We Tested 5 Paid Podcast Ad Platforms to Grow Our Show… Here’s What Happened

Profits Through Podcasting
Profits Through Podcasting
We Tested 5 Paid Podcast Ad Platforms to Grow Our Show... Here's What Happened
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You can have more podcast listeners overnight – if you’re willing to pay for it.

I’m not talking about scammy online “podcast promoters” who promise thousands of (fake) downloads. I’m talking about legit podcasting platforms where you can get your podcast in front of potential new listeners.

I recently tested promoting this podcast on five major platforms: Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Spotify, and Buzzsprout.

Now, I’m sharing the full results, looking at each platform’s performance metrics and cost-efficiency. This will help you determine if paid podcast advertising to grow an audience is right for you – and how to approach it.

Today’s episode includes:

  • Does it make sense to pay to grow your podcast audience?
  • Insights into ad performance metrics and cost-efficiency across five podcast promotion platforms.
  • Challenges in targeting niche markets like health and wellness entrepreneurship.
  • Why flexible ad categories can enhance conversion rates.
  • Which platforms delivered clear results, and which delivered no results whatsoever.
  • The pros and cons of each platform, focusing on category flexibility and audience reach.
  • Where I recommend to put your ad dollars when starting out.
  • Importance of aligning your advertising strategy with broader business goals.
  • Why high-quality content is crucial before investing in paid advertising.

 

Are you pouring your heart into your podcast but still not seeing the growth you deserve? Download our free guide to unlock your podcast’s full potential and expand your impact: https://eastcoaststudio.com/5mistakes

 

Our LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/eastcoaststudio/

Our Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ecpodcaststudio/

 

View unedited episode transcript

Are you looking for a way to speed up your podcast growth? And if so, are you sure that that is the right move for you at this moment? Today, we’re looking at test results from five paid platforms that you can use to get new subscribers for your podcast. 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,

and one of the four podcast growth pathways that I discuss is promote. And one way you can promote your podcast is through paid ads. We want to do something extra besides just having the podcast exist. We want to grow it and do that purposefully. We’ve got to promote. And of course there’s always a way with money paying to have your podcast promoted.

Now, even within that, there are different ways that you could go about it. But what we’re breaking down here today is running ads in other podcasts or podcast apps using five specific services. That we tested. So I’m going to break down what these are, how they work, the differences in the ad delivery and the results that we got to help you understand the best option to use.

If you are wanting to invest some money into growing your podcast audience. So remember back to the Adam Shibley episode a little while ago, this was something he spoke very highly of, and it got me very curious to try it out. And once I started looking at all the options I wanted to actually get in there for the sake of our clients in this podcast and try everything out and see what happened.

So these five platforms, they are basically in two different categories grouping these by the way that they deliver ads. But there are still some minor variations. The first category three, the apps are overcast FM podcast addict and pocket cast. So what these are, the best way to explain this is if you’ve, if you have an iPhone and you’ve used the Apple podcasts app, they are a third party platform.

Podcast app. So it’s not native on any phone, iPhone or Android. You have to go download these from the app store. Some are available on one or the other, but it’s for people who just aren’t either happy with the podcast app on the iPhone, the native one or on Android. They want something a little better.

They like the features, they like the recommendations, whatever it is. These are podcast apps designed for listening to podcasts and discovering podcasts, but they’re not natively installed on any phone. Okay. So the way ad delivery works with these. These three apps, there is a small ad on the screen while they have something playing at different places in the app, depending on which one, but it’s a little visual ad on the screen.

It is not heard. There is no interruption to the show. They can just click on this ad if they decide and hear your podcast. It’s got your podcast name and artwork and a little sentence that’s group number one. The other category that I want to talk about when we look at these five platforms, we’ve got Spotify and buzzsprout in there.

These are both audio based. So people listening to podcasts actually get interrupted for lack of a better word. And they hear. Your ad, so we’re going to go into the details of how all of these work and how the different platforms vary, but that’s essentially the two groups.

