first party data Archives

Data Trailblazing: An Interview with Viafoura’s Director of Data and Analytics

With over a decade of experience in the realm of publishing at The Globe and Mail, Shengqing Wu, Director of Data and Analytics at Viafoura, is uniquely positioned to provide remarkable insights into the way data serves and supports the many moving parts of a news organization. Having witnessed first hand the evolution of a once print dominant industry as it shifted more and more into a digital landscape, Shengqing – a brilliant data analyst – is also equipped with the nuanced insights that only experience in the newsroom amongst editors and analysts alike can bring.

We sat down with Shenqing to chat about how publishers approach data vs how they should approach it, why simplifying data rears the most sophisticated insights, and what on earth is a generational audience funnel?

Changes in data, publishing, and analytics at large

Shen, as we know, the world of data is in a perpetual state of growth. In some parts thanks to evolving technologies and learning capabilities, and also because of cultural shifts and the way consumers behave based on their lived experiences. So, in your experience over the years, what are some of the changes you’ve observed in the way data is acquired and utilized in publishing?

Obviously throughout the past many years, publishers have become much more sophisticated in terms of data, manipulational data strategies in general, and understanding their audiences. Really trying to study behavioural data from the business is the key. Now, this also ties into [the publisher’s] business model as well, right?

Right.

Ten years ago maybe 99% of media publishers relied on – if we’re talking about digital revenue, they’re relying on advertising – many publishers started to transform into subscription model. This model is where publishers gain access to audience behaviour. This kind of data, behavioural data, has become more important than ever because all publishers want their audiences to generate the habit of, for example, reading three times a week or more.

Which makes sense for any publication, but specifically for digital publishers, right? The more a reader visits the site, the more time they spend on its pages, which in turn means more data points.

Those data signals are very valuable. That’s one of the things we help with at Viafoura, taking those data points and signals from things like comments, likes, Q&As, and applying machine learnings and natural language processes to get the advanced contextual information.

And then that data becomes what, exactly?

Declarative data, which is something Viafoura provides. Basically, what people say, how they feel, what is their opinion… Through their data they’re directly telling us what they’re interested in by reading an article.

Analytics: Keeping it simple rears sophisticated results

As things continue to shift and change, the demise (though perpetually postponed) of cookies, new consumer behaviours, new technology that changes the way in which we consume our content and, and, and… The list goes on.

With that in mind, if I were a publisher staring at my digital experience platform’s (DXP) data analytics dashboard – are there key indicators you think I could keep tabs on to get a solid understanding of the health of my business?

The basics. The very basics. Article consumption behaviour, total comments, things like that. We recommend going through these, but –

I had a feeling there was more to it..!

We believe in a user-focused or ‘segment focused’ approach. User segmentation will play a vital role and it’s a way to visualize the user segments that are helping the business, how they’re performing, and also being able to compare one segment to another.

What’s so helpful about being able to compare different audience segments?

Let’s say you have one segment that’s excited about politics, and then another that’s more excited about celebrity news. So? Then what? By being able to go into a dashboard and compare those two different segments in various ways, we can find behavioural patterns.

How long does one segment typically spend reading, what are their shared interests, what are interests exclusive to the individual segments and so on. So, while the celebrity focused segment is more interested in shopping and the political leaning audience segment tends to enjoy reading about personal finance – there may be similarities that we find through comparison that become valuable behavioural insights.

Okay, so by being able to compare the similarities and differences between two audience segments that land on the same site, a publisher could actually learn a great deal about what kind of content they could stand to use more or less of and perhaps retain multiple segments by customizing their experiences.

Right.

Got it. Earlier you had mentioned that there are the ‘basics’ of what to look for on an analytics dashboard; time on page, number of comments, time spent in the comments section, etc… Are there things that you’ve noticed get overlooked because perhaps they seem too obvious, but are in fact really valuable data signals that lead to richer insights?

Typically what we suggest is that

look at their different conversion metrics. We really aim to help our clients drive conversions of unknown users through their funnels down into other more valuable and helpful segments. Converting more users who don’t know the company into authenticated, registered users who have provided their e-mail. You can do so much more with those authenticated users.

