Tracking Audio Advertising

Our portfolio company Targetspot announced something pretty interesting today. They are calling it Targetspot Analytics and the announcement is here.

When you run an ad campaign on the web, you can track its performance. That's been a vital part of the online advertising value proposition from the early days of web advertising. We can argue about what metrics are worth tracking, and we do, but the ability to measure online advertising is a key reason it is growing and other forms of advertising are in decline.

But it has been hard to measure the "performance" of video and audio advertising, particularly "in stream" advertising like pre-rolls and mid-rolls. That is because users don't click on the ads and leave the stream.

But we know that radio and video advertising works. People see and hear things and they remember them. I listen to WEHM on long island all summer and I know where to get outdoor furniture, get a tennis court resurfaced, and where to get my bike tuned up because I listen to the ads in between the music.

So back to Targetspot Analytics. This is how it works:

TargetSpot Analytics tracks the unique and total visits to any
advertiser-designated destination website along with other data,
following the delivery of an online radio ad. This information gives
agencies and advertisers the ability to measure a true return on
investment and optimize the performance of their online radio campaigns.

TargetSpot Analytics is easily implemented: An advertiser simply adds a
small snippet of code to their destination website that corresponds to
their TargetSpot ad campaign. TargetSpot Analytics can then provide
information on each visit to the advertiser’s website, even if the
consumer arrives there later through a search engine or by typing the
website directly into the browser.

The bike store on long island doesn't know that I showed up to get my bike tuned up because of their ad on WEHM but if they ran that ad on WEHM's internet stream and I went to their website to look up their location before heading over, they would. That kind of tracking and measurement is the power of internet advertising in action and I am excited to see it come to audio and video in stream advertising.