One group does not interfere with the podcast listening experience at all. And the other two are audio ads where it does actually stop the listening.

Now regarding the tests. We need a lot more data to make any real determinations. Of course, there could be flaws in methodology. Maybe our ads weren’t that good. There are just a lot of differences that are hard to account for, but I’m not working at Harvard. You can test as well, but I want to share our experiences because what I do know, and really what I wanted, is that Is I, I have an idea of what I would double down on versus what I wouldn’t do again at all.

I would just focus on what worked best for us rather than trying to optimize and fix the things that didn’t work. So although the data collection is not purely scientific, it’s okay for what I needed anyway. So I wanted to share it with you. So we’re going to start with that first group, the first three, I’ll call them the podcast directory apps.

First one we tried was overcast FM. And what we did here was we paid 370 us dollars for one month of running an ad in the health and fitness category. So this happened November 20th to December 20th, 2024. We got 1, 770 taps and 26 subscribers.

So our niche with this podcast, it’s a bit of an odd ball because we are for. Entrepreneurs in the health and wellness space. You’re not going to be able to target those in these scenarios. Like you maybe would be able to do so better on pay per click ads, meta ads, where you can really drill down into exactly who you want to reach.

So with these apps, as you’ll see, we kind of just have to be a little more broad. So not everybody who is listening to a health and wellness podcast is going to be an entrepreneur. Who also has a podcast. Okay. But that’s just the best we could do. I just had to assume that I imagine many of our potential suitable clients, if they had to be listening in any category on this app, they’d probably be into

health and fitness. So I did choose that category to start.

One thing I really like about overcast is you don’t necessarily have to advertise in the category in which your podcast resides. You can actually change it up. And I think that’s, as we’ll, we’ll hear as we go throughout this episode, that’s probably a good thing. Depending on your podcast, well, some of your ideal clients might be listening in other categories.

So maybe you can get them there. Like, for example, you are listening to this podcast right now, it’s business related, but maybe you like comedy podcasts as well. So if you happen to see an ad for this podcast, while you’re listening to a comedy show, that’s Hey, I’ve just got a new listener. And we’re obviously trying not to waste money and just throw it all over the place, but this is why I wanted to do this experiment and see what kind of results we would get.

And on that note, as a little bonus, I actually did a second buy on overcast to check this. And I’m thinking the category may be does not matter. Too much, at least based on our results. So near the end of the episode, I’ll dig into the results from that one. But for now, let’s continue on with this first overcast ad buy.

So we’ve got 26 subscribers from a 370 us spend that works out to 14 and 23 cents per subscriber. Now you don’t really know how long they’re going to stay around, but at least this portion was real. Intangible. It seemed to me, we saw very clearly in our stats, listeners went up through overcast, you can actually see what app they listened from and it was right there.

 Our results were roughly in line with their estimated clicks and subs. Uh, slightly lower, but like I was saying, we’re in a bit of a niche here.

I wouldn’t expect our podcast to perform as high as their estimates. They originally estimated about 11 per acquisition. So per subscriber, and we ended up at. And change. So yeah, kind of what I expected now around the same time when we bought this category health and fitness for three 70 for the month, the all category ads where they just show up in every category on the app, those were going for around 1500.

On overcast and their estimated CPA there was their cost per subscriber. I’ll say it was 15 and in the business category, it was a thousand 50 for the month with a 21 estimated cost per subscriber. So for 14, what we got, you know, not too bad. It worked out. Okay. Their pricing is based on demand. So the varies depending on the category, there are some lower end categories that were around 150 at that time.

And then business was on the higher end of, of any category. And then the all of course is much higher, like I mentioned. So anyway, it seemed logical to us to start out, to pick the most relevant category, but of course it did cost more than just buying a cheap category, seemingly unrelated and. We didn’t even use the business category, which is probably where we should have been.

But at a thousand dollars, I thought that’s a bit of a steep investment compared to the other platforms, just to test it out. Let’s just see how health and fitness does first.