Sometimes we will use examples of these conversion metrics with new clients to show them just how valuable a more engaged user is to their data findings.

I see, so it’s by looking at conversion metrics as a KPI that you’re saying we’re able to discern exactly where and when content is achieving things that contribute to hitting audience growth OKRs or adding value to digital ad space.

As an aside, for those following along with this conversation, these value exchange moments are the instances where users decide to offer their information in exchange for the experience being offered. They’re incredible sources of insights for not only informing content strategy, but also building community, making design changes, improving discoverability of the site itself, and so much more.

It’s about knowing users, right? Another thing to look for within these conversion metrics are to keep an eye on where these conversions occur in proximity to design choices, products and their features. For example, at Viafoura, we are able to work with our clients and definitively say ‘the engagement starter that we implemented has a conversion of XX%’.

Which means that with that data they can strengthen weaker points of conversion or learn from winning points of conversion! When the data makes sense, everything makes sense.

Are ‘generational funnels’ the new normal?

Before we wrap things up, there was one more thing we had hoped to pick your brain about; there seems to be a budding conversation in the industry around crafting multiple audience funnels for one publication or brand, which isn’t unheard of at this point, but more specifically the idea of crafting generational funnels. Meaning, funnels that aim to address the vastly different behaviours that we now see existing all at once in the same market.

Gen Z doesn’t behave anywhere remotely like Boomers when it comes to news media content consumption – or consumption in general, it would seem – which makes the concept of multiple funnels make a lot of sense to me. For example, some publishers have opted to offer ‘piece by piece’ payment options for people who don’t want a subscription, just the content behind the paywall. This strategy is more Gen-Z focused as they tend to skew more subscription resistant and news avoidant, while Gen-X and Boomers still have a more traditional, habitual behavioural approach to content consumption – picture them reading the newspaper with a coffee as opposed to Gen-Z intentionally searching for content built around their interests.

My question for you is: are you seeing a big change in consumer behaviours and, to that, an increase in interest from publishers in taking this funnel-diverse approach?

At the moment, not a lot, to be honest.

As I mentioned before, we prefer to take a segment focused approach – so this kind of thinking would fall under that. Using data to observe patterns, make connections, create segmented audience profiles in order to help clients. When we compare across different segments we’re able to discern these patterns and layer the data to reveal these kinds of indicators. So, what you were talking about –

Generational Funnels?

Yea, that is generally enough for us to make specific segments that consider age demographics and other data signals, but it’s not like ‘This Is Our Gen-Z Subscription Model’.

I see. I guess then it’s more relevant to look at the big-picture of the audience segment, with a bit of consideration given to age but more primarily to what all of the data tells us holistically.

Yes, but also – there are age specific patterns that are super important, they just might not define or merit a whole funnel all on their own.

Alright, so that’s a ‘stay tuned for more details’ when it comes to Generational Funnels! Thank You Shen. This has been an incredibly informative conversation and thank you for your time!

Of course. Any time!

Observe, analyze, learn, reiterate.

As time goes on, the world of data continues to shift and evolve. What’s important to remember is that data is, whether it’s the cookies that will soon be gone in 2024 or changes to site-to-site tracking, data is the language our audiences use to guide us to their loyalty and to help create meaningful content experiences for them. As long as we don’t lose sight of the humanity in the data, there is always going to be something to learn.

Loyalty Plays: The Next Era Of Retention

There’s an old saying in marketing that “it costs more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one.” Some studies have shown it can cost up to five times more to focus solely on customer acquisition at the disservice of customer retention.

Publishers who focus solely on registration and pumping out as much content as possible often neglect relationships with existing readers. By taking stock of current relationships and finding new ways to reward subscribed readers for brand loyalty, publishers are far more likely to improve customer retention rates.

Don’t devalue retention: it’s more profitable than you know

There’s money to be made in retention, even with a slight move of the needle in the right direction. According to a Harvard Business School study, improving customer retention rates by as little as 5% can improve profitability by 25%. In some cases, profits can rise up to 95%.

Those findings are similar to research conducted by Gartner, which determined that 80% of business profits come from 20% of existing customers. Additionally, the success rate of converting an existing reader into a paying subscriber ranges between a 60% to 70% success rate. Conversely, the success rate of converting a new reader into a subscriber ranges between 5% and 20%.

