Discover how to schedule ads for campaigns or insert custom content to share announcements or special messages with your audience using the dynamic insertion tool.
Dynamic Insertion offers podcast creators a versatile tool to maximize their content's potential. Whether you're an experienced podcaster or just starting out, this feature empowers you to extend your reach, engage your audience, and increase revenue through strategic ad placements. With Dynamic Insertion, you can seamlessly add or remove pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll segments for announcements, updates, or special messages, ensuring your content remains fresh and engaging. Additionally, benefit from real-time updates, custom insertion points, ad flexibility, direct communication, and the convenience of avoiding permanent ad embedding.
Here are some examples on how you can use dynamic insertion:
Announce Events: Use Dynamic Insertion to announce upcoming events or live streams that you're hosting on specific dates, ensuring your listeners are informed and engaged.
Optimize Host-Read Ads: Leverage Dynamic Insertion to optimize your host-read ads based on conversion performance, maximizing your advertising effectiveness.
Meet Sponsorship Goals: Use Dynamic Insertion to boost performance or meet impression thresholds for brand sponsorships, ensuring you deliver on your sponsorship commitments effectively.
In this Article:
What is the Dynamic Insertion Tool
The Dynamic Insertion tool gives creators full control over podcast advertising. It lets you manage ads throughout your content library, improving reach and conversions. You can use Dynamic Insertion to turn audio uploads and Zencastr recordings into new ad opportunities, repurposing old ad spots for better performance. Plus, you can strategically insert ads into older episodes to maximize monetization. Another key feature is the ability to replace outdated baked-in announcements or advertisements from past episodes using our ad extractor tool. Learn more about this feature here.
Before You Start – Requirements for Dynamic Insertion
Your podcast must be hosted on Zencastr.
Insertion points are crucial and must be added before scheduling content insertion. Refer to this support article for guidance, here.
You need to be on a Scale, Business, or Enterprise plan.
Navigating Through the Dynamic Insertion Tool
Flight Manager: Manage and set up ad flights by campaign and show.
Legacy users: If you login and see flights pre-populated, you can go ahead and archive and edit any existing flights. More details here.
Ad Pool: A collection of audio ads from current and previously flighted ads.
To schedule ads, make edits, or play the audio clip from this module, find the episode and hover to locate the context menu (3 vertical dots). A menu will appear with the following options: Play Ad, Edit Ad, New Flight, or Edit Flight.
Reporting: Gain instant access to a comprehensive array of real-time metrics - filter by show, date range, and track impressions to fine-tune your ad flights for maximum impact.
How to Create a Flight
Log in to your Zencastr account.
On the left-hand sidebar, click Dynamic Insertion.
Click “Create Flight”
Fill out the field with the correct information
Flight name - For example, Zencastr Campaign August - September 2023
Ad Content - Ads ready to be strategically placed within your content. You can choose the most relevant and engaging ads to seamlessly integrate into your episodes. Within the Ad Content are two selection types:
Search Postproductions: uploaded postproduced audio or a produced recording via Zencastr's recording tool.
Search Ads: extracted audio, previously marked ads from past/current campaigns.
Tip: You may select more than one audio clip per flight. If you’d like to rotate different creatives per the campaign, select all the clips that apply. Please note there is no ability for you to weigh each creative, the system will choose based on the ad server algorithms.
Ad position - Select your preferred ad position (pre-roll / mid-roll / post-roll). In terms of how we classify the ad duration spot by industry standard, preroll runs the first 25%, midroll between 26-75%, and postroll 76-100% of your episode. This field is multi-select, you may select more than one. Please note: Opening multiple slots is ideal, as it creates opportunities for the ad to play based on how many campaigns are live at a time, or if you’re also opted into the Programmatic Ads Program. This does not mean the same ad will play back to back.
Offer - Select the offer associated with this flight. Only accepted offers will appear on the drop-down.
Note: Selecting an offer is optional. Please leave this blank if the ad scheduled is for a brand outside of Zencastr.
Advanced Settings
Fulfillment Goal: Use this setting to set your campaign’s goal. There are two methods available when flighting your fulfillment goal.