So some pros and cons of overcast advertising. Well, pros, great results, very obvious, quite quick as well. I was impressed and I liked that. They let me choose which category I want the ads to run in. I wasn’t restricted to the actual category of my podcast cons with overcast. Well, some categories appear to cost more than other platforms, and there can be a weight to get the category that you want.

That’s arguably a pro as well because they limit the amount of ads running at any one time, but it does mean that sometimes you cannot just walk in and buy it right away. You’ve got to wait for a slot to open up.

Moving on to the next platform, Podcast Addict. So similar to overcast in many respects, this is a podcast listening and discovery app for Android devices. As I kind of alluded to the tests that I did here with the timelines, the costs, they’re all going to be different across the app. So it’s difficult to do a perfect comparison, but at least gave me insight into what I want to do more of and less of and what to recommend for our clients.

So in podcast addict, we did go with the business category. This time, this actually isn’t what I wanted because I wanted to do a more fair comparison from app to app. I wanted to try health and fitness after having done it on overcast, but they force you to choose the one that your podcast is set to.

And honestly, most of the time that’s probably okay. We’re going to discuss after why there may be some benefits to choosing different categories, but yeah, you’re limited here. You are forced to choose what your podcast lives in. So there’s no saving money by testing other categories, unfortunately.

So I’m not a big fan of that, but on the bright side, the business category on podcast addict was cheaper than overcasts by a significant amount. It was only 350. For the month, whereas at that time, overcast business category was going for around a thousand dollars. As I mentioned, it goes up and down depends on the demand, but for three 50 for the month of January, they estimated 1200 to 2000 clicks.

Whereas for overcast with the higher price point, they estimated 1500 to 2000 clicks. So right in the same ballpark, but a lot higher of a price from overcast podcast addict for that lower price estimated 15 to 200 subscribers. Yes, that’s right. That’s a giant window.

One five to 200 and overcast on the other hand, their estimate was 50 to 65 subscribers. So perhaps a more realistic number or they’re just a little more confident in giving us a narrower window. But in any case, at the very least, this price point from podcast addict for the business category was less.

So with all that said, I do apologize that we can’t do a proper comparison, but. In the business category on podcast addict for that, uh, three 50 that we spend, we ended up with 715 clicks. So below what they estimated 13 subscriptions, which is right on the border of what they estimated as the low end.

Which is a 1. 82 percent conversion rate, fairly in line with the overcast campaign. We did cost wise, but lower performing in terms of cost per subscriber. Cause here with podcast addict, it worked out to be about 27 per subscriber that we got. And as I mentioned with overcast, it was about 14. These are both fine if you can make some sales, but you know, with the results coming in here at half.

of the overcast campaign where we got double the amount of subscribers and the cost was half per subscriber. that’s a big difference, right? But I can’t compare accurately because we did use two different categories. But as I mentioned, It gave me some real world insight to what would work and not work for us.

So I learned that and it helped me make a decision moving forward. So I don’t necessarily need perfect data for podcast addict. I did indeed see listens increase on our podcast stats. I saw podcast addicts show up as a player. We had a clear boost and

pros and cons of podcast addict. Well, decent pricing, depending as I noticed that they’re all category is about 3, 000, which is around double what overcast charges for the all category, yet the business category was less. So you got to look at that for yourself and see what makes the most sense. The cons.

Well, I wasn’t a fan of that limited category flexibility where I cannot run an ad in a different category for my podcast. And of course we got worst cost per subscriber, but it could still make sense. Depending on your business model, especially having a high ticket offer

next app in this category of showing the ads on screen while people are listening to a podcast. This one was called Pocket Casts. So similar idea to the previous two. However, this is available on both iOS and Android as apps. And they also have a desktop platform and claim to have over a million users across all those platforms.

I don’t have numbers for the other apps like that, but I did review some estimates and I’ll chat about those in a moment. For PocketCast, we paid by the week, and I only did a single week for some obvious reasons. So, I just extrapolate that out to a month, in this case, because I wasn’t seeing results.