The bottom line is that there’s plenty of value to be found in reader retention. Publishers just need the right approach and the right resources to engage with existing readers to convert them into brand loyal subscribers.

Personalization fosters loyalty and retention

Communicating with your existing readers using personalized content experiences is the best way to earn reader loyalty. What and how you communicate with your readers makes all the difference between retaining their business and losing their interest.

For example, if you were to publish generic content week after week, it’s hard for readers to see the value in the experience. Instead, the audience sentiment will be that you’re just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. The content loses all of your brand’s personality that first resonated with readers, increasing the likelihood that they churn and never return to your site.

On the other hand, personalized content that appeals to specific reader interests is far more engaging to your audience. By demonstrating that your creative team understands their readers, and chooses to publish content that adds greater value to their experience with your website, you have a winning formula to improve retention rates and, hopefully, subscription rates.

Collect first-party data to gain those audience insights

One of the best ways to boost audience engagement and increase the value that readers experience from your publication is to encourage their engagement with your community. Encourage your authors to add the first comment to freshly produced content in an effort to kickstart a conversation with your readers. Encourage your audience to post their thoughts and use a commenting moderation tool to analyze the sentiment shared by your readers.

As more comments are submitted, you automatically build a wealth of first-party data that you can leverage to gain more insight into your reader tastes and preferences. You can pick up on things like what themes within the content people react towards, and you can measure the preference for one type of author over another.

Once you collect enough first-party data to really understand your audience, you can revamp your content strategy into a data-driven initiative. Focus the subject matter of your content around the themes, topics, and interests that your data informs you is what matters most to your readers. Show your avid community that you listen to their responses by producing more of the content they’ve indicated is what they want. This is how you build a loyal following that is likely to provide customer lifetime value for years to come.

Incentivize readers to act with special recognitions

To encourage further debate around your content, you can assign badges to comments that generate responses from other readers. Show your most valuable readers and/or subscribers that you recognize their contributions to the discussion, proving to them that they’re considered VIPs among your reading audience. Earn that reader loyalty and reap the fruits of those labors!

New Data: 40% of Your Subscribers Are Sleeping On Your Content

Let’s say you’ve effectively done all of the right things to acquire new subscribers. You’ve created really interesting content and pushed it out for your readers to consume. Before you know it, you’ve monetized your efforts with a new batch of converted paid subscribers.

That’s the good news, and an accomplishment that your publishing team should be proud to hold up as a gold medal. The journey doesn’t end when readers agree to subscribe, though. Once you have new subscribers, you need to monitor how actively engaged those subscribers are with the content on your website.

Who Are The Active Subscribers And Who Are The Sleeping Subscribers?

You want to organize your subscribers into different tiers based on their level of engagement with the website. Bucket users into labels of active subscribers, who are the ones that visit and engage the site on a near daily basis, and sleeping subscribers, which describes people who seldom return to the site after they become subscribers.

Your active subscribers are your highest valued customers with the greatest potential customer lifetime value (CLTV). These subscribers visit your site daily or weekly to consume fresh content, and they’ll often engage in community activities, such as commenting or participating in lively discussions with other readers. When the time comes for the subscription to renew, there’s little chance that a churn will occur instead.

On the other end of the spectrum are your “sleeping subscribers.” These subscribers have paid for a subscription, which is a good thing. According to your audience insights and analytics platforms, they haven’t visited the website since they completed the subscription form.

Studies have shown that sleeping subscribers make up approximately 40% of a publisher’s subscription base. Sleeping subscribers have the highest probability to churn before the subscription renewal, so it’s vitally important to re-engage and retain as many of those subscriptions as feasibly possible.

Remind Sleeping Subscribers Their Journey With Your Publication Has Only Begun

There’s an old saying in the publishing space that 80% of recurring revenue comes from 20% of paid subscribers. Essentially, this means that subscribers who are the most active and the most engaged with your content are responsible for providing the bulk of subscription revenue to your publication.

The driving reason for this challenge is that up to half of your existing subscriber base is not motivated to come back to the site. Once they complete the subscription, they feel their journey with your website has come to an end. As a successful publishing business, your job is to remind them that the journey has only begun.

