Let’s paint a picture. You're a savvy marketer who's shaken all the right hands to get your perfectly crafted, perfectly budgeted audio advertising campaign live. By the end of the campaign you receive a report about its performance; impressions and the listen-through rate (LTR) are high. Great! Yet this is not reflected in the sales of your advertised product/service.

What gives?

How do we measure success? 

The advertising industry provides advertisers with measurement metrics for their campaigns, with LTR usually emphasized as the most important one. However, the more case studies I came across where LTR was mentioned, the clearer it became this was always just one half of the story.

Wait, what is LTR?

LTR or listen-through-rate represents the number of times the ad was played all the way through. However, It’s important to note here that just because the ad was played does not mean that anyone was there to hear it. It’s the age-old question that has plagued the audio industry from the start, “how do you know someone is listening to your audio ad?”.

Audibility: how we should measure success

This is where another metric called ‘audibility’ comes into play. In simple terms, audibility is whether the ad is capable of being heard. Ok, so then the problem is solved, right? Case closed, end of post! Not quite, the current definition of audibility from the IAB is “the audio ad must play for at least two seconds with the player unmuted”. This means that an ad that is played for at least two seconds, at just 1% volume, is classified as audible.

At Audiomob we do not believe this definition goes far enough to protect advertisers. 

Going Further!

When Audiomob was created this was one of the problems I wanted to tackle. If we’re going to ask advertisers to pay 10x the price of a banner ad we should at the very least ensure the ad is audible to a reasonable standard. This is why we do not play ads in games or apps unless the user's device volume is at 30% or above. Rewarded or skippable ads are automatically paused or skipped if the user's device volume falls below the 30% threshold. This allows us to provide both an accurate LTR measurement and a non-intrusive user experience.

Are you currently wasting your audio advertising budget?

Our data shows that 45% of users have their volume below our 30% threshold, this means if you’re running audio campaigns with in-game audio partners who are not doing volume detection you’re wasting 45% of your advertising budget.