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How Engagement Tools Can be Leveraged in the OTT Space

Once you implement the right tools on your platform, you can engage your audience and ultimately grow your revenue.

When it comes to over-the-top (OTT) media services — streaming platforms that rely on internet instead of satellite or cable — an overwhelming amount of organizations are serving up extremely interesting content. But here’s the thing: content isn’t everything. Your audience is.

In order to build tight-knit, engaged and profitable communities around your content, you need to spark conversations among consumers. So give people a great experience where they can discuss topics, form human connections and interact with one another, all within the context of your content.

This, of course, all starts with on-site engagement tools.

Once you implement the right tools on your platform, you can engage your audience and ultimately grow your revenue. In fact, we’ve observed that organizations with engagement and conversion tools can actually triple their ROI.

That said, here are a few ways to leverage engagement tools in the OTT space:

Get People Talking

If you thought that conversation tools (like real-time commenting widgets, live blogs and live chats) should be reserved strictly for blogs, you’re in for a bit of a shock. These types of community-building tools can and should be used on OTT platforms as well.

Conversations matter. By generating conversations around your content, your audience will have access to a premium user experience.

Engagement tools allow OTT providers of all genres to facilitate a socially immersive experience, prompting meaningful connections between viewers based on content they truly care about.

Take sports-streaming platforms, for instance. Organizations have a massive opportunity to open their content to real-time conversations around what sports fans are watching as they watch it. Live blogs can also be used to provide play-by-play updates on games and major milestones.

Research has found that “71% of sports fans crave ‘deeper immersion’ when watching live games.”

However, most consumers, not just sports fans, crave social interaction online. So make the most of their appetite for socialization.

By increasing the opportunities your subscribers have to talk to one another, they’ll begin to form regular habits, where they return to and interact with your platform.

Build That Community

Once you’ve added engagement tools to your platform, you’re ready for the next step: building your community through excitement and trust.

Use your tools to generate buzz around popular personalities and content through interactive events, like Q&As or AMAs. This is a great way to promote upcoming shows, movies and videos right on your platform. Imagine the impact of having a celebrity engaging directly with your audience around your content.

The trust between your brand and audience can be strengthened through these types of positive, engaging experiences. Trust is a highly important community-building element as it paves the way for brand loyalty. Compared to the experiences on social media, where trolls and bots run wild and trample over your valuable content, you can protect your audience’s experiences on your own properties through moderation.

You can also grow your audience by highlighting model community behavior in comment sections. Or, you can leverage a moderated rating and review system. If consumers see helpful, accurate suggestions on what to watch, your platform can become a place where people come to read authentic reviews.

“Operators that invest in functionality that maximizes fan engagement will see a 24% uplift in subscriber acquisition,” states Deltatre’s 2019 report.

In other words, engagement tools in the OTT space can accelerate subscription revenue growth if used to their full potential.

Understand Your Audience

Your audience data is important, but this isn’t new information. What you may not know is that it’s essential to look beyond the general insights you have on your audience demographics and size. Instead, understand the bigger picture by analyzing the complete behavior of your users. This can be accomplished by gathering first-party data from all on-site engagement tools and content.

Identify what anonymous users (your potential customers) and known users are doing all across your properties. As a result, you can get fully-formed ideas of what your consumers like and dislike. Use first-party data from your tools to improve the content and experience you’re providing by serving up more personalized or recommended content.

While many OTT providers are looking at the customers on their platforms, they aren’t digging deep enough. They need to take their analytical efforts a step further by analyzing what audiences are doing in general and making strategic decisions based on that.

For example, user data can enhance your conversion and retention strategies. Your engagement tool provider can also keep an eye on your audience’s behavior, and send signals to your paywall provider when they are ready to subscribe or are about to churn. If users are close to churning, which can be identified based on drops in engagement, they can be sent a special discount of content offer.

Whether you’re a sports media organization or host a unique video-streaming solution, engagement tools will allow you to build a community that thrives around your content — in a sustainable way.