Let’s put it that way. They do let you choose whatever category you wish to advertise in. So I appreciated that. And I use the same one that we did in overcast health and fitness. 146 was the weekly price. And we did a week in December for our test. So if you just base it purely on time, it was indeed a higher cost that would have put us at 584 for an entire month versus 370 on overcast.

This is obviously not a great metric because first of all, these prices float depending on the demand, right? And we’re really after conversions. I don’t care how long it runs. I just want to get conversions at a lower cost. So in this case for the 146 for a week and 46, we had 852 people see the ads roughly two times each.

So like 1600 impressions and about half that for unique impressions, total taps or clicks nine. And total plays or subscribers, nothing. Zero. And remember with overcast, we had 770 taps and 26 subscribers. So down from 770 taps to nine is drastic and no, no results whatsoever. That’s a huge difference. Yes, it was only a week, but like I said, price wise, if I had spent on a full month, would I have gotten any more than zero subscribers still,

so pocket cast quotes, a million users. It’s really difficult to verify that or get data on the other platforms. To know what their user base is. But I do know since this was public on the Apple us app store, I checked their overcast app has 42, 000 reviews. That is quite high. Compare that to pocket casts on Apple’s app store.

They only have 757 reviews, so that is a substantial lower number. And it’s not everything of course, but if we want to try to figure out some data, we would look at 42, 000 reviews versus seven 57. That could indicate a difference there for sure. Podcast addict, as I mentioned is only on Android in their app store.

It had 4, 600 reviews and in the Android app store pocket casts had around 4, 500. So those are actually pretty close on Android to take that for what you will, but. All I know is that pocket cast was not performing as well for us based on the money.

It just didn’t seem to have the numbers that either of the other two apps had for us. So it was not a winner here, unfortunately, pros of pocket casts. Well, I did like that their category choice was flexible.

That was nice, but the cons price was just too high compared to the alternatives. We didn’t get results as well. Their interface, their website, how it works is just not great. The other two have a nice portal. You get to see your stats. It’s easy self serve to buy our ads, pocket casts. They just send you an email after the fact with your stats.

It’s just lacking in that department of a nice online portal. So that was a downside as well. So that wraps up that first category I mentioned where we have these little ads on the listener screen that they can tap to access your podcast or moving into next is different because they are actually audio based ads.

 First one we tested here was Spotify.

 It’s kind of a hybrid actually, but it is an audio ad. So it’s separated from the other apps where they just have a little ad on the screen. It’s not intrusive, but with Spotify, you’re actually hearing an ad while listening to the podcast.

So that’s a big difference. There are some other differences here as well. Although you can say that Spotify is a podcast directory app in similar ways to the other ones. It’s somewhat different because it is huge. It has other functions. It’s got a giant user base that may have Spotify for non podcasting reasons like music, more mainstream in that way.

So a bit of a different app when you think about it in that way, but it’s still at the end of the day, does play podcasts. It lets people find podcasts. And with this, Version of ads. It is audio based

So the way the user experiences this, you’re listening to a podcast, you know, you hear it stop, takes one of those ad breaks and all of a sudden an ad is playing, you get an onscreen display in this case as well. So if you’re looking at the Spotify app during one of these ads, your actual podcast shows up there, which is neat.

And people can click right over to it, save it, listen to an episode. There’s nothing added to the show notes. It’s just for that moment, they hear your ad and they see it. If they’re looking, the ad is not stitched into the podcast audio. It’s just within Spotify’s app. And if people are not listening on Spotify, they do not ever hear this ad.

Since this is all happening within Spotify’s platform, it seemed to have the most customization and targeting to me. And they have a lot of data, right? Because it’s all happening within their ecosystem. Something odd though, is they did not have a subscribers number. As a metric for the ad campaign, the only most relevant or suitable campaign objective here, as they call it was streams.

