There are a lot of podcasters and radio stations turning their audio clips into video. (Over 30,000 alone are using Headliner to do so every month as of the writing of this post) But for all the videos getting created, there isn’t a ton of data out there showing how effective it is to promote your audio using video. So, we decided to run tests on social media to try and get to the bottom of what is the best way to promote your audio.

Introduction

For the first test of this year, we thought it made sense to do an updated version of our very first test from last year. The original test pitted a still image against a few different types of video. Social networks are always updating their algorithms, so to start off this next round of tests, we wanted to first see if things had changed at all since last June.



I got a note a few weeks ago from Jerod of Changelog.com. He said he wanted to see more actionable info from us in our upcoming posts. Naturally I took that as an invitation to repurpose one of their Tweets into a series of ad units for a Facebook Split test, thanks Jerod!

For those of you that are new to Changelog, they have a series of “Weekly shows about developer culture, software development, open source, building startups, artificial intelligence, and the people involved.” For this test, we used a clip from their show focused on all things JavaScript, JS Party.



About the Test

We wanted to check in and see if video is still more effective than a static image for promoting your podcast. We did this using a Facebook Split Test. Targeting was set to people on Facebook, over 18 years old living in the United States who are interested in Java Script.

The 5 Units

We set up a few test videos using different combinations of waveforms and captions (or lack thereof) .

“Waveform Only” – this video featured the audio, a moving waveform, and an image.

“Waveform and Captions” – everything above plus captions across the bottom.

‘Video w/Image” – this video featured the audio and an image, that’s it!

“Captions Only” – this video featured the audio, the image and captions

“Static Image (No Video)” – just like it says, this unit is simply an image, there is no audio, and it is NOT a video.

You can click on any of the video images below to view the actual video

Waveform Only

Waveform and Captions

Video w/Image

Captions Only

Static Image (No Video)

The Results

Type Clicks Impressions CTR CPC VIDEO: Waveform Only 91 1,551 5.9% $0.21 VIDEO: Waveform and Captions 84 1,715 4.9% $0.23 VIDEO: No Waveform, No Captions 73 1,579 4.6% $0.26 VIDEO: Captions Only 62 1,479 4.2% $0.32 IMAGE: Static Image 32 1,795 1.9% $0.61

The Best Performing Video was 3 times more effective at driving clicks than a static image

The winning video was a simple combo of audio, still image, and moving waveform, it was 3 times more effective than the Static Image post. The next video, that featured waveform and captions, was more than 2.5 times more effective than the static image post. The worst performing video in this test, the one that was just captions (no moving waveform) still performed 2 times better than the static image post. In short, this test shows, yet again, that video is much better at driving traffic to your site than a static image alone.

Thanks for checking this out, if you have a test you’d like to see us run, or would like to have your podcast considered for a future test, please email us: info @ headliner.app

Not Using Headliner Yet?