Public radio is a powerful advertising medium that can deliver impressive ROI. Eighty-two percent of NPR listeners take action after hearing a sponsor message1. However, tracking specific results of any campaign can be challenging without setting up the right metrics. The key to realizing the benefits of your public media campaigns is understanding how to track and measure success. Several metrics allow you to see where your public radio messages are the most effective and where you need to make changes.
Setting yourself up for success means asking the right questions from the start, like who you want to receive your messages, what channels they prefer, and what causes and values are important to them. Careful planning and research give you the blueprint for your campaign. Now it is time to track the indicators that show your message resonates with your target audience.
Early Success Indicators
Quantifying your campaign performance is how you know if your strategy is working. Every campaign will have different KPIs depending upon your business goals. Metrics let you know what works so you can leverage it in the future. They also indicate what isn't as effective, allowing you to shift those resources to something that has a more significant ROI.
As veteran marketers know, you don't have to wait to start measuring results. Early success metrics let you know whether you are on the right track, allowing you to implement changes before you waste time and money on ineffective tactics.
There are several early success indicators, including:
- Increased search volume - Search volume means how often a keyword or phrase appears in searches over a set timeframe.
- Increased site traffic - Comparing your website traffic before your campaign to the traffic during or after running your public radio messages is an excellent early success indicator. You'll want to look at details like:
- Source of traffic
- Keywords used
- Which pages do they visit
- Total time on site
- The last page they viewed before they left the site
- Frequency of return visits
- Higher quality traffic - You want your traffic to be people that fit your target persona so that they are more likely to be interested in and buy your products or services. Metrics include:
- Average time on page
- Average time on site
- Bounce rate
- Exit rate
- Lead to customer conversion rate
- Pageviews
- Visit to lead conversion rate
- Increased site visit to conversion rate - This metric is expressed as the percentage of site visitors that become customers by purchasing on the site.
Attribution Tools
Establishing your key performance indicators also requires ensuring you have the tools and technology to analyze and measure them. Attribution tools can more accurately track the impact of your marketing efforts. Attribution is the analytics of establishing the source channels and messages that caused a specific revenue-producing action. Tools like Market Enginuity Audience Analytics provides fast, data-rich insights.
Enginuity Audience Analytics, powered by AnalyticOwl, leverages the industry's first attribution and analytics platform built specifically for broadcast media. It tracks new website visits within an 8-minute window of a radio spot's airing. The platform features built-in attribution measures like Urchin Traffic Monitors, snippets of code appended to URLs to track user engagement from outside marketing campaigns. With Enginuity Audience Analytics, you can easily measure public radio sponsorship ROI by comparing the impact of your on-air messages to online traffic and industry standards.
Another simple way to track attribution is by using a memorable, unique URL in the message. You may want to set up specific tracking URLs for each public television show or public radio channel to let you know which source is the most effective for reaching your target audience. For instance, if you have a travel company, you could use an easy-to-remember phrase as a URL that connects back to your site.
How To Measure Public Radio Metrics for Campaign Success
Crafting your public radio campaign takes research, experience, and a solid strategy to ensure that it achieves the goals for which it was designed. Part of that is understanding the audience you want to target and finding the right mediums to reach them. Then, you have to know how to measure the efficacy of your strategy by establishing the right metrics that give you quick, accurate feedback so you can adjust and optimize your campaign efforts as needed. When you work with a respected public media partner, access to Enginuity Audience Analytics can help you understand how to get the best ROI from your public radio campaigns.
1. Kantar, NPR State of Sponsorship Survey, April 2021
