getting an Apple subscriber, you’re getting a subscriber on Overcast, but that is a podcast playing app. It essentially the same thing as Apple Podcast person is using it for playing podcasts, so that’s okay. Audience, Lyft is not an app.

It happens within the phone itself, and it just has some kind of popup, just like a. Push notification. I don’t even, I still don’t really understand it, although I have chatted to them about it. So can’t really get behind that, especially, like I said, once I found out that when the campaign is over, so when you’re not actively paying them money, the user does not get notified of your new episodes anymore.

And that’s how those push notifications worked is when you publish a new episode, they get a popup of some sort saying, Hey. There’s a new episode of this podcast and you can click to open it, I guess, in the browser and listen to it. That way when you stop paying, that stops happening, so you always have to be paying for a campaign or you lose the subscribers that you got at a minimum of $500 for these campaigns. It’s a little on the higher side to get the numbers working, and it seems to be more designed for larger companies. I couldn’t invest myself. Now I was happy to see that recently they introduced two other styles of campaigns. One was for YouTube and one for the other major platforms where they can actually help you get subscribers on those platforms, which I said was a big shortcoming, in my opinion, of the platform as it was this way, they will get you subscribers on, apple, Spotify, or YouTube. However, the budgets for these ones start with a minimum of a thousand dollars and also $5,000. Those are the two options, and it was beyond what I’d be comfortable paying to test something out. It’s a little steep and it leads me to put it in a different category altogether in terms of what they offer.

So the 500 for the other campaign, okay, maybe we could go with that. It’s not too much higher than the other platforms, but as I mentioned, I’m not really a fan of how the whole thing works and how you just lose all those subscribers anyway when you stop paying. I don’t get it. I think their primary focus is downloads.

And there may be some situations where downloads and download numbers are more beneficial and more of what the podcasters need in their stats for certain reasons. But for me, I want ongoing people to hear the podcast long-term. So that didn’t really make sense. And then these other campaigns where it would help get subscribers on the big platforms just a little high.

For trying it out. So unfortunately, I cannot comment on how well audience lift works, but based on the minimum budgets, it does seem best suited for bigger companies. However, if you feel like you want to go down that road, feel free to try it out if that’s your budget range. I will also say I did have some back and forth with someone on their team and they were very good, they were very responsive, they were very friendly.

So I love that aspect of it. They seem great to deal with, but for this particular experiment and for what I’m looking for, it just seems to fall a bit outside that, especially since, as I open the show with. Once we found what worked, I was kind of happy just to keep doing that until it stopped working.

So to make this leap up to a lot higher of a purchase, a lot higher of an investment when I already had stuff that seemed to be working okay. Just, yeah, didn’t make sense for us. But I certainly am open to you trying them. I’m not saying don’t try them, just doesn’t make sense for us. And the other one that I wanna mention here is called Mo Pod.

And this was mentioned to me by a contact who had tried it. Now I gotta be slightly critical here again, because their website is very vague. I don’t actually know. I don’t know what happens. It’s not an app, from what I can tell. It does say that they work with large media companies. It says they get you downloads here we are again with downloads. Now they also offer some higher price tiers for enterprise. That seems to be their focus where they do have some guarantees in place. However, they also offer a low cost option, which starts at a hundred dollars us, which I thought was quite reasonable.

So they’ve got like the enterprise thing where they’re much more hands-on and able to help you or they self-serve, where you pay a hundred bucks and you get a campaign. So I like that they’ve got those separate options. The contact who told me about Moop Pod did see some downloads and thought maybe a small percentage of those turned into subscribers, but he said he didn’t really see too much from it.

Now, this is just one experiment. That was his case. I haven’t tried it, which I’ll tell you about in a moment, but fair enough. If this is their focus, if their focus is getting downloads, I would expect that conversion rate into subscribers really isn’t gonna be as high as an option where.

People are flat out encouraged to subscribe like on some of the other platforms we discussed here. So if they’re more about downloads, that’s cool. If you are more about downloads, then that might work for you. But me personally, I want long-term subscribers. That’s our sales cycle, that’s our funnel. I don’t think they’re gonna download one episode and then become a customer.

I need a subscriber when I’m investing money into this type of thing. When we’re doing marketing. I want a long-term thing. Now, you could hit them multiple points. You can do other ad targeting, different platforms, whatever. So depends on your strategy, but I just wanna highlight that here. And you may need to do this consistently over a period of time to get real results through mo PO as opposed to a single campaign, since they’re not focusing on subscribers.

Now, as I mentioned, I don’t fully know how this works ’cause again, the website is vague. You are able to schedule a demo, but personally would love to see a simple, accessible demo right on the site, right there, showing how it works. Just a video. It has a text description of how things work, but otherwise you don’t get a full explanation. It’s just, Hey, put in your podcast to pay and we’ll get it out there, get you some downloads. I always like to know how things work. Personally, I’m not a big fan of, it being vague and I don’t wanna schedule a demo just to talk about it.

I just wanna see it. So anyhow, since the minimum for the lower tier service was a hundred bucks, I thought I don’t have much to lose. I’ll try it out. But when I put in my RSS feed link I got a message that they don’t support the hosting that I use.

I do self-hosting through WordPress, which is fairly common. It should be compatible and it is compatible with most things. So I’m out. They would not take my money. They could not take my money. They did list many popular podcast hosts that they are compatible with like almost all of them.

Anything that you’d probably be using it is compatible with. So if you want to try it out for a hundred dollars, feel free to go ahead. I just wasn’t able to,

so in summary, it is always worth testing in your own situation. Just because something did or didn’t work for us doesn’t mean that the same results will happen for you, but we have continued to have good results with Overcast, although I, like I said, I paused it for a bit, but I am going to try that again.

And once I pick that up again, I’ll just keep going until either it stops working or you just want to focus the budget somewhere else. And the Castro one. I really like also, so I’m gonna be trying them out again and the player fm now that I’ve tried them also and seen pretty good results, like quite impressive results.

I like to try them all again because as I mentioned, we’re gonna see now with just the campaigns we’ve done, how the numbers hold up over time. But on top of that I want to add some more momentum and then see how things work when we add in additional campaigns over time. So probably leave it for a little bit longer, especially the player fm ’cause we just did it.

I do want to see where the numbers settle after a little bit longer of time period. But I will try them out again so long as the numbers stay somewhere reasonable and don’t completely disappear. Same with Castro and Overcast. Those are the ones that I’m really liking right now for us that worked. That’s great and I’m always open to trying new methods of podcast promotion as well. Specifically when it comes to these paid ad services that we’ve been testing out in this podcast series, which is now two episodes. I’m happy to try more. If there are some that you’re a little apprehensive about testing, but you’ve heard of, feel free let me know.

I’d be glad to check them out. And also if you’ve tried any paid podcast advertising on your own, whatever it might be, I’d love to hear your experience with it as well to get some additional data that we can share in a future episode. So if you want to do that, get in touch, you can do so on Instagram at EC podcast studio.