A feed swap (trading episodes with another show to introduce them to each other's audience) is a great way to help cross promote other shows within your podcast feed. To send download impressions back to the partner you’re swapping episodes with, you’ll want to take the following steps:
‼️Please note: This process is a combination of several smaller processes - click the links provided for more information about each step specifically.
Step 1: Create an episode draft in Dovetail Podcasts for the feed swap episode.
Ideally, this should be done at least 24 hours prior to the flight set-up portion of this process (step 4).
Step 2: Set-up a creative in Dovetail Inventory that is just a short silent piece of audio (.5 - 1 seconds)
Step 3: Add a pingback/tracking pixel to this silent creative.
This pixel will come from the team that is looking to track the data, and should look like a URL. You can find the list of PRX approved tracking pixels and some formatting examples here.
Step 4: Set-up a flight in Dovetail Inventory with a few required settings for this particular use case:
- Set the Actual Dates of the flight to reflect the length of your feed swap arrangement. This can be open-ended if there is no specific end date.
- This flight must have the existing silent creative ft. pingback url you set-up earlier attached (steps 2 & 3). No specific zone is required, add it wherever it fits best!
- Make sure that this flight targets the feed swap episode specifically (or an episode draft that you plan to use for the feed swap episode - if it's being published at a later date). If you don’t see it, update your inventory to pull in newly created episode drafts.
- Check off the appropriate Advanced Settings options
- Flight type is set to baked in. This will help ensure that every download of the episode gets tracked.
Once that flight is set to Approved and the targeted episode has been released into your RSS Feed, impression information for this episode only will be sent back to your feed swap partner.