Eric Siu and Neil Patel examine whether midroll ads keep listeners or drive them away. Siu's data from Growth Everywhere shows listeners skip auto-inserted ads, but native sponsorships like those on Mixergy perform better. They recommend custom landing pages and unpredictable ad placement to improve results.
Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
And I'm Neil Patel.
And today we're going to talk about, do mid-roll ads really work? So, let's explain what mid-roll ads are first. So, you're listening to this podcast right now. Average person listens to about 7 podcasts. I'm sure you've heard this before where, you know, we're talking and then halfway through, like, before, before we continue, listen to our messages, da da da. And then they run, here's an ad and here's an ad, right? A mid-roll is basically an ad that's in the middle.
Yeah, technically we don't do that on our podcast, but tons of other people do. I think a large portion do.
Yeah, I mean, there's a, okay, there's a pre-roll and a post-roll. So the offer that you hear us give at the end, like our marketing goodies, that's considered a post-roll. A pre-roll would be like something you watch on YouTube where, you know, the video, the ad happens before you actually get to consume the content.
Yes, and to clarify, a pre-roll is typically an ad before the podcast starts. A post-roll is an ad towards the end. And Eric mentioned, you know, ours at the end is marketing goodies, but that's not technically a post-roll because it's not an ad. We don't get paid for it. We don't generate any income. It's just something we do for free to try to get you guys more perks. And we just appreciate you guys listening.
100%. And if that were an ad, that would be a post-roll. But ours is a post-giveaway or whatever you want to call it. But so what happened was I was looking at our Apple retention, Apple Podcast retention. So if you do have a podcast, go check out, You can just type out podcasts, Apple Podcasts or whatever, and you can log into iTunes Connect, I think. And then in there you can see the podcast retention. Their analytics have gotten better. And I was like, man, because I do have a mid-roll inside of my Growth Everywhere podcast, I wanted to see how bad the drop-off would be and if people would actually drop off at that point, because it actually does happen with like YouTube videos, for example. So, what I saw was the retention was like slowly going down. And then when the mid-roll hit, it like, it dropped like significantly. Like, I don't know, you might've lost like 50% at that point, but it came right back up, which means that the retention was like, it was slowly going down consistently. And people would just kind of skip, fast forward. And that's okay. Maybe we should go this way. So video going this way. So we go that way. And then basically we found that people ended up staying, they were just skipping. So in that case, based on that data, probably it's okay to keep a mid-roll because the people that don't want it will skip and the people that will sit through it and take it. They will actually stay. So that's what we see based on the data.
Yeah. And when it comes to ads, when you're thinking about advertising on mid-roll, because I've never put ads within a podcast, so I don't know from a perspective of monetizing. So I don't ever see the data like Eric just saw because it's his podcast, the Growth Everywhere one. But I learned something really interesting when he told me that. That means if you're doing ads within podcasts, now it's only a sample size of one. So we would have to look at more data. I'm making an assumption here. And how many views do you have, Eric, per month?
On Growth Everywhere, it's about 54,000.
And your audience is entrepreneurs, marketers, what is it?
Entrepreneurs.
So if that's similar to other podcasts, that means if you're doing mid-roll ads, the chances are a lot of people are skipping over them, which means you should probably see if you can create a customized landing page and thank you page and see if there's an ROI. And I don't think that you can't generate an ROI from it. It just means that a lot of people are skipping them because I've talked to Andrew Warner from MixerG and he's just like, dude, he's like, I do these ads and he integrates them and he's just like, people are generating revenue from it. But if you just do a podcast where it cuts off and then an ad is inserted, people will know and they're going to skip over it. But what Andrew Warner does, and I think this is a much more form of effective advertising if you want to spend money on podcast advertising, He integrates you within the podcast episode and discusses your product or service, and that helps generate more signups or revenue for you. But what you're doing is you're just cutting out on someone's auto-inserting ads, correct?
Yeah, it's auto-inserting. What Libsyn, which is our host, allows us to do is they can strategically decide where they want to put it in. So it can be in the middle, it can be a little towards like, you know, 3/4 of the way through.
Yeah, so based on the data that's in Eric's podcast, don't take it as an end-all be-all, but it probably means that if you guys are auto-inserting your ads in other people's podcasts, most people are skipping over them. You're probably not going to generate ROI. But if you pay people to do custom stuff like what Andrew Warner gets paid for Mixergy, that probably converts and is going to generate you much more revenue because he's told me like, yeah, I send people to specific landing pages. Some of these customers keep coming back and advertising because they're telling me they're getting a direct ROI. So don't just advertise in podcasts. I know this episode is, do mid-roll ads really work? And it depends on what you consider a mid-roll ad. If you consider just auto-insertion, probably no. If you consider someone doing something customized and integrated, maybe at the beginning, middle, end, but whatever flows naturally, that probably works really well.
Yeah. And so, I mean, what Neil and I are describing is the stuff that Andrew Warner is doing is Native advertising. So, he basically makes it look as if it's, to Neil's point, integrated within where he— sometimes what he'll do is he'll even like, let's say I'm interviewing you, we'll even have a conversation around hosting or whatever.
Correct. But he also does clearly state that they're a sponsor and they paid him.
Right. 100%. I think doing it that way and also, you know, kind of moving things around where it's not predictable. So, I'll give you an example. When I listen to Tim Ferriss's podcast, I know For the first 5 to 7 minutes or so, it's going to be 2 or 3 ads. So, I automatically skip to the— skip to the 7-minute mark. And then when it's about to— I know it's about to end, I'll like, even if I'm like driving, I'll like fumble and I'll like move to the next podcast because I know predictably where it is. So, think about how you can be a little unpredictable with your podcast ads. Anyway, that's it for today. Go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to check out our marketing goodies that will grow your business and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.
