Spotify podcast ads can now track impressions, reach and audience data

Spotify has rolled out a new suite of marketing tools for podcast advertisers, making it possible to view impressions, frequency, reach and audience demographic information for podcast ads, the company announced Wednesday.

The new metrics tools are supported by Spotify’s new podcast ad technology, Streaming Ad Insertion (SAI), which utilizes data from the platform’s logged-in audience in tandem with its streaming audio service.

New insights. Spotify is offering podcast publishers and advertisers data on real-time ad impressions, reach (the number of unique listeners who heard an ad), frequency (the number of times a listener heard an ad) and anonymized audience information such as age, gender, device type and listening preferences.

The anonymized demographic data first arrived for podcast publishers in August, 2019.

Why the data is available now. Spotify requires users to log in, providing the company with basic demographic data on the listener. The shift in audience preferences from downloading episodes via RSS feeds to streaming them has enabled companies to extract more information on listening habits.

Why we care. The podcast sector has grown by leaps and bounds, but for all its popularity, the lack of targeting and reporting data has kept many brands from investing in podcast ads. 

Now that advertisers and publishers can get more precise information on whether their ads are getting listened to, who and how many people are listening to them, the medium is more transparent and more likely to attract new advertisers, which may help to continue the sector’s momentum.