You set that as your objective, and then you’re trying to get someone to tune in to an episode of your show when they get the ad. I set a budget of about 200 U S that got us 19, 000 impressions. This began around December 29th, and it took less than a week to deplete that balance.

We reached about half of the impressions number. So whatever you want to call that 9, 500, something around there. So people probably heard the ad twice. That’s what I assume. We had 35 clicks from all of that and a total of five streams. Five people. Tuned into an episode from all those. And we have no data on subscribes, either no one subscribed or they don’t show it. I didn’t know. So overall for the money, this was not great. Now Spotify is obviously a huge, great, successful platform. So I don’t really know what the secret is here or if these just aren’t meant to perform very well.

Maybe our audio ad wasn’t very good. Maybe it was targeting. I’d have to do more testing. Or just run more ads for repetition. Like maybe once is just not enough to convince people. Plus, as we know, our podcast is in a bit of an odd niche, so I don’t expect it to be great, but yeah, you’re asking people who are already listening to a podcast to tap into yours, potentially tune in or save it.

So there’s a whole bunch of things in my opinion, that seem to be working against you in that situation and. Overcast despite our strange niche, definitely delivered on the results. People click the ad, they went in there and found the podcast. So yeah, when you’re comparing Spotify to overcast offering here as the podcast are trying to get more listeners.

This just didn’t stack up in our situation, at least. So the pros of Spotify, well, there’s a lot of data. You can clearly see the clicks. You can see the conversions, the impressions. I like that, although we didn’t have very many and they’re a big company. So they have a very nice app. Of course, honestly, the website portal, although it is powerful, it’s just quite complex as well.

Overcasts and, podcast addict, very easy to use. Very straightforward. You choose your category. You see the dates you pay. Spotify definitely had a little bit of a learning curve. Actually I turned a pro pro into a con, but continuing on the cons list list for Spotify, it didn’t touch overcast for the money.

But as we’re saying, the ad style was different. I’m not sure what to have expected, but now I’ve got some data on that for myself. I also had a little pet peeve of the text length on the ad screen. So you design the screen on which your ad shows when the ad is playing. So they’re hearing your audio, they’re seeing something on screen.

And for us, the podcast title profits through podcasting was too long. And I had to leave the spaces out, which made it look kind of funny. And I don’t even think our title is that long. Like if you have a longer title than that, You have to cut words or something didn’t look very good. So just a minor thing to bring up.

The fifth and final platform on our list has a bit of a different way of ad delivery yet again. And this one is Buzzsprout ads. So Buzzsprout is a podcast host similar to Libsyn or Spotify for creators. Pod bean, their whole bunch of them out there. Buzzsprout is a podcast host and they allow you to, well, not just choose anyone, but they have the service set up for their users where it can connect people who are trying to buy audio ads with people that have podcasts.

And listeners and they split the revenue. So how this works, it is an audio ad stitched into podcast episodes, and you get a mention in the show notes as well, which is pretty neat. If your ad was in an episode or sponsor an episode, it shows up there. There’s nothing on screen like Spotify or the other apps, nothing at all.

There’s nothing to click in that moment. The user would have to go manually, look up your podcast or click the link in the show notes. These essentially run for all listeners. Doesn’t matter the platform. As an example, you don’t need to be using the Spotify app or any of those other apps. You can be listening anywhere for the most part, and it’s not targeted by individuals.

So this is perhaps the most broad targeting of them all, arguably. So how it works is potential suitable podcasts come into a dashboard that you have online. So you’ve set up and said, here’s my podcast. It’s called Profits Through Podcasting. I want to run some ads, suggest to me some suitable ads, some suitable podcasts rather on which I might be able to run ads.

So it goes out then to podcasters that thinks would be a good fit and says, look at this, this guy, Joel with profits through podcasting, he wants to advertise on your show. Do you accept? And then that podcaster would click yes. Then it bounces back to me and I have to approve it unless I have auto approved turned on.

