What’s in a Name?

If you hear about AudioGO without context, you may (mistakenly) think you don’t know about them. However, AudioGO is just the platform that gives you access to the ads on the SiriusXM audio network. I bet that name rings a bell. To be more specific, AudioGo is the self-service campaign management platform for SiriusXM Media; and SiriusXM Media is the advertising arm of the more all-encompassing SiriusXM Audio Network. It’s like a fun little marketing matrioska doll.

Audiogo provides self-service access to an extensive portfolio that spans streaming services, satellite radio, podcasts, and specialized sound platforms including SoundCloud and the SiXM podcast network. The platform democratizes digital audio advertising by enabling advertisers to deploy audio campaigns with just a few clicks, making sophisticated audio advertising accessible to businesses of all sizes.

SiriusXM Media has come a long way from doing just satellite radio back in the 2010’s. It is a whole umbrella company that reaches 150 million monthly listeners across the United States. The network includes three main divisions: SiriusXM satellite radio, the SiriusXM Streaming Network (anchored by platforms like Pandora and SoundCloud), and the SiriusXM Podcast Network. This comprehensive portfolio allows advertisers to access audiences around the clock. From people listening to radio shows in the morning on satellite radio to streaming music at work while they code to their evening podcast unwind session.

The evolution from a satellite radio company to a comprehensive audio ecosystem reflects broader changes in how Americans consume audio content. What started as primarily an in-vehicle entertainment solution has expanded to capture listeners across every possible audio touchpoint throughout their daily routines. This transformation means AudioGO isn’t just another advertising platform; it’s access to the most complete audio network in the United States, covering contexts and audiences that individual platforms simply can’t reach on their own.

Key Advantages Over Traditional Paid Media Advertising

AudioGo offers several compelling advantages compared to other paid media channels, backed by substantial data and consumer behavior insights.

Reach and Variety of Audiences

The platform reaches an audience of 160 million monthly listeners. These are individual listeners, so roughly 1 in 2 Americans according to SiriusXM’s data. This represents substantial reach that would be difficult to achieve through other single advertising platforms.

AudioGO enables marketers to segment that sizable audience in a variety of ways to achieve relevance and timeliness in message delivery. Not only can one use demographic segments, but the platform itself has a whole gallery of high-impact, neatly-segmented audiences based on who users are and what they do.

Higher User Receptivity and Trust

The platform benefits from significantly higher user receptivity compared to traditional digital advertising. Audio audiences have grown accustomed to accepting ads as part of their listening experience, especially when the creative content is culturally and contextually relevant. This acceptance creates substantially less friction than what advertisers typically encounter with web browsing interruptions or when Google inserts ads into AI Overviews that users can’t opt out of.

Research indicates that streaming audio audiences consider the medium 4.7 times more trustworthy and authentic than social media. This trust factor becomes particularly valuable when targeting cold audiences who haven’t previously interacted with your brand, as they approach audio content with less skepticism than they bring to social media advertising.

Of course, this trust and connection is a two-way street, and ad creative has to be very tone-accurate for this initial low friction to continue.

Notable Platform Features

AudioGo’s feature set distinguishes it from other self-service advertising platforms through granular control options and sophisticated targeting capabilities. I think that many marketers would be impressed with the variety of levels one has at their disposal with AudioGO.

Campaign Scheduling

The platform offers flexible campaign management with both immediate launch and advanced scheduling options. Advertisers can schedule campaigns on an hourly basis, allowing for precise timing control. For example, campaigns can be set to run only during specific hours like 10 AM to 4 PM in the listener’s local time zone, enabling businesses to target audiences during their most active periods or when products/services are most relevant.

This hourly scheduling represents a significant advancement over many digital advertising platforms that offer only day-level targeting. The granular timing control enables sophisticated strategies that account for listener behavior patterns, business operating hours, and optimal message timing based on product relevance. Restaurant chains can focus on meal planning hours, B2B services can target business hours, and retail brands can time campaigns around payday cycles or weekend shopping periods.

The local time zone functionality ensures geographic campaigns remain effective across multiple regions without complex management overhead. A national brand can maintain consistent timing strategies across time zones, while local businesses can optimize for their specific market patterns and customer behaviors.

Campaign Objectives and Tracking

Campaign objectives include standard options like brand awareness, brand reach, website traffic, and conversions. Brand awareness campaigns focus on increasing recognition and familiarity within target audiences, while brand reach campaigns spread awareness to the widest possible audience. Website traffic campaigns aim to convert listeners into site visitors, and conversion campaigns drive specific actions like purchases, newsletter signups, or app downloads.

The latter objectives do need to be tracked with the implementation of a pixel on the site, which is something I cover further down.

Advanced Targeting Capabilities

The platform’s segmentation capabilities stand out as a major strength. Advertisers can choose to run campaigns across the entire network or focus exclusively on specific platforms like Pandora or individual podcast networks. This granular control extends to reporting, allowing for detailed performance analysis by individual platform or audience segment.

Geographic targeting operates at multiple levels, from state and county down to city and zip code targeting. The platform supports bulk zip code imports, making it particularly valuable for advertisers who have identified high-performing geographic segments from previous campaigns on other platforms like Google Ads or Meta.

Demographic targeting includes gender selection and age groups with 5-year increments (18-24, 25-34, etc.), providing more granular options than many competing platforms. Device targeting spans phones, portable media players, tablets, desktops, gaming consoles, smart speakers (including partnerships with brands like Sonos), smart TVs, and connected vehicles—reflecting SiriusXM’s satellite radio heritage.

