Running Meta ads for podcasting is a challenge. You can run ads to Apple Podcasts or Spotify, but the tracking is a black hole. How much your ads contributed to plays and how long people played is a complete guess.
You can send people to a landing page on your website, but even then tracking is limited. You can create custom events based on button clicks when they click a button to your podcast, but then you again lose tracking. You can create an event for time spent, but that’s not exactly what you want.
You have another option.
Now that YouTube allows you to connect your show’s RSS feed, you can embed a YouTube version of your podcast on your website. Since you can create custom events in Google Tag Manager based on embedded YouTube plays, this provides some interesting possibilities.
This is something I was already doing for standard YouTube videos. You can have custom eventsConversion events tracked by the pixel, app SDK, or API that are outside of standard events. These tend to be created to fit the publisher's needs when a pre-defined standard event will not. More fire when the embedded player is started, based on progress, or based on completion. This will give you much more insight into engagement with your podcast on your website.
You can then track these results in Ads Manager (using 1-day click attributionClick Attribution is one way Meta gives credit to an ad for a conversion. Credit will be given to an ad when someone clicks your ad within a specified number of days of clicking. Click Attribution options include 1-day click, 7-day click, and 28-day click, the last being only available for reporting. More, of course).
You can also optimize for these events in an attempt to show ads to people most likely to listen to your podcast.
If you have a podcast, it’s worth trying. It’s got to be better than the current options.
