As a podcast publisher, planning your future episodes is an important part of your success. It enables you to create a reliable publishing schedule and predictable inventory volumes for your advertising partners, leading to new monetization opportunities and improved revenue.
To help you efficiently plan and monetize your episodes, Simplecast has introduced Future Episode Scheduling and Targeting, a new multi-layered capability that enables you to automatically create and schedule your future episodes for up to one year in advance and then target these episodes in you advertising campaigns. With the new feature, you gain more control over your podcast schedule and can easily monetize your content before it’s even released.
Key Benefits and Capabilities
Optimized revenue: Earn more from your podcast content by making your episodes available for advertising campaigns before they are published.
Greater flexibility: Leverage a publishing schedule that is synchronized with the campaign management system and ensure any change you make to the release schedule is accounted for when trafficking your advertising campaigns.
Increased efficiency: Harness the power of a streamlined workflow and an automated scheduling process and save time and effort when planning your future podcast episodes.
Effective Delivery: Ensure ads are delivered to the right episodes from the first download, regardless of their publication dates and possible changes in the release schedule.
Tailored Advertising: Enable advertisers to align their ads with specific episodes and ensure their messages reach the right audiences, which leads to better results for advertisers and increased revenue for you.
Improved Listener Satisfaction: Enhance the listener experience by delivering ads that complement the episode's content and foster a stronger long-term connection with the audience.
Foolproof targeting: With each future episode associated with a unique ID, you can ensure any changes you make to your episode will not affect campaigns targeting your future content.
How it works
To leverage the new capability, there are two big steps you need to follow:
1. Create and schedule your future episodes on the Content tab. The Overview and User Guide for this phase of the workflow is available here.
2. Target your future episodes in your advertising campaigns by using the Podcast Episodes targeting rule (previously known as Episodes Targeting) on the Campaign Management tab. This workflow is described below, in this guide:
With Podcast Episodes, you can now target episodes that have already been released (as today), as well as episodes you scheduled to be released in the future. The two types of episodes are displayed differently in the targeting modal:
For released episodes, Simplecast displays the names of the episodes, under each show.
For Future episodes, you can see the name of the show and the scheduled release date (e.g., ShowName_2024-05-15).
For each podcast show, future episodes are displayed at the top of the list, while published episodes appear underneath. You can filter the episodes you want to see in the targeting modal, by defining the date range for past or future release dates, or you can search for a specific name.
Step-by-Step Workflow
The Podcast Episodes targeting rule is available in the Podcast section. Here’s how you can set it up:
1. In the Targeting section of your campaign, click +Create New Group.
2. Click the targeting rules drop-down list and navigate to the Podcast section.
3. Select Podcast Episodes.
4. On the right, select the operator for your rule: is any of or is not any of.
5. Click the Selected Episodes field. A list of all podcast episodes that are available for targeting are displayed.
6. In the date selection field, you can use the default publishing date range, which shows you all episodes published a month into the past or scheduled to be released in the next three months relative to the present day. Or you can define your publishing date range by clicking the first date field and choosing the appropriate date.
7. Click on each podcast show name to expand the list of episodes.
8. Select the episodes you want to target. Future episodes are displayed as showname_publicationdate (e.g., ShowName_2024-04-15)
9. Click Apply.