How Campaigns work

Campaigns

Campaigns is Transistor's DAI (Dynamic Audio Insertion) feature. This allows you to insert adverts or snippets of audio into your back catalogue of episodes at specific timestamps. These ads are easily added and removed from your episodes.

As Campaigns is one of our more advanced features we've put together a FAQ of all of the most common questions we receive.

FAQ

I can't see the Campaigns tab in my account. How do I access the Campaigns feature?
The Campaigns feature is available on our Pro and Business plans and above. If you are on our Starter plan, you would need to upgrade to a higher plan to access the Campaigns feature.

What is a Campaign? How is it different to an advert?
A Campaign is a templated collection of adverts that can be applied to one or many episodes in one go. It's a reusable layout that contains the adverts you would like to use together and the order the adverts are in. A Campaign can also have a scheduled start and end date.

Can I run two Campaigns on the same episode at once?
No, an episode can only have one Campaign applied at any time. This is because a Campaign is the complete layout of all adverts that are put into an episode. All ads you wish to run in an episode need to be combined into one Campaign.

I setup a Campaign, why can't I hear my advert?
Here are some key things to check if you can't hear your ads in your episodes yet.
Does the Campaign contain any ads?
Is the Campaign applied to the episode you are listening to?
Is the Campaign shown as Live?
Does your episode have a mid-roll ad location set? Mid-rolls are skipped if the episode doesn't have an ad location.
Are you listening to the correct time-stamp? The ad will be offset by any earlier ads. e.g. adding a 30 second pre-roll will push later adverts 30s further into the episodes.

Why is my advert 1 to 2 seconds offset from the timestamp I selected?
This is likely due to the encoding of your episode audio, when it was exported from your editing software. Variable bit rate encoding can make it difficult for us to place exact timestamps. We recommend you re-export your episode audio with different encoding settings. Audio files should be encoded at 44100 Hz and around 128 kb/s quality.

Why is my advert 10+ seconds offset from the timestamp I selected?
Remember that adding other adverts will make your episode longer and push ads to a later timestamp. So if you're expecting to hear an advert at the 5 minute mark, remember to account for the length of any adverts that came earlier in the episode. A 30 second pre-roll will cause later ads to play 30 seconds further into the episode.

Why are my adverts louder than the rest of my episode?
Your adverts and episode audio were likely recorded and exported with different loudness settings. We don't perform any loudness normalisation on your ads or episodes. We recommend you re-export your episode and advert audio using -16 LUFS for loudness.

Can I add mid-roll ad location timestamps in bulk?
You can reach out to support@transistor.fm and we can suggest what options may work for you. We don't recommend adding ad locations in bulk as it will cause ads to be inserted mid-sentence and interrupt the flow of your normal episode audio. It is best to listen to each episode and select an appropriate timestamp, ideally where there is a second or two of silence or a natural break in your episode.

Can I have more than one pre-roll or post-roll?
There can only be one pre-roll and one post-roll per episode, as they are the start and end points. Any other adverts you wish to add to the episode would be considered a mid-roll (even if they are not in the middle). Mid-rolls require a timestamp to be specified in the ad locations of the episode. You could have a pre-roll followed immediately by a mid-roll, set at an early timestamp.

How many mid-rolls can I have in an episode?
You can add as many mid-rolls into your Campaign as you need. Remember you will also need to set multiple ad locations in each of your episodes to indicate where each mid-roll should play.

What happens if I have a mid-roll set in the Campaign but no ad location set in the Episode?
If you have a mid-roll specified in your Campaign but no ad location specified in your episode, the mid-roll will be skipped.

What happens if I create more ad locations in an episode than adverts in the Campaign?
Extra ad locations are ignored if there are no ads in the Campaign to fill them. If a Campaign has just one mid-roll set, just one ad location will be used. The adverts will not be repeated to fill the remaining ad locations.

Are my adverts pushed to YouTube?
Campaign ads are not pushed to YouTube, only the original audio is pushed to YouTube. We only publish episodes to YouTube once using the original audio. If we included the ads they would not be removable from the video. If you updated your campaign, the old ads would still be in the YouTube video.

Updated on: 09/04/2024