audience engagement data Archives

The New Daily drives engagement, first-party data, and revenue diversification with Viafoura.

The New Daily is an online, non-paywalled, Australian digital news site that was founded in 2013. It features content such as breaking news, politics, finance, entertainment, lifestyle, sports, and weather from Australia and around the World.

Like many publishers, The New Daily is keen to provide its readers with the opportunity to contribute their unique viewpoints to a vibrant and safe community. Ingrid von Bibra, Publisher, at The New Daily says they are “excited to increase user engagement whilst also providing their editorial team with valuable feedback and user insights”.

By implementing Viafoura’s Conversations, Live Blogs, Community Chat, Trending Articles, Topic Follows, and Moderation solutions, The New Daily is driving their first-party data strategy forward at an accelerated rate. With data generation now in hyperdrive, the team has access not only to traditional information such as PVs, Dwell Time, and RFV values, but extensive insight on user sentiment, interests, propensity, and community participation as well.

Viafoura is excited to be working with The New Daily. “The energy that The New Daily has brought to this initiative is palpable! We’re delighted to be their chosen partner for reimagining the audience experience and unlocking a new first-party data strategy” says Dalia Vainer,Director, Customer Experience.

As The New Daily continues to reap the rewards of Viafoura’s turn-keysolutions, nothing but positive outlooks remain for continued audiencegrowth, engagement wins, and revenue diversification.

When you know more about your audience, you pave the way for growth

The more you understand your users, the more opportunity you have to grow your community of followers. And the more you grow your community, the more your business can ultimately generate revenue and brand awareness. But without first-party data about your audience, you’re working from an incomplete picture.

To grow, media brands need to know the profile of their users, their preferences and their behaviours. It won’t just help you improve and personalize your content lineup; obtaining rich first-party data also empowers you to supply advertisers with the crucial targeted audience segments they want.

Building engagement to gain data

Our research has found that engagement leads to loyalty because it creates experiences users will stick around for. The longer they stick around, the more likely they are to register, which will give you access to their real-time data.

So what types of engaging experiences can you provide your users? We’ve identified six Viafoura solutions that can help your content convert users from unknown to known, including: moderated conversations, or safe spaces for registered users to discuss content; follow buttons; live chats around a topic, event or video; social share bars; trending conversations; and live blogs, or real-time interactive content posts.

For example, Viafoura’s personalized newsfeeds are onsite feeds similar to a Facebook feed, aggregating all the interactions that are relevant to a user, including what and who they follow. Our data has found that they generate 3.15 more page views per month among both anonymous and registered users.

How data helps your content strategy

With 64% of consumers willing to give up their data for relevant services, personalization is your key to giving readers what they want. When your newsroom has access to your audience’s data insights, they become empowered to create a personalized experience for the user, which is increases audience retention.

They can do this by extracting audience insights from Viafoura’s engagement solutions. One example is Viafoura’s Community Chat, which allows media companies to host real-time chats around popular content.

“With (Viafoura’s) Community Chat, we’re delivering more value to the fans, while also increasing engagement by 150%,” says Kristian Walsh, head of sports audience engagement strategy at Reach PLC.

So what kind of behaviour and preferences can you track from users, and what can that tell you about them? For starters, look at what types of content are driving people to engage. What are the topics and themes that are capturing interest? Who are the writers of this content? You can then rank an article’s performance based on clicks and audience segments to help determine the topics your readers are most interested in.

By understanding who their readers are, what they’re interested in and how they express that interest, newsrooms can align on a high-conversion content strategy based on a strong relationship with their audience.

How data incentivizes your advertisers

That rich audience data allows you to understand your audience more intimately, but it also better equips you to provide targeted audience segments for advertisers. Advertisers today are looking beyond clicks, and are seeking metrics like time-spent, return visits and number of page views: all signs of an engaged audience. So the more you know about your own audience, the more appealing you can make your site to advertisers.

“Viafoura gives us access to valuable engagement data that helps drive business decisions,” says Philippa Jenkins, the head of registered audience at The Independent. “We know what content topics and formats are resonating most with our users, so we can deliver more of what they want.”

User registrations, direct newsletter sign-ups and a view into audience interactions allow you to understand your users at the engagement level, to inform your sales team, and paint a better picture for advertisers.

In fact, the New York Times is capitalizing on its first-party data, having found that digital ads that used its first-party data accounted for 20% of its core ad revenue, up from 7% the year before. Ad Exchanger reported that subscriptions also soared during the same period, hitting 5.1 million digital news subscribers and 1.6 million subscribers for other products.

Brands that glean actionable insights on their data will be much better positioned to deliver the goods that advertisers want, in an age where advertisers have become much more savvy in the data they demand.

Why Identity Resolution Can Help You Future-Proof Your Businesses

Is your media company converting anonymous visitors into registered users and then monitoring their behavior? To help secure your company’s future, it’s worth transforming your website’s visitors into identifiable and trackable community members.