According to the American Press Institute, only 31% of publishers target low-engagement subscribers with re-engagement campaigns before their subscription renewal dates come up. That means your business can be one of the three out of ten that forms a successful re-engagement strategy to convert the sleepers into active users.

Re-engagement is the most important step in this process. If subscribers are not engaged with your content, they’re likely to balk when the renewal charge comes up on their bank statements. A churn is likely to occur… Unless you can win them back over and remind them why they subscribed to your website in the first place.

First-Party Data Is The Alarm To Wake Sleeping Subscribers

Using an audience insights platform to collect first-party data, you have the necessary touchpoints to form rich audience profiles of your subscribers. Build those profiles so that you can gain a better understanding of how to wake up the sleepers.

You can view the articles they consumed that led them to go beyond the paywall. You can identify topics that resonated to drive the subscription in the first place. You can see what authors they followed, or community discussions they participated in that really shone a light on their passion for a subject.

All of these touchpoints are examples of first-party data that tell you what motivated your sleeping subscribers to pay for your content in the first place. Use that knowledge to build highly personalized emails and activate re-engagement campaigns to awaken those sleepers and guide them back to your publishing experience.

Send Personalized Emails To Shake The Sleepers Awake

Since you’ve collected the audience data and built out the profiles, you already know the best way to re-engage with your sleeping subscribers. Now, you just need to create the messaging to facilitate that re-engagement strategy.

Use your content recommendation module to pull out the articles that align with the topics which led your sleepers to initially subscribe for your content. Once the recommendation engine feeds you the suggestions, drop the links into highly personalized newsletter email templates. Create messaging that triggers the same passion as the articles that led the sleepers on their initial journey with your site to reinvoke those same feelings.

By reminding them of that experience, the sleepers will wake up and they’ll follow those links back to your site. This is when you can create a whole new personalized experience to convert sleeping subscribers into active subscribers with the highest CLTV potential.

Data Is King: Personal Experiences Boost Conversions By 30%

What’s your preferred experience with published content? Would you prefer a site that feeds you generic articles, or a publisher that knows how to personalize the content you see? The obvious answer is the second option. A personalized website is far more enjoyable as it provides the topics, opinions, and commentary that speak directly to your unique set of interests.

Some publications are better at personalization than others. These publications know how to identify if an article, or even a headline, will encourage readers to spend more time on the site. Their content is informative and capable of adding value to the reader’s experience so they feel compelled to consume the story. They also know how to use highly targeted links within the articles to drive up clickthrough rates.

By adopting personalization as part of an overarching content strategy, publishers remain connected to readers who are very protective of what they consume. There’s a rising trend of “selective news avoidance” all over the world. According to CNN, only 23% of people get their news from news websites. Young people, in particular, are more likely to use social media for news updates.

Can Personalized Content Trump News Avoidance?

Reuters Institute commissioned their annual Digital News Report. The study analyzed a YouGov survey of 93,000 participants from 46 different countries. Among the key findings was a growing lack of trust in newsworthy content, a problem with its strongest foothold in the United States. Only 26% of US respondents say they trust the news, a three point decline from 2021, and the lowest positive sentiment among all surveyed nations.

Common reasons cited for selective news avoidance have to do with growing polarization, perceived media bias, and a sense of too much politics in the news. But a senior Reuters executive, who helped commission the Digital News Report, says the issue goes much deeper.

“A large number of those who selectively avoid the news say the news has a negative effect on their mood,” says Rasmus K. Nielsen, Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Click-Bait Headlines Or Insightful Titles: Which Is The Best Approach?

What are the primary causes for news avoidance? According to the International Institute of Information Technology – Hyderabad (IIIT-H), one of the reasons could be that some publishers rely too frequently on “click-bait headlines.”

In a research study entitled “Clickbait’s Impact On Visual Attention-An Eye Tracker Study,” IIIT-H studied gaze-fixation from 60 participants to measure the amount of visual attention paid by readers to different articles. One group of articles had click-bait headlines, while the other group used educational titles. The results found that click-bait headlines received far less visual attention from readers than articles with non-click-bait headlines.

