Campaign delivery is the process in which your campaigns are delivered to your audience.
Components of ad delivery
Term | Definition |
Campaign | The unit in which all orders and advertisements are contained within (i.e. Spotify - Q4 2026) |
Order | The unit that correlates to an individual slot in a given ad break and will contain an advertisement (i.e. Spotify - December 2026) |
Advertisement | The asset within an order that your audience will watch or listen to on Spotify (i.e. Spotify - Wrapped 2026) |
Ad delivery on Megaphone contains three units: campaigns, orders, and advertisements.
Breaking down delivery
Term | Definition |
Ad break | The specific unit that contains up to 5 ad positions (positions 1-5) |
Ad location | Where your ads will appear in within an episode (pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll)
Note: If you select mid-roll as your ad’s location, you can also identify which mid-roll ad break you’re selecting, or let it deliver in any position (up to 5 ad breaks) |
Ad position | Where an order will appear in your ad location (for example, whether your ad plays first vs. last inside an ad break) |
There are up to 35 total spots in an episode where an ad can run, which are called ad positions. Orders (and the ads within an order) appear in ad positions you select.
There are 7 ad breaks in total where you can place ads: 1 pre-roll ad break, 5 mid-roll ad breaks, and 1 post-roll ad break.
Each ad break contains up to 5 positions where an order can be placed (and for an advertisement to subsequently air).
Where you can place ads
Ad break location | How many positions | How many ad breaks | Total possible ads |
Pre-roll | Up to 5 positions | Only 1 | 5 |
Mid-roll | Up to 5 positions per ad break | Up to 5 | 25 |
Post-roll | Up to 5 positions | Only 1 | 5 |
You can have up to 35 possible ads delivered when using all available ad breaks and their positions. This level of granularity allows you to be specific about the way ads appear on your episodes.
Validating your locations
After you’ve set up campaigns, orders, and advertisements, you should validate the ad breaks and locations you’ve added to your episodes.
Note: You’ll need to have Ad Ops manager access in order to use this feature.
To do this, you can check an individual episode’s monetization setup:
Log into Megaphone.
Click on Podcasts, then the Episodes tab. Find the specific episode you’d like to check.
On the Episode page, click Monetization.
Click Ad Locations.
If you need to adjust or edit any locations, click Edit ad locations to launch the Ad Locator tool.
For ad breaks, ad locations listed on the Ad Locations tab and in the Ad Locator tool will show ad positions differently than how they’re shown in your orders. This especially affects mid-roll ad breaks.
Orders will list your ad positions with specificity. The Ad Locations tab or Ad Locator tool will show your ad positions based on how many ad positions you’ve added so far in an episode. This means if you’ve specified an order to run in a specific position that isn’t present in your Ad Locations tab or Ad Locator tool for an episode, it will not run. For example, you could’ve created an order to run in Position 5 of your 2nd mid-roll ad break, but in your Ad Locations tab you’ve created two mid-roll ad breaks with only two positions in each, which would mean that your order cannot run.
For more information on using the Ad Locator tool, visit this article.
Factors that impact delivery
There are additional factors to consider as you create a campaign, orders, and advertisements that may have an effect on whether your campaigns’ delivery (over or underdelivery)The below parameters are the most common places to check for configurations causing delivery issues.
Competitive separation
You may have competing orders that are in the same advertising category. Competitive separation applies at the ad-break level. This means that if two orders share the same advertiser category and target the same ad break (pre, mid, or post-roll), only one will serve.
Note that multiple orders in the same campaign will not deliver to the ad break as well. Additionally, campaigns with the same advertiser assigned will not deliver within the same ad break. This may result in your deliveries being lower than you’d expect for certain campaigns.
Frequency caps
Any active frequency caps applied to an order will have an effect on how often your ads deliver over set time periods to an individual viewer or listener. Try increasing your caps to see if delivery improves, or vice versa if you’re seeing delivery occur too rapidly.
Impression caps
Any active impression caps in place on an order will affect how many impressions your ads can receive over your order’s schedule. Try increasing your caps to see if delivery improves, or vice versa if you’re seeing delivery occur too rapidly.
Pacing
Your pacing selection for an advertisement will affect how steadily it delivers. Some pacing types (like front-loaded) can’t be changed after the order starts delivering.
These pacing changes are not supported and you’ll need to create a new campaign if you’d like to adjust pacing:
Frontloaded to Even
ASAP to Frontloaded
ASAP to Even
These pacing changes are supported in existing campaigns:
Even to Frontloaded
Even to ASAP
Frontloaded to ASAP
Positioning
You may need to double-check that the positions you have selected are present in the episodes you’re targeting. See the Validating your locations workflow above for more information.
Schedule
You should make sure that the order or advertisement you’re investigating is currently live within the designated flight dates. If your flight dates haven’t started yet, or have ended, your order won’t be delivered.
Targeting and exclusions
You should ensure that the content targeting options you’ve selected, if any, are valid. You may also want to decrease the number of specific targeting you’ve applied to your advertisement if you feel like it’s underdelivering.
Your included or excluded geotargets will determine which markets your ad can deliver in. If no targets are selected, your ad can be delivered in any eligible markets.