“Real-time data collection, analysis and targeting is the glue that keeps customers engaged with relevant information,” states a report by FIPP, a global publishing association.

Rather than guessing how to invest in your brand’s consumer experience, you can use data to piece together an accurate picture of your digital community. That way, you’ll understand how to cater to consumers as their interests change.

Read on to discover why understanding your community through identity resolution is part of the winning formula that leads to sustainable business growth.

Understanding Identity Resolution

How well can you truly know your online community if you don’t analyze each individual? That’s where identity resolution comes in.

“Identity resolution offers a 360-degree view of an individual and the ability to effectively identify a person across multiple devices by recognizing and connecting individual data points, allowing marketers and publishers to form a clear idea of who their customers are on an individual level — and more importantly, how, where and when to best reach them,” Digiday explains.

In other words, media companies can piece together consumer identities and behaviors on their properties to get a complete understanding of their communities.

The identity resolution process offers insight into what types of content and experiences are most impactful on consumers. If you can gather a detailed view of your online visitors, you can meet your community’s ever-changing needs.

The Hidden Power of Known Visitors

Between the consumers coming and going from your digital properties on different devices and those toggling between browsers, it can feel practically impossible to keep tabs on your audience.

Now consider how simple this process could be if your anonymous visitors had to register for premium features or events on your platform.

With a registration process in place, your visitors will no longer be anonymous as they travel and interact across your site’s pages.

Transforming your anonymous visitors into known users comes with a handful of benefits for media companies. One significant advantage is that you’ll have more information on your audience members, which can be used to improve their experience with your brand.

And using identity resolution to customize on-site experiences for consumers is key to boosting subscription revenue. “According to subscription solutions provider Piano’s research, the average conversion rate of registered users is 10x that of anonymous visitors,” writes Faisal Kalim, a business journalist from What’s New In Publishing.

Prioritizing User Registrations in a World Without Third-Party Cookies

Having a firm grasp of your community’s identity is essential to securing the future of both your subscription and ad revenues.

Until recently, third-party data has been a primary way for businesses to gather information on visitors. With the ongoing move to phase third-party cookies out across internet browsers, using first-party data to understand and track visitors is a clear, sustainable step forward.

Converting anonymous visitors to registered users is an effective way to gather that first-party data, keep track of your users and match their movements and information to your subscriber list. After all, the last thing anyone wants is a disconnected view of user behavior as they register, subscribe and switch between devices.

“Registration is part of the funnel to growing reader engagement and donations while improving advertising quality and targeting so the benefit will be twofold to both strands of revenue,” explains Alice Pickthall, a senior analyst at a subscription research company.

A registration process offers insight into each community member. As a result, you can provide them with personalized, consistent experiences that suit their interests and behaviors.

You can also work with your advertisers to produce high-performing, targeted ads based on your community’s data.

The better a company understands its visitors, the better it can target ads to them and engage them, improving the experience for community members, staff and advertisers.

How Viafoura Can Help

Not all community-building and engagement solutions in the media landscape will offer you access to your community’s first-party data.

At Viafoura, we know that your on-site audience data controls the fate of your business. That’s why our engagement solution gives you complete access to your user data while meeting your information security and compliance needs.

Our engagement tools also offer flexible login options, allowing anyone to register to use our engagement tools on partner websites. The Viafoura solution can connect to your subscription service as well for a unified, consistent view of your community.

Ultimately, identity resolution can help to inform your business decisions, strengthening your community and revenue streams. To start learning about your visitors’ identities and using that knowledge to build a thriving community, get in touch with Viafoura.

New Data Showcases the Public’s Appetite for Online Engagement

At this time, media companies are facing some of the most pressing challenges they’ve encountered so far: shrinking advertising dollars, a strain on resources, endless misinformation and a shift to remote work. Brands are slowly realizing that the only way to survive in this climate — and keep individuals informed with trusted information — is to build highly engaged communities of consumers.

So here’s the big question: How much does the public genuinely want to engage with media brands… especially during a pandemic?

Viafoura’s data experts combed through millions of engagement data points based on the performance of our solutions across client platforms. And the results were jaw-dropping: the desire for audience engagement solutions online has never been as prominent as it is now.

We’ve summarized the main takeaways from our report below to help you make sense of your consumers and how you can build a loyal community.

Consumers’ Interest to Engage Online Has Grown by 53%

According to our data, the number of unique users interacting with engagement tools grew by 53% in March compared to February. This means that being able to interact on digital media properties is becoming more important to consumers during the pandemic.

After surveying over 2,500 people, Unruly, a video advertising platform, confirmed that individuals are in fact craving more engagement through content, brands and ads.

“The pandemic has resulted in rapid, unprecedented changes in consumer behaviors and their preferences,” explains Unruly’s VP of Insight Terence Scroope.

Scroope goes on to state that brands must now refocus their priorities “to maintain and grow connections with consumers, provide support and minimize disruption to performance.”

By satisfying the need for entertainment and social interaction, media companies have the power to support the public and build loyal communities through engagement tools.