Click-bait headlines promote a misleading title separate from the crux and context of the article content. According to IIIT-H, people feel duped by misleading headlines, feeling a disconnection between the promoted title and the body of the article. They abandon the page rather than continue the experience, reducing total engagement rates.

Instead of creating false headlines to trigger quick clickthrough rates, successful publishers create thought provoking titles, encouraging readers to consume the entire article. The best way to create headlines that generate engagement is to develop a deeper understanding of what resonates with the intended reading audience. To gain those audience insights, you can use the power of first-party data to align engagement strategies with audience preferences.

First-Party Data Is The Intersection For Creators And Readers

Two of the best examples of first-party data are pageviews and time on-site. You can rest assured that people are intrigued by your content if both of these numbers are trending in the upward direction.

Aim to develop a deeper understanding of what best resonates with your readers. You can identify commonalities in things like the tone of the articles, the positioning of the headlines, common topical themes, and certain keywords that appear in articles with the highest amount of reader engagement.

Your creative team can access these findings in your audience insights platform dashboard to view the results for themselves. They can view the data and clearly identify which articles earn the most engagement from readers. This will help them pivot the content strategy to focus on future stories that support greater audience engagement.

Profile, Personalize, Perform: The Power Of First-Party Data

There’s a lot of power to be wielded with first-party data, which gives your publication a leg up on competitors. Your audience insights platform stores demographic details about your readers, including variables like age, location, backgrounds, and past consumption behaviors on your website. Pool these insights together into rich audience profiles that tell your creators how different types of readers are likely to engage with the content.

You can also segment your audience into different buckets: new readers, known readers, and subscribed readers. The difference in each audience category is measured by their degree of engagement with your website. New readers are fresh to the site, which means there’s very little behavioral data to profile. Known readers are people who have provided at least one example of first-party demographic data that you can use to start building your profiles. Subscribed readers are those who have fully converted and actively paid for premium access to your best content.

As you build your audience profiles, focus intently on the subscribed audience. Look back at the patterns that led people on the journey to fill out the subscription form. What were the articles they read? What common topics or themes were prevalent in those stories? Where did they spend the most time on your site?

Using these enriched profiles, coupled with the data you have on your top performing content, you have all of the necessary information to personalize what readers experience the next time they visit your site. You can deploy highly segmented examples of content that appeal to different readers at each stage in the consumption journey with your website.

Focus on creating personalized content that enables those deep journeys, which should help boost subscription conversion rates by 30%. Watch those pageview and time on-site metrics shoot through the roof by deploying this strategic approach!

Ad Revenue Directly Linked To Depth Of First-Party Data

One of the greatest challenges that publishers are facing the world over, is an ever-changing digital landscape.

This new age of publishing comes with a wide range of demands; publishers must treat technological adaptation as imperative, devise more efficient ways of understanding net-new consumer behaviours as new generations age into news consumption, and always be prepared for the moment when, at the whim of a small handful of tech giants, months of work can be upended overnight. Lest we forget the mayhem that ensued when Google announced it would be eliminating third-party cookies.

Publishers and the global markets at large have, more or less, adjusted to the new normal – even though Google yet again delayed the cookie demolition to 2024 instead of 2023. Having adapted to first-party data, for the most part, publishers have been able to uncover reasonable solutions to all of the above demands. First-party data analytics can inform new insights and illuminate a multitude of fresh paths to heightened revenue and a diversification of income streams. One such stream is ad revenue.

Thus, to the laundry list of things publishers must have these days, one must add: a fully fleshed out revenue-focused ad space strategy. In the wake of Google’s big cookie announcement, advertisers quickly invested billions of dollars in order to capture as much value from third-party data as they could. Those investments were fast and furious, but quickly diminished after their peak in 2021. According to research conducted by Insider Intelligence, the rate that advertisers have spent on digital display advertising has since steadily declined as projections show diminishing investments in the years to come.

US Programmatic Digital Display Ad Spending

What does this mean as publishers, brands, and corporations look ahead?