The Key Engagement Tool Metrics Media Organizations are Losing Out On

There are a number of engagement tools that publishers can leverage to build digital communities. Before you commit to any community engagement solution, we want to make sure you’re fully benefiting from the tools you choose to invest in.

After all, it’s important to monitor a number of key metrics that measure the health and growth of your digital community. As you gather information on how your users are interacting with one another around your content, you can fine-tune your editorial and subscription strategies around audience behavior. Keep in mind that third-party cookies are no longer an effective way to capture your community’s information, meaning you now have to turn to the rich data from your own platform to collect it.

Set your business up for success by ensuring your engagement tools are giving you the following metrics:

Daily, weekly and monthly active users

While the number of new users is important to keep track of and could represent the success of your user acquisition strategies, it fails to take into account churn and loyalty. A growing, active user base, on the other hand, highlights the fact that you’re providing value to your community.

The definition of an active user depends on your individual objectives and product offering. For us, the number of active users includes active commenters, users who authenticate and users who spend more than five seconds reading comments.

A good rule of thumb is to aim for 20-40% of your monthly unique visitors to be in the active user category.

Engagement Velocity

The engagement velocity is essentially the number of aggregate engagement actions per minute. This is another helpful metric to keep track of that can help predict how popular your content will become based on the speed of user engagement with your front-facing tools.

Use this metric to find out how well your content is resonating with users.

Daily, weekly and monthly active engagement

“Many publishers are focused on fostering deeper engagement with loyal users, who exhibit a higher propensity to return, and ultimately to subscribe,” reads a new report by the Local Media Association.

Be sure to monitor the number of daily, weekly and monthly active engagement on your platform over time and across pages. Over time, it helps you measure the impact of strategic decisions, and across pages, it helps you identify highly engaging pages early on and improve their visibility to maximize conversions.

On average, we see an annual increase of 20% in active engagement across our clients.

Percent of user attention time in comment sections

Time spent on-page is a common metric that publishers keep a close eye on. But to get a thorough understanding of your audience’s engagement level, you need to dig a little bit deeper.

Most users are passive consumers of content — that means they are more likely to read than contribute to a conversation. For this reason, the percent of time users spend reading comments can be a good indicator of community engagement. While engagement will vary depending on article type, our clients see a monthly average of 9.46% to 26.53% of user attention time in commenting sections across their platforms (with some as high as 43%).

Looking to boost this number for your platform?

Last year, Microsoft conducted a study, which concluded that good content is the key to getting users to spend more time engaging with your content. This is especially important as the study found that the human attention span has been reduced from an average of 12 seconds to eight.

Moderated conversations can also be an asset in capturing user attention by helping users feel protected enough to participate in discussions.

Civility Trends

Your audience’s online engagement is in fact dependent on civility — toxicity has a negative impact on engagement, ad revenue and brand image.

To keep track of your community’s online health, monitor civility trends across your platform. This can be as simple as watching the rate of disabled posts (disabled posts / all posts), which allows you to assess at a high level if users, in general, are complying with your community guidelines.

Dive a bit deeper into your engagement tools’ civility trends by monitoring the disabled posts even more closely. If you’re able to classify the reason behind disabling posts, you can monitor the violation trends and create strategies to resolve specific violation types. For example, if you’re seeing a lot of political hostility around an election, you may choose to keep a close eye on related articles in the politics section of your platform.

Here’s an example of one of our moderation dashboards:

Make the most of your engagement solutions by monitoring these metrics on a regular basis, and identify related strengths and weaknesses on your platform. Only then can you adjust your business’ strategies to build a loyal community.

If you’re unsure of where your numbers stand in the media industry, you can use the Google News Initiative tool to see where your data stands and set benchmarks to help your organization grow.

If you liked this article, you’ll love reading about what every publisher should ask a potential tech partner.

How Audience Engagement Tools Impact Revenue

Engaged users increase your pageviews, time on site, and ultimately, revenue. But what is an engaged user exactly? Simply put, it’s a website visitor who…

Last updated June 14^th, 2018

Engaged users increase your pageviews, time on site, and ultimately, revenue.

