Podcast ads might not always deliver as you expect them to. Before you contact Customer Support, try the troubleshooting tips outlined below.
As you prepare to troubleshoot, please take a moment to think about how Tap places ads in podcasts.
Delivery depends on many factors, including how many other ads were delivered to listeners downloading episodes that are targeted for ads. So, for example, if you have an ad with 1,000 podcast pre-roll impressions allocated to it, and the podcast is downloaded 10,000 times, 90% of those downloads will not contain that ad. They might contain other ads that are similarly targeted, or no ads at all.
This is normal behavior for a flight that is set to pace evenly. It prevents your ads from over-delivering early in the flight's lifespan, such as if an advertiser buys ads to deliver over a ten-day range; in that case they are paced to deliver evenly across those ten days, even if it means no pre-roll on some downloads.
The same scenario exists if you have multiple flights. All flights are set to pace evenly, and it won’t be until your inventory is close to 100% sold that you can reasonably expect an ad in every download.
Troubleshooting Tips
If the above doesn't explain why you aren’t hearing an ad when you expect to, then here are a few things you can try when troubleshooting your podcast ad delivery.
If you don't hear the ad you expect to hear when you download the podcast:
- Try running an advertising report that shows impression delivery. You can quickly run an affidavit report, or do a deeper analysis via Tap Explore. If impressions are being delivered, then you'll know the platform is delivering ads as expected.
- Look into the various targeting rules for the flights and make sure that they aren't excluding you based on where you live or some other targeting element.
- Look at how the flight is pacing, via the on-track report for the flight. If over 90% of the flight's impressions goal has delivered then you can reasonably assume that other people heard the ad and the pacing was simply slowing down before you did your download. There are times when this will dip below 90%, so it's best to track this over two days before assuming there is a problem.
Still not convinced? Sometimes things do go wrong, which requires a little extra digging to reveal the problem. By process of elimination you should be able to get to the root of the issue. Here are some further things to look into:
- Is everything else delivering normally?
- Does every flight you looked at have targeting that includes you?
- Are you downloading the episode at a specific time when all the ads for the day may have already delivered?
- Does this happen all the time or just sometimes?
If you still experience problems with podcast ad delivery, contact Customer Support.