So then I get to see who is this. Okay. That looks like a good fit. I would like to spend some money there. I’m probably useful to their audience. I hit approve, and then the ads start running within their show for listeners. Once an ad on audio ad runs and a listener hears it, that’s considered an impression. That’s it. They have fulfilled their obligation. They will get paid. There is nothing to do with clicks or anything like that.

So long as an ad ran and someone heard it, even if they skipped it, there’s no way of knowing that’s it. You paid for that impression.

I want to share with you a bit of text from Buzzsprout’s website. This is what they claim. It says typically a 10, 000 impression ad buy results in podcast downloads across your entire podcast catalog. The goal of the ad is to get people to listen to one episode, one time.

From there, the quality of your episodes will determine how many people follow or subscribe. It may be hard to see this impact in your podcast stats, as oftentimes the ad is only generating one or two additional downloads each day, and the ad takes multiple days to complete. 10 for each podcast episode download.

Maybe more or less, performance is not guaranteed. So that’s from Buzzsprout. Bye. I can’t take those estimates too seriously. I don’t really know where they got that data, but without my own data, who really knows there are a lot of variables and it’s very difficult to track. You can’t really get your own data from this.

You may see nothing. I’m not saying that there are no results, but without a way to effectively track it, how do you really know that’s just the nature of these types of ads?

Buzzsprout also restricts your category selection, which as you know, I’m not a fan of. So I couldn’t even test the health and fitness category like I did on some of the other platforms. I was forced into, I guess the business category. I bought 10, 000 impressions for 200.

This ran from December 25th until January 8th. This is the smallest amount that you can buy. It took me about two weeks to use up those 10, 000 impressions. But of course that’s widely variable and dependent on different things like you’re targeting.

So pros and cons of buzzsprout. Well, you get linked in the show notes. I thought that was pretty neat. You get to easily see download numbers and stats of the podcast that you are vetting to run your ad on, which is neat. Although at the end of the day, an impression is an impression.

So whether you’re on 10 podcasts with an audience of 10 people or one podcast with an audience of a hundred people, it may not really matter, but it’s still data that you get to see, to use, to make a decision. The whole system is really, really nice. I really like how it worked, the interface, the ability to see in real time, which podcasts your ad is live on the whole approval process.

Really, really cool. But let’s review the cons of Buzzsprout. Well, as I mentioned, you’re forced to choose the category. You can’t choose the category you’re forced into one. I didn’t really like that, but fair enough by its nature. No, you cannot get any conversion or click stats here.

You know that an ad played somewhere to someone who was a listener to one of these podcasts that you approved, they might’ve skipped it, but that’s basically all you can know.

Value wise, this just didn’t stack up for us against some of the other options, not in a way at least that we could obviously see. And I would rather just take the bet, the sure bet. Where I know if I invest certain amount of dollars, I can guarantee that I got some subscribers also want to mention here with this style of ad, like this audio insertion ad.

You could go directly to a podcast and sponsor them that way if they allow it. Be up to them if they allow it, but you could perhaps even include a promo code or some kind of special link with them as well that would make it easier to track. Maybe you’d get a better deal. It depends. There is actually some in Buzzsprout that I was kind of surprised and I wouldn’t have thought of that were accepting ads.

So I feel like in those cases I got a pretty good deal. I still don’t know if If anything became of it, but it is an option. Don’t feel that if you want to run ads, you have to go through this platform or something like it. You could go right to the podcast and propose to them that you do a sponsorship and they can even do a host red ad in that case where the host reads the ad.

 Could get you better results than just having an inserted audio ad I want to wrap up with a quick summary and. How I suggest you go about trying these paid ads to grow your podcast.

But first as promised, I want to get into the bonus ad buy that I did on overcast in a completely seemingly irrelevant category. I chose the fiction category. This buy was from January 5th to February 5th of this year, 2025. It only cost 140 cause there’s just a lower demand for this category and it performed quite well.

