Should we put a website address in a radio spot?

Only if it can be spelt out loud in one go, with no slash and no hyphen. Most listeners are driving. A spoken brand name they can type into Google later works better than any address, so build the spot to be searchable rather than typed.

The station says it reaches 18 lakh listeners. Does that prove anything about our campaign?

It proves what the station sells, not what you got. Listenership figures are panel estimates for a station and a time band across a city. They cannot tell you how many people heard your ten seconds, and they were compiled before your spot existed.

How many spots does radio need before anything shows?

Enough repetition in a short window that one listener hears it several times in a week. A handful of spots spread across a month is money spent on a medium that works through frequency. Buy the time band and the week, and judge the week.

Is an RJ mention better than a recorded spot?

It is read as an endorsement and it holds attention longer, which is why it costs more. It is also harder to verify. Ask for the exact date and time, and record whether the mention actually carried your offer or only your name.

Can we run radio and a hoarding campaign at once and still measure them?

You can run both and you cannot separate them cleanly. Either stagger them by a fortnight, or accept a combined reading and say so in the report. The one thing not to do is credit the lift to whichever medium you already wanted to rebook.

Notes for owners · Digital marketing

How to track radio advertising

Radio response arrives as branded search, direct traffic and a call an hour later, because the listener is driving. Read the broadcast log against the clock.

The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 7 min read

Radio produces almost no clicks, because the listener is driving, cooking or working, and the phone is not in their hand. The response shows up somewhere else: a search for your brand name that afternoon, a rise in direct visits, a call an hour or a day later. So you measure radio by the clock and by the week. Get the broadcast log with the real transmission times. Plot calls and website sessions in short blocks across the same days, and watch what your name does in search over the burst.

Why a radio response never looks like a radio response

Somebody hears your showroom's name at a signal on Hosur Road. They are not going to pull over and dial. Four hours later, at home, they type your name into Google, land on your website from an organic result, and enquire from the contact form.

Your analytics credits organic search. Your agency credits its SEO work. The radio schedule, which actually caused the enquiry, gets nothing, and at the review meeting somebody proposes cutting it.

That is the whole measurement problem with the medium, and it does not go away with better software. What it needs is a different reading: look for movement in the signals radio actually creates, in the hours and days when it aired.

The clock method

Ask the station for the transmission log, spot by spot, with the actual times rather than the booked band. Then:

Export your call log and your website sessions for the same days, at ten or fifteen minute resolution.
Mark each spot on the timeline.
Look at the fifteen minutes after each spot, and compare with the same quarter hour on a day with no spots.
Add up the pattern across the week. One spot shows nothing. Forty spots across six days show a shape.

What you are looking for is small and short-lived: a handful of extra sessions and a call or two in the quarter hour after a drive-time spot, fading almost immediately. If your business takes calls at a counter rather than online, do this with the call log alone.

Morning drive and evening drive behave differently. The morning listener is heading to work and acts later. The evening listener is heading home and sometimes acts at once, which is why a showroom open until nine gets a different result from a clinic that shuts at six.

What the station's own numbers do and do not prove

The station can prove two things and only two. That your spot aired, at these times, on these dates. And what its measured listenership looks like for a station and a time band in that city.

The first is real evidence, and you should insist on it in writing before paying. The second is a market estimate built from a listener panel. It was compiled before your campaign, it describes the station's audience rather than your advertisement's audience, and it cannot be broken down to your ten seconds.

Then there are the extras thrown in during negotiation: a mention by the presenter, a contest plug, a mention on the station's social media. Treat them as goodwill you should get in writing and verify, not as measurement. A value-add nobody logged is a value-add that may not have happened.

Watch branded search over the burst

Because radio pushes people to search rather than to click, the branded signal matters more here than on any other offline medium.

Record three things weekly, for four weeks before the burst, through it, and for a month after. Search volume for your brand name and its common misspellings. Direct traffic. Google Business Profile searches by name rather than by category. A rise across the burst weeks is real evidence that the medium did something.

It is directional evidence. Volume tools estimate, a pronounceable brand name behaves differently from an acronym, and anything else you ran in those weeks shares the credit. Measuring brand awareness goes into what those numbers can and cannot carry.

Build the spot so it can be traced at all

Some of the measurement is decided in the script, before anything airs.

One thing to remember, repeated. A name, or a name and an offer. Not three products and an address.
A number said twice, slowly, at dictation speed, if calls are the goal. Ten digits at normal speed is not a number, it is noise.
A brand name the listener can spell. If your name is spelt an unusual way, say it letter by letter once, and expect the misspelling in search data.
A separate number for radio, kept live for months afterwards. People act late.

Two stations in one city need two traces

Buyers of radio in a city like Bengaluru or Mangaluru rarely buy one station. They buy a Kannada station and an English one, or two Kannada stations with different audiences, and then read the result as "radio".

Those are separate media with separate listeners. The Kannada morning show and the English evening show reach people who shop differently, and one of them is probably carrying your whole campaign.

Give each station its own number, or at minimum record which station every caller names. If the creative differs by language, which it should, the tracking difference costs you nothing extra to arrange.

A worked example

For example, a jewellery showroom in Hubballi buys a two-week Kannada FM burst in the run-up to Akshaya Tritiya, with spots concentrated in morning and evening drive time. The figures are illustrative.

The spot names the showroom, the offer on making charges, and a number said twice. The showroom freezes its Meta spend for those two weeks, keeps a counter sheet asking which radio station, and pulls the transmission log at the end.

The call log shows small bumps after evening spots on eight of the twelve days. Branded search on Google rises through both weeks and stays high until the festival. Walk-ins who mention the radio are far fewer than the branded search rise suggests, which is the expected gap rather than a failure of the campaign. The showroom rebooks the burst next year, with more evening spots and fewer morning ones, and nothing else in the plan for those two weeks.

What to do next

Ask your station for the transmission log for the last schedule you ran, and put it beside your own call log for the same dates. An hour of that will tell you more than the station's presentation did.

If you have been buying radio every festive season without ever checking a log against your own enquiries, our free audit will put a number against that.

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