Percentage: Use the percentage when you don’t have a set goal, but want to control the hierarchy of which campaign you would like to prioritize. Some levers include performance or duration of the campaign. For example, you’d like to prioritize brand A since it’s it’s a limited time promotion ending at the end of the month, you’d set the following:
Brand A: 60%
Brand B: 20%
Brand C: 20%
Impression: If you have a contracted goal amount you’re aiming to fulfill, enter the impression amount.
Flight Date Range: Enter the campaign’s flight date range. This sets the date ranges you’d like to run each flight.
Target Episodes: Search and select specific episodes you’d like to target. If you are looking to target all episodes in your catalog, leave this field blank.
Frequency Capping: Frequency capping is a term in advertising that means restricting the number of times an advertisement is played for a campaign and for a specified time duration.
On: If you select to enable a frequency cap, we recommend the default of 1 per 2 hours. This means 1 ad for that particular campaign flighted will play in the duration of 2 hours of a listener tuning into your show.
Off: Leave this off if you want the ad server to pull in ads based on algorithms.
Note: Flighting your ad goals through Dynamic Insertion is not a guarantee your goal will be delivered in full – many factors can impact your performance such as the frequency cap, how many campaigns you have active, the popularity of each episode and overall seasonal traffic. To track your campaign flight, reference the Reporting tab to see the progress. If you have reached your goal and you’d like to turn it off, pause or archive your flight.
Flight Status
There are multiple flight statuses that you have on under this column:
Active: Current flights serving ads via dynamic ad insertion across your show.
Paused: Inactive flights.
Pause Flight: Select Pause Flight if you’d like to pause and eventually resume the flight at a later date.
To Reactivate: Select Activate Flight to change the flight from paused to active.
Archive Flight: Select Archive Flight if you’d like to end this campaign. To unarchive a campaign go to the drop down menu under Flight Manager and select Archived. To unarchive, select the line item and select Unarchive Flight.
To make changes to flighted ads, click on the line item and an Edit Flight menu will appear.
Uploading Your Pre-Recorded Ads
If you want to flight ads that were not recorded on Zencastr, follow these steps:
Create a new Session by clicking Upload in New Session.
Click on Choose file, select your ad, and click Create.
Upload your ad in MP3 format.
Once the upload is complete, click Next.
Click Run Now on the Review & Confirm page.
You will be taken to the publish page to wait for the Postproduction to be completed.
Click on Back to go to the session, and then click on the Postproductions tab.
On the Postproductions page you will have the ability to rename your file to stay organized. Click on the 3-line menu and select Rename. Once done, click Save to finalize the name change.
You should now be able to find your newly uploaded ad by going to Dynamic Insertion > Create Flight > and on Ad Content > Search Postproductions.
Recording An Ad on Zencastr
If you want to record an ad on Zencastr, follow these steps:
Create a session by clicking +Create New Recording Session.
Fill out the fields with the correct information, and then, click Create.
Session Name - please use a name that is related to your creative or campaign to make it easy to remember for you.
Language
Recording type (Audio/Video)
You will be taken to the recording page to complete your recording. Please follow the steps here if you are new to recording on Zencastr.
When you’re done recording, click on Preview at the top part of your screen to run the audio recording through Automatic PostProduction.
Click Run Now on the Review & Confirm page.
You will be taken to the publish page to wait for the Postproduction to be completed.
Please do not publish the episode. Click on Back to go to the session, and then click on the Postproductions tab.
You will have the ability to listen to your post-produced ad on the Postproductions page and you will have the ability to rename your file to stay organized. Click on the 3-line menu and select Rename. Once done, click Save to finalize the name change.
You should now be able to find your newly uploaded ad by going to Ad Manager > Create Flight > and on Ad Content > Search Postproductions.
Extracting An Ad for Flight from A Published Episode
If you have previously inserted an ad on a published episode, extracting that ad to flight would be fairly straightforward. Please follow the steps to Mark Existing Ads: Campaign Participation.
Once an ad is marked, this will appear under the Flight Manager tab. You can now create a flight for this extracted add.