Dollars in, downloads out

A Q&A with Chartable’s Dave Zohrob about SmartPromos and direct attribution for podcast marketing campaigns

Chartable’s co-founder and CEO Dave Zohrob, and the SmartPromos attribution model

Audio campaigns work.

If you want your podcast to reach new listeners, one of the most effective things to do is appear in other podcasts. For example, take these “preach to the converted” tactics:

There’s plenty of prior art and anecdotal evidence to suggest these tactics can be effective.

However, they can be tricky to measure.

If I spend $50k on mid-roll promo spots inside a big, popular, well-aligned show, how do I know if it was money well spent? How can I measure whether any of the impressions I paid for yielded a new listener?

Calculating ROI on audio campaigns has been a longstanding challenge for the podcast industry, and the team at Chartable is addressing it with a new service called SmartPromos.

Here at Pacific Content, we’ve been experimenting with SmartPromos for a few weeks, and we’re really excited about how podcasters, agencies, and media buyers can use it to run smarter, more effective, more measurable audio campaigns to promote their shows.

I recently asked Chartable’s co-founder and CEO Dave Zohrob a few questions about SmartPromos, and how podcasters can move towards direct attribution for their paid audio promo dollars.


Dan Misener: Historically, why has podcast-to-podcast promo attribution been a challenge?

Dave Zohrob: Podcast-to-podcast promotion has been a great growth channel for years, but attribution was challenging because there wasn’t a way to directly measure impact — until now.

Before SmartPromos, the best methods were probabilistic, looking at download numbers around the time the promo ran and comparing to historical traffic patterns. This allowed for an estimate, but any number of things could skew the numbers: a holiday weekend reducing download counts, running two promos in a short timespan, a press hit or mention elsewhere. SmartPromos takes the guesswork out of podcast-to-podcast promotion.

How does SmartPromos address the attribution problem?

SmartPromos offers direct podcast-to-podcast attribution built on Chartable’s analytics infrastructure.

If Podcast A drops a trailer in Podcast B’s feed, we look at all the listeners (as defined by the IAB — unique IP address & user-agent combinations) who downloaded the promo from Podcast B, and see which of them ended up downloading Podcast A afterward.

SmartPromos works both within your own network and across networks, on nearly every hosting provider (e.g. Podcast A can be on Libsyn and Podcast B on ART19).

It also works for all promo types. That means baked-in ads and dynamically inserted ads, regardless of where the ad is placed (preroll, midroll, postroll), as well as episode drops.

And if you’re running a large audio promotional campaign across many podcasts, SmartPromos offers multi-touch attribution. So if you’re dropping a trailer not just on Podcast B but also Podcasts C, D, and E, we’ll properly assign credit for downloads across all impressions.

If I use SmartPromos to measure my campaigns, what type of metrics or reports can I expect?

The primary metrics we offer are:

All campaigns offer multi-touch attribution, so if you’re running multiple promos, we’ll distribute the “credit” for a unique/new conversion across all the promos that listener was exposed to.

What types of campaigns are publishers measuring with SmartPromos? Promo swaps? Paid campaigns? Guest appearances?

SmartPromos is really new but so far, we’ve seen:

SmartPromos should also be useful for guest spots, and we’ve also got pilots in the works for attributing from streaming radio promotion to podcasts. We’re excited to see what other uses the ever-creative podcast community will find for this tool!

It’s exciting to have a “dollars in, downloads out” way to measure the success of paid audio campaigns. But as with any measurement product, there are questions about benchmarking. How do you think podcasters should gauge the success of campaigns they measure through SmartPromos? What benchmarks can you share?

This is a great question! Because SmartPromos is so new, we don’t have a massive data set to pull benchmarks from. Conversion rates can vary wildly depending on a number of factors:

As a very general baseline, we see conversion rates of 0.25–1% for ads, and 1–10% or more for episode drops. The wide range for episode drops in particular reflects the importance of audience alignment. If you’re a podcaster interested in doing a case study with us, get in touch! We love working with forward-thinking creators.

SmartPromos is part of a larger suite of attribution tools from Chartable. How does it fit into your vision for the future of podcast measurement?

Chartable’s goal is to help publishers and advertisers understand the entire listener journey — from the web to a podcast, from a podcast to another podcast, and from a podcast back out to the web. SmartPromos fits right in the middle of that journey:

SmartPromos is launching in limited beta today — so visit your Chartable dashboard to sign up for the beta, or visit https://chartable.com/publishers/smartpromos.

We’re incredibly excited to keep building and improving these tools so that creators can grow their shows and advertisers of all kinds can unlock the power of podcast advertising.


Here at Pacific Content, I’ve been part of many different podcast media buys. I’ve seen big buys and small buys. Smart buys, and complete wastes of money.

I’m excited about tools like SmartPromos because they can help podcasters make smarter decisions about where to spent their time, attention, and money.

How do you measure bang-for-buck on paid audio campaigns?

Pacific Content

We’re an award-winning podcast agency working passionately at the intersection of brand strategy and high-quality audio storytelling. Our work connects brands to listeners in a real way with content they will love.

Dan Misener

Written by

Head of Audience Development, Pacific Content

Pacific Content

We’re an award-winning podcast agency working passionately at the intersection of brand strategy and high-quality audio storytelling. Our work connects brands to listeners in a real way with content they will love.

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