Source: www.insideradio.com, March 2023
With home improvements an ongoing part of ownership, it’s a never-ending opportunity for home services businesses. According to Radio Advertising Bureau’s latest Radio Matters blog, the medium is well-positioned to deliver listeners to such businesses just about all day, every day.
“Not only does radio have high reach, it also has the ability to drive consumers to home service business websites,” AnalyticOwl General Manager and Radio Matters guest blogger Rick Kestenbaum says. “Advertisers in this category who use radio and follow these insights will build upon their current service sales.”
The insights are based on AnalyticOwl’s report for the category based on responses measured between February 2022 and January 2023, showing that radio commercials drove quality visits, with session durations averaging one minute, 42 seconds with an average of 2.2 pages viewed, which according to Kestenbaum indicates serious interest and response.
Also encouraging are the low bounce rates, at 39%, suggesting fewer people just visit a single page before leaving the site. Six in ten site visitors (61%) used a mobile device, which Kestenbaum notes is “a great reminder that radio audiences can easily respond anywhere and everywhere [and that] radio reaches consumers on-the-go.”
While Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Thursday tie for the best response days, AnalyticOwl’s data shows that the other three days were not far behind. “In this case, the best strategy is a consistent presence throughout the week in order to leverage that steady flow,” Kestenbaum says. And while middays generate the highest response, afternoons are close behind, and, notes Kestenbaum, “morning drive airings often drive this ‘halo effect’ later in the day, and evenings and overnights often prove to deliver good value given lower rates.” The most effective duration for home services ads is 30-seconds, which drive a 3% increase in web traffic.
Where radio listeners come from to get to home service sites can be as important as when they’re tuned in. AnalyticOwl finds that 77% of site visits occurring immediately after commercials aired came from search engines, while only 19% of website visits came from users who entered a specific website address. The importance of this, notes Kestenbaum, is that the ‘referring Source’ metric identifies the last website a visitor saw, which can give the impression that all of that traffic should be attributed to search engines, when actually, many visits are from people who had just heard a commercial and then used a search engine to get to the site.
“Understanding that people will overwhelmingly behave this way no matter what call to action is used is key to understanding the full impact of radio,” Kestenbaum says. “Hard-to-remember website or landing pages addresses, dedicated phone numbers and response codes all attempt to create a narrow response path that most people simply won’t go down.”
With not only this data on radio’s side, but also Scarborough data showing radio reaches 86% of adults who plan to do any home improvement within the next year, Kestenbaum reminds advertisers that “radio has proven to be an excellent way to not only keep listeners thinking about home improvement projects, but also to get them to act.”