But what is an engaged user exactly?

Simply put, it’s a website visitor who is actively involved with or interested in your brand. In a study led by researchers from Google and Yahoo, they categorized user engagement in four ways:

Bounce: user did not engage with the article and left within 10 seconds after arriving
Shallow engagement: user stays and reads 50% of the article
Deep engagement: user reads more that 50% of the article (means he had to scroll down which indicates commitment)
Complete engagement: user posts a comments or a reply on the article

We would define an “engaged user” as anyone who likes, dislikes, shares content or comments, posts a comment, replies to a comment, or follows content/authors/other users. The more actions they complete, the higher their engagement.

It’s also important to note that some actions are “worth” more, or signify higher engagement. For example, a user who posts a comment is more engaged than someone who simply likes content, because they are taking more time to provide a personal opinion. A user who follows an author, story, comment or other user is more engaged than someone who shares an article because they are proactively choosing to be informed and updated in real time, showing significant interest.

So how do you engage your users or encourage them to perform these actions?

Audience engagement tools increase social interactions

Audience engagement tools give users more opportunities to engage with your brand and other community members, much like social media.

Media brands and publishers using these types of tools can expect to see significant increases in comments, replies and likes. One such brand, Graham Media Group, saw the following results after implementing engagement tools across seven of their news sites:

Increase in total comments & replies

increase in total interactions

Increase in commentper user

Increase in repliesper user

We also found that users who visited pages with engagement tools produced a 248% lift in weekly pageviews per user and a 364% lift in time-spent on site per week.

	Total Weekly Pageviews Per User	Total Weekly Attention Time Per User
Did not view engagement tools	2.07	4.07 minutes
Viewed engagement tools	7.20	18.80 minutes
Lift	+248%	+364%

*From analyzing the data across 600+ media organizations

Additionally, across our network of 600 media brands, 80% of all user registrations occurred on pages with engagement tools. And users who register generate 5x more return visits per week compared to non-registered users.

Now we come to the final question: how do these KPIs impact revenue?

Increased ad revenue

Research from data scientists confirms that not only do pageviews per visit increase ad revenue, but so does session time per user, as depicted in the graphs below. It’s also evident that getting users beyond the first few pageviews or seconds offers exponential revenue potential.

You’ll notice that session time has a surprisingly similar positive correlation with revenue as pageviews. Increased attention time means that there is more time for the ads to load on the page, and there is also a greater chance that a user will see an ad and potentially click on it.

Increased subscription revenue

Researchers Zalmanson and Oestreicher-Singer found that a user’s willingness to pay for premium services is more strongly associated with their online social activity than their content consumption.

In other words, users who engage more with other community members and with content are likelier to subscribe. In order to raise engagement levels, Zalmanson and Oestreicher-Singer suggest content producers should invest in a platform that provides the social engagement tools necessary to encourage active participation.

Doing so can increase subscriptions significantly, as witnessed by a New England media company that saw digital subscriptions jumped by 410% over three years after implementing automated audience engagement and targeting tools. Additionally, by displaying relevant content to anonymous visitors, they were able to increase the number of registered users by 9%.

Interestingly, Zalmanson and Oestreicher-Singer also found that users are more likely to subscribe if they have connections with other subscribers. The more subscriber friends that users have, the likelier they are to pay for premium services. This is likely due to the psychological phenomenon of social proof or social influence, where people mimic the actions of others because they assume it’s the “correct” behavior. Knowing this, publishers may want to consider how they can highlight their subscribed users so that their followers or friends are aware of their purchase decision.

Conclusion

If you have the right audience engagement tools in place, your audience will return to your website organically and regularly. It’s also less expensive to encourage your current website visitors to engage than it is to purchase new eyeballs on an ongoing basis. Not only will you save on marketing and advertising costs, but you’ll also increase your pageviews, attention time, online interactions and – most importantly – your advertising and subscription revenues.

Tag: engagement tools