Publisher ‘The Week’ sees massive uptake in subscriptions and a 96% reduction in CPA thanks to podcast advertising campaign with Acast
The brief
The Week — a hugely popular weekly magazine presenting a fresh take on news stories around the world — wanted to drive subscriptions of its publication, and was running an offer promising new readers six free issues and a free notebook.
As a direct response campaign, it was important for The Week to be able to tangibly measure success using a redemption code — a tool often heard in podcast advertising, and one proven to be very effective in getting listeners to take action.
What we did
Acast and The Week ran host-read sponsorships on a collection of political podcasts including The Rest is Politics, Reasons to be Cheerful and The Political Party, using the trusted voices heard on those shows to convince listeners to subscribe.
Each podcast had a dedicated landing page at theweek.co.uk, with a shortened URL read out in the ad. theweek.co.uk/rest, for example, redirected to subscription.theweek.co.uk/restispolitics, for ease of discovery. For ease of redemption, landing pages also allowed visitors to input the promo code directly, rather than needing to navigate to another location.
The results
Since the campaign started running, they have acquired a volume of subscribers far above and beyond the expected campaign goals. Perhaps even more impressively for The Week, the cost per acquisition (CPA) was a whopping 96% lower than its previous best podcast activity CPA earlier this year.
The campaign also had a significant impact on other channels, with a clear uplift in website traffic and on paid search activity as a result of the podcast campaign.It was also clear that there were spikes in orders and visits to theweek.co.uk on Wednesdays throughout the campaign — the day The Rest is Politics episodes air. For overall traffic, there was a significant increase — which ultimately impacted the organic traffic to the site and transactions.
So far, the trial take-through rate for these orders is almost 10 percentage points higher than the initial target.
Want to see results yourself?
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