Radio And Digital Advertising By The Numbers

A recent report on the state of digital advertising as it relates to radio stations selling it, provided some valuable insights into both mediums. The report, “Benchmarking: Local Radio Stations’ Online Revenues” looked at factors such as how much local digital ad dollars are being spent broken out by market and how much of that is with local traditional advertising companies?

Here are some of the key stats that jumped out at us as we looked at this report:

The report forecasts that local digital ad revenue will increase this year by 14% over last year. That’s a good benchmark for you to compare your pacing and performance so far this year…are you on track to increase your digital ad revenue by 14% or better?

The average radio station cluster sold $1.1 million in local digital revenue in 2017 and comprised 7.5% of the average station’s ad revenue. This year that is projected to increase to 8.8%-10% of a station’s revenue.

Among EXISTING radio advertisers, 70% said they were increasing their digital budgets. 17% said they were increasing radio budgets.

79% of radio advertisers said that when digital is offered, they buy it. Yet only 57% report that they have been pitched digital by their radio salespeople. 72% say they are hearing pitches for digital advertising from newspaper, yellow pages, TV and Cable advertising salespeople.

Only about 8% of radio manager rated their sales team’s ability to sell digital advertising as “Excellent.”

On average, 18% of everything that’s spent locally by advertisers on digital advertising, goes to a locally based media company (radio, tv, cable, newspaper, etc.). What percentage of that piece of the pie are you getting? The remaining 82% of digital ad spend gets spent directly with Google, Facebook, Yelp, AutoTrader.com and other top digital sites.

Per-Radio Cluster Digital Revenue By Market Size, 2017:

The report also includes an Appendix which details what is being spent on digital advertising across the top 300 markets which is a window into the potential dollars you could be generating in your market from digital ad sales.

Perhaps the most significant observation in the report comes in the conclusion where the authors state, “There’s something wrong. The vast majority (82%) of (radio) station managers told us that only 1 in 3 of their radio customers are buying digital advertising from them. Yet 85% of the 1,500 radio advertisers we surveyed said they’re buying some sort of digital media. Radio often has the exact same digital offerings as print and TV competitors. So the problem may be in the sales pitch.”