Isn’t that interesting? It had a higher conversion rate than our first ad in the health and fitness. Category. Which was more money, like over double. So we ended up with 2. 5 percent of clicks from this ad ended up subscribing versus 1. 5 percent on the other one, giving us a total of 8 and 20 cents per subscriber down from 14 for the other overcast ad buy.

Isn’t that interesting and irrelevant or seemingly irrelevant category. Got better results. So it may be worth trying. I’m certainly going to test it again because as I pitched the idea, just because someone is listening to a fiction podcast or a comedy podcast doesn’t mean that they’re not your ideal buyer.

Doesn’t mean in our case that they’re not a health and wellness entrepreneur with the podcast. So yeah, I’m going to try more of those. There are a handful of them. Well, I’ll call lower cost categories. Some of those are science, religion, music, leisure. So it may be worth trying there as well.

So let’s wrap up here. I like that you can spend money to speed up your audience growth. Audience is very important for a variety of reasons. Obviously listeners could potentially become customers. That’s one of our main goals, but also think social proof, bigger guests. When you’re starting out, they don’t really want to come on smaller time podcasts.

They want to see that you’ve got a bit of a following going. This helps speed up the process. It still takes time. And of course it takes money, but it takes less time than it would. If you just relied on organic natural growth. One thing I would say is you want to have your content as perfected as you can, before you look at something like this, because if your audio is bad, which we know is a huge tune out reason, or your episodes are boring, that sort of thing.

Why invest money into trying to get subscribers when they’re just going to come over, listen to it and shut it off and leave. You want to make sure that when they come, They like what they hear and then they stick around as you continue to publish future episodes. So that’s a big thing to consider first and just your overall business goals.

Like, yes, a podcast audience that’s bigger is typically good, but also what are, what are your business goals right now? Would it be better to invest in a mailing list if you don’t have one? Because we know that can help get additional sales, capture additional sales from your. What if you just should be running Facebook ads or something ads on Instagram or hiring a social media manager.

I’m just floating these ideas. It’s going to be dependent on your specific situation, but don’t just assume that. Yeah, I need a bigger audience. I just want to go spend money on that. It might not be the right thing for you to do. Right now with these podcast ads. No, it is not really possible to track through the funnel perfectly.

 If you have a high ticket offer, which you should, you’re going to have a bit of wiggle room there and maybe you don’t need to obsess over the numbers if your business is anything like mine.

Yeah, I do want to track ad spend as best as possible and see where the ROI is coming from. But if I’m going to spend 400 bucks a month on something like this, and I can see that we add 25, 26 new subscribers each time. Okay. That’s a bet I’m willing to make. It’s not huge, high risk. We are working on our funnel, continuously optimizing, hoping that people come into our ecosystem, into our family, and someone will eventually become a customer.

So I don’t have the exact data, but at that price, I’m willing to do it. You know, that is the hope. And if we’re not converting any of those people that discover us, well, we’ve got bigger problems. In the show notes. I’m going to put the links to each of these platforms so you can review and potentially try them for yourself.

 I think, you know what my highest recommendation is. I know what I’ll be recommending to our clients as a first. Try a first strategy. Definitely overcast would be number one, podcast addict would be the second.

And then once that stops working. I’ll move on to something else. Perhaps I, I assume overcast will burn out. It may need some downtime, like perhaps floating around different categories, if a certain one just seems to be burned out. Or if I try them all after a while, it’s like, you’ve kind of exhausted that listener base.

There’s no one else in the audience that hasn’t found your podcast. Then you can move on to something else. So I hope that was helpful for you despite the. arguable flaws that are within the data. I know that I learned from this what I needed to get.

I’m going to be passing it on to our clients. I’ve passed it on to you. This is a great way to make a decision. And I think a great strategy for you as well. Please, if you do run any ads on these platforms, let me know, send me an email, DM me on Instagram.

I’d love to hear results from you as well and add that data to my own data. Here, how these ads are performing for you.

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5 Growth-Killing Mistakes Holding Back Your Health-Focused Podcast and Business

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