Creative Placement and Format Options

AudioGo provides control over ad placement within content, allowing advertisers to choose pre-roll, mid-roll, or post-roll positions for their audio creative. This flexibility helps brands optimize for different campaign objectives, whether seeking maximum attention (pre-roll) or reinforcing messages after content consumption (post-roll).

The platform differentiates between podcast and streaming campaigns, requiring separate campaign creation for each format. This separation allows for optimized creative and targeting approaches specific to each listening behavior and context.

Mixed Media Campaign Capabilities

AudioGo offers sophisticated mixed media campaign options that combine audio advertising with display remarketing. After users hear your audio ad, the platform can automatically remarket to them across display networks, creating a cohesive multi-touchpoint experience. This feature proves particularly effective for brand awareness campaigns and product launches where building name recognition across multiple channels creates powerful reinforcement opportunities.

Conversion Tracking and Attribution

The platform includes pixel conversion tracking capabilities, allowing advertisers to install tracking pixels on their websites and set up specific conversion actions they want to measure after users hear their ads. This attribution system helps demonstrate direct impact on business outcomes and ROI, addressing one of the traditional challenges in audio advertising measurement.

Why Advertisers Should Consider AudioGo for Their Marketing

Digital audio consumption represents a significant opportunity that many advertisers overlook, despite compelling usage statistics and unique advantages that make it particularly effective for various marketing objectives.

Substantial and Growing Audience

Approximately 76% of Americans listen to digital audio, spending an average of 4 hours and 46 minutes daily with audio content—comparable to time spent on mobile devices. This extensive engagement occurs across multiple contexts throughout the day, from commuting and working to exercising and relaxing, providing advertisers with opportunities to reach consumers during various mindsets and activities.

The platform’s reach extends beyond simple audience size to audience quality. SiriusXM Media reaches more listeners than any other digital audio platform, with 87% of their 150 million monthly listeners engaging with ad-supported content. This combination of scale and engagement creates substantial opportunities for message reinforcement and brand building.

Incremental Reach Across Media Channels

AudioGo provides significant incremental reach when combined with other advertising channels. The platform demonstrates 29-41% incremental reach over individual streaming platforms like Spotify, iHeartRadio, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, and Apple Music. When combined with traditional AM/FM radio, digital audio through SiriusXM Media provides 66% incremental reach, while offering 82% incremental reach over terrestrial AM/FM alone.

For television advertising, the incremental benefits are equally impressive. AudioGo provides substantial incremental reach across major broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX) ranging from 21-27%, and similar incremental reach across streaming platforms like Netflix (14%), Prime Video (19%), Hulu (24%), and Disney+ (31%).

Consumer Shopping Behavior Alignment

The platform’s timing capabilities align perfectly with evolving consumer shopping patterns. Recent behavioral shifts show that the traditional 8AM-5PM window has become prime shopping time, with consumers making more purchasing decisions during daytime hours when they’re actively listening to audio content rather than focused on screens during evening entertainment hours.

This behavioral shift creates unique opportunities for AudioGo campaigns to reach consumers during active consideration and purchase moments. The platform’s hourly scheduling capabilities allow advertisers to concentrate their spending during peak shopping windows, maximizing impact during high-intent periods.

Cross-Platform Integration and Touchpoint Multiplication

SiriusXM Media’s diverse platform portfolio allows advertisers to follow audiences throughout their day across different contexts and devices. A typical consumer journey might include morning satellite radio during commuting, afternoon Pandora streaming at work, and evening podcast consumption, all accessible through a single campaign setup.

This multi-touchpoint approach provides multiple opportunities for message reinforcement and audience development. Case studies demonstrate significant impact from this integration approach—for example, when DoorDash added the SiriusXM Podcast Network to their existing SiriusXM Streaming Network buy, they saw a +70% gain in incremental reach and +64% increase in attributable actions, with 64% of attributable actions being incremental conversions that wouldn’t have occurred without the expanded SiriusXM Media campaign.

Authentication and Premium Environment Benefits

The platform provides access to premium, authenticated audiences across ad-supported content that delivers 87.2% completion rates and just 12% average mute rates. This engagement level significantly exceeds typical digital advertising benchmarks and provides advertisers with higher confidence in message delivery and audience attention.

The premium environment also reduces concerns about brand safety and ad fraud that can affect other digital advertising channels. SiriusXM Media’s curated content environment and established audience relationships create more predictable and brand-safe advertising contexts.

Competitive Advantages in Audio

As the largest addressable audience in audio, SiriusXM Media provides access to listeners that competitors cannot reach. The platform’s #1 position in US markets, larger than all broadcast radio formats combined, gives advertisers unique access to substantial audience segments unavailable through other audio advertising options.

This platform deserves consideration as part of any comprehensive media mix for prospecting, incremental reach, and message reinforcement. The combination of substantial reach, user trust, reduced advertising friction, and sophisticated targeting capabilities makes AudioGo particularly effective for brand awareness campaigns, product launches, and integrated marketing strategies where audio can amplify performance across other channels.

The Bottom Line

Digital audio is a great addition to most media mixes and brings with it lots of otherwise untapped top-of-the-funnel opportunities for companies that are trying to achieve visibility and brand lift. The setup is easy and the minimums are low. The biggest barrier to entry in trying this platform is the creative, where professional voiceover artists are not something most companies have engaged with before. But even then, the SiriusXM itself can help in that regard by providing access to professionals or even AI voiceovers (brave new world, isn’t it?).

That said, we here at Online Optimism do prefer the warmth of real voices, as digital voice ads beat other forms of ads in one other way – tone. Tone matters, and can make or break a campaign’s performance.

If you are curious about what digital audio in general or AudioGO specifically can do for you and your company’s marketing mix, call us and we can make an audio campaign that will make sure your target audience listens.