Conversation Readers Have Increased by 50%

Some media organizations may find the endless selection of audience engagement solutions overwhelming. But with a growing number of people seeking out and reading conversations on media sites and apps, the value of conversation-based engagement tools is rising.

This growing interest in online conversations shouldn’t come as a surprise though. As physical distancing standards leave people socially disconnected, major global organizations like the CDC are encouraging individuals to forge meaningful connections with one another in other ways.

Consumers are now turning to media organizations with conversation-based engagement tools (such as moderated commenting, live blog or chat tools) to feed their desire for human connection. And since comment readers represent the most active and valuable portion of your digital community, everybody wins.

Building Interest Around Your Content

Engagement tools — such as content recommendation and conversation widgets — increased our clients’ page views by 24% between January 2020 and the end of March.

In other words, engagement tools can help to amplify interest in content. This is because offering consumers the opportunity to interact with brands encourages them to spend more time engaging with content.

“As the dust settles at the end of this period, people will remember how [organizations] have responded and that is the challenge,” writes Steve Impey, a SportsPro journalist. “How do you drive value in your community in this particular situation?”

Media companies without engagement tools may miss the opportunity to enhance their content and add value to the overall consumer experience.

How Engagement Tools are Being Leveraged During the Pandemic

To activate their communities, news and lifestyle publishers alike are working to improve the consumer experience through engagement tools.

While some publishers are running online chats and conversations alongside live-streamed shows or old sports games, others are relying on instant blogging tools for the majority of their COVID-19 news coverage.

Media companies are also using discussion-based audience engagement solutions to run online webinars and events. The Financial Times, for instance, hosted an interactive webinar with thousands of people who took part in live polls and Q&As.

At the end of the day, engagement tools are being used as a way to bring people together even though they’re physically apart.

Publishers are no longer just content distributors; they’re facilitators of social connections in an incredibly isolating and challenging crisis. By providing audience members with engagement tools online, media companies can make social isolation a little more tolerable for both consumers and brands.

Audience Engagement Data is About to Amp up Sports Media

Just last week, Adam Hodgkins, the senior business development manager at Genius Sports Media, published an insightful article that dug into why audience engagement data on-site is the key to growing revenue in sports. And we couldn’t agree more.

“There’s an awareness in the OTT space that sports companies have lost control of their audiences to social media,” says Michael Shewchenko, Head of Business Development for Sports and Media at Viafoura. “But they now have an opportunity to engage their audiences on their properties in a positive and highly valuable way, and use their own data to put a name and a face to their users.”

Audience engagement data is the money-making factor that many sports companies are missing out on. Any sports company that wants to significantly boost revenue would, therefore, benefit greatly from connecting with their audiences, learning who their community members are, and then using that information to create and send highly relevant content and ads.

Unlocking a Premium Experience for Sports Fans

To connect with audiences on a more direct level, sports companies need to turn their digital properties into engaging communities — through super-exclusive spaces that capture valuable insights on users. This can be accomplished through ‘premium experiences’ that can be offered to encourage users to register or subscribe.

“Engagement tools can open up the premium experience,” says Shewchenko. “Tools that encourage on-site interaction increase the likelihood of passive sports consumers becoming active and highly engaged users. It’s all about building the two-way communication between users and brands.”

A premium experience can include anything from participating in live chats, real-time commenting and blogging to following favorite teams, players, authors, topics or getting regular updates.

In his article, Hodgkins explains that “unique behind the scenes footage, exclusive interviews and easy access to detailed statistics have handed sports leagues and teams a golden opportunity to turn their websites and social channels into valuable destinations for information-hungry fans.”

Techcrunch even conducted a recent survey, which found that 78% of industry experts believe that fan engagement tech will have the largest impact on live streaming and esports in the next year.

Sports fans are already excited about players and upcoming events — they’re practically itching to interact with one another and around related content. The more opportunities you give them to engage on your platform, the more data you’ll be able to gather on who they are and what kinds of content and experiences they like.

Not only can sports companies sell this consumer data to advertisers, but “by knowing that their audience are, say, mostly men aged between 18 and 25 who read about basketball on a daily basis, advertisers have a huge strategic advantage when choosing where to spend their budget,” says Hodgkins.

Targeting Content to Known Users

As sports companies learn who their audience members are and how they react to different types of content, they can create content and experiences that delight their communities. For instance, knowing which player is your community’s favorite can help you generate extremely high-performing, related content that your audience will devour and generate conversations around. Plus, the more engaging and relevant your platform is, the more likely your community is to grow.

By serving up a premium experience to fans, sports media is able to capture meaningful data, which can significantly improve conversion strategies, grow revenue and increase consumer loyalty.

Stop relying on third-party news aggregators and social media platforms to run your ads off of, and instead, become the primary destination for consumers.

Get to know your fans on your own properties. Give them the content and experiences they love. Then use their data to inform business strategies and grow revenue. It really is as simple as that.