Audio Isn’t Just for Awareness Anymore – The Data Finally Caught Up
By Sam Garton, Brand Account Manager
For years, audio marketing has sat in a strange corner of the media plan. It’s been respected, trusted, and often well-liked, but rarely taken seriously by performance teams. Radio and digital audio were usually filed under “brand,” seen as useful for reach and salience but quietly excluded from the same ROI-driven conversations as search, paid social or display.
However, attitudes towards audio are starting to change, and not because audio suddenly became more fashionable. It’s breaking because the data finally caught up. In fact, new research suggests that audio does not just sound good. It delivers measurable performance outcomes. According to a 2025 report by Ofcom, ‘Audio continues to play an important role in our everyday lives. Over nine in ten of us (93%) listen to some form of audio content each week, be it the radio, a streaming service or beloved record collection.’
From Reach to Revenue
Historically, audio marketing’s value proposition rested on scale. More recent studies are closing that gap. They show consistent links between audio exposure and concrete business outcomes, including increases in site traffic, uplift in branded search activity and stronger conversion rates when audio runs alongside lower-funnel channels.
In 2025, Oxford Road found that audio drove an average of 18% of clients’ branded search volume. For brands, this revelation recasts audio as a key driver of discoverability, credibility and demand, highlighting how audio is increasingly demonstrating clear assist value within multi-touch customer journeys, particularly on mobile. Audio behaves less like a pure awareness channel and more like a performance multiplier, rarely demanding the last click, but meaningfully improving the efficiency of the channels that do. For performance marketers, that distinction is crucial to understanding how channels work together to create demand and convert it efficiently.
Why Audio Works Differently
One reason audio marketing performs so well is the context in which it is consumed. Audio reaches people when their eyes are occupied, but their minds are available. It fits into moments like commuting, exercising, cooking or scrolling with the screen locked. Unlike display or social formats, audio does not compete for visual attention. Instead, it integrates into routines and moments of focus, building familiarity and intent without asking for an immediate action. The impact of that exposure often shows up later, through increased search activity, higher click-through rates on paid media or improved conversion efficiency once users finally reach a landing page. Audio primes enable lower-funnel channels to do their jobs more effectively.
The Measurement Problem That Holds Audio Back
Attributing online conversions directly to audio exposure remains challenging. There’s no universal pixel that fires when someone hears a podcast or radio ad and then makes a purchase days later. That lack of clean, deterministic tracking has made some teams uncomfortable, leading them to deprioritise what they cannot easily see. The good news is that conversion lift studies are becoming more accessible, clean room environments make it easier to connect exposure to downstream behaviour, and geo-testing or time-based analysis can help isolate audio’s incremental contribution. Even relatively simple signals, such as branded search uplift, vanity URLs or promo code usage, can add valuable directional insight.
What Performance Teams Are Missing
The real risk for performance marketers who continue to label audio as “brand only” is not that they miss out on awareness. It’s that they underestimate the cost of not using it. Audio marketing has been shown to reduce over-reliance on increasingly expensive paid search, improve efficiency across social and display, accelerate trust for challenger brands and sustain demand when lower-funnel channels begin to plateau. When audio is excluded from performance planning, teams often respond by over-optimising the bottom of the funnel, squeezing the same users harder rather than creating new intent upstream. However, that approach does not lead to growth. It leads to diminishing returns.
Bringing Audio Into the Performance Conversation
Treating audio as a performance channel does not mean forcing last-click KPIs onto it or turning it into an imitation of paid social. It means planning audio alongside search and display rather than after them. It means evaluating success through incrementality rather than direct response alone, and testing formats and messaging with the same rigour applied to other channels. The strongest performance teams already think this way. They are less interested in whether an individual ad generated a click and more interested in whether an investment made the rest of the media mix work harder.
Want to learn more about how audio marketing can help your audio-visual marketing strategy? Speak to our Paid Media team today.
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