More and more digital marketing platforms are adding self-service advertising features. That means you can buy, create and schedule online ads without needing to go through a media sales rep.
Pandora and iHeart fall into this camp. For the former, we’ve previously placed ads through our Pandora for Brands ad rep, and for the latter, we’ve placed spots through our local iHeart radio rep. Now, we can manage our own advertising through AudioGO.
AudioGO is a self-serve advertising platform that places ads on its publishing networking, which includes Pandora, iHeartRadio and TuneIn, among others. The main drawback of AudioGO is that you may not choose the publishers on which your ad appears.
After you create a free account and set up your billing details, click on the green “+Create New Campaign” button and fill in the fields:
- Campaign name. Unlike Facebook or Google, AudioGO doesn’t allow you to create the Campaign-Ad Set/Group-Ad Structure. Thus, the campaign name may just be the name of your ad, for example.
- Campaign budget. The minimum spend is $250. This amount is way less than the minimum spend of $5,000 when you work with a Pandora for Brands rep. The CPM for both is $18, so keep that in mind as you craft your budget.
- Scheduling. Beyond the dates of your campaign, you can choose the hours of the day (e.g. drive time).
- Creative. Here’s where you upload an up-to-30 sec. MP3, WAV, AAC, WMA or OGG audio file. AudioGO provides ad creation services for a fee if you need them. In addition, you also should upload display banners (300 x 250, 500 x 500 and 300 x 600), which you can create in AudioGO’s integrated Canva application, and include a destination URL (typically a landing page on your website).
- Audience. You may target your audience by location (state, county, city or Zip Code), gender, age group (18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64 and 65+), behavior segment (e.g. interested in food) and streamed content (rock music).
On the right side of the screen, you’ll see estimated impressions and estimated unique listeners. The general rule of thumb is to strive for a frequency of at least three. Thus, divide the number of unique listeners by the impressions. If the number is less than three, then you need to either increase your budget, increase the length of the campaign and/or further narrow your audience.
AudioGO, unfortunately, doesn’t provide as robust of analytics as platforms like Facebook and Google do. You will only see impressions, reach, clicks, listen-through rate (what percent of people listened through to the end of your ad), click-through rate and segment break-down.