No more cookies: what this means for publishers

It’s important to note that, in the chart above, not all of those display-ad investments were directly or even loosely tied to publishers. Businesses of all backgrounds advertise on the web, but the media and publishing industry is uniquely affected by the pending end of third-party cookies. Not to mention the rise of crucial privacy protection mandates emerging globally, all with the intent of safeguarding consumer data. At face value, this may seem like a daunting challenge for publishers who rely so heavily on data to guide their content and editorial teams – but is it?

The digitally savvy consumer is no longer anomalous, they are the norm. Modern consumers are far more protective of their privacy, well aware of the value their information holds, and they’re much less quick to trust any old businesses to respect their data. According to Deloitte, 40% of consumers don’t trust online services to respect their privacy. Which, when it comes to ad space and ad revenue for publishers, means they’re less likely to interact with unwarranted and unwanted ads.

A growing trend emerging in consumer behaviour is that the timing and relevance of an advertisement on their journey is of the utmost importance; they want the right ad for them, at just the right time – anything else will diminish their interest, trust, and brand loyalty.

Listen & Learn: earn an audience’s trust with their own data

With consumers more fickle (justifiably so) than ever, how can organizations navigate their user needs and meet their own business goals?

By forming real, meaningful relationships with them.

If a publisher is able to leverage their data to provide the content and experiences their audiences want to have with their site, consumers will feel connected to their brand. Over time, affiliation with the brand will nurture readers to develop an affinity for the publication, making them more likely to come back for new content. This means that publishers are in direct possession of their very own high-value niche-interest users that, if analyzed and segmented properly – can raise their ad space cost per mille(CPM) astronomically and give prospective ad partners access to ideal target audiences.

First-party data is the resource that allows publishers to create those kinds of brand experiences. Unlike third-party data, first-party data is directly collected from consenting users. Each time a user interacts with a site by visiting a webpage, commenting on a post, searching for specific articles, etc., each of those touchpoints provides first-party data points.

It’s through collecting all those insights that organizations can build rich audience profiles and create content that appeals to their users’ interests. This personalization of direct relationships between brands and their audiences is paramount to continued growth and success.

The rewards from personalization are highly engaged users who interact with more content on publishers’ sites, including personalized display ads promoted by their affiliates. Personalization is one of the keys to bolstering growth in audience, reduction in attrition, and improving ad and subscription revenue. According to McKinsey & Company, 71% of users want publishers to personalize their experiences.

The audience’s intent is laid bare; all that’s left is to do the work in order to analyze, interpret, and take strategic action with their first-party data.

First-party data is the key to an ad revenue boom

By creating a first-party data strategy, publishers can win over their audiences and create longstanding relationships with loyal consumers of their content. Imbued with brand-trust and their intrinsic value as consumers, these audiences become key partners in building profitable relationships with existing and prospective ad partners who want to buy engaged time with high-value interest-relevant users.

Google and Facebook dominate the digital advertising landscape, controlling a whopping 57% of all digital ad revenue. Although, even with the lion’s share in their possession, the returns on those investments leave much to be desired. According to HubSpot, 68% of marketers say paid display advertising is “very important” or “extremely important” to their overall marketing strategy. However, a “good” return on advertising spend (ROAS) is a 4:1 ratio, meaning $4 of revenue for every $1 spent.

Given the complexity of Google and Facebook’s algorithms, which have traditionally relied on third-party cookies to reach viewers, many advertisers fall well short of that average benchmark when calculating ROI on their ad campaigns. In fact, 80% of marketers say their campaigns were less effective without accurate audience identifiers. Those advertisers need to grow their businesses, and they need a better way to do so.

Publishers with detailed audience profiles are saviors for these advertisers. Audience profiles tell affiliate advertisers what consumers are looking for in terms of visuals, messages, offers, and promotions that motivate them to click on an ad insert. These profiles, built using first-party data, are far more valuable to advertisers than playing a guessing game with Google or Facebook.

The odds of achieving or exceeding that 4:1 ROAS benchmark are much higher with first-party data backed audience profiles.

The takeaway: don’t just collect first-party data – use it!

First-party data is the essential ingredient to creating a profound win for all parties. It’s a win for publications because they collect valuable audience insights that help inform what the best content to produce may be. It’s a win for audiences at large and individual users alike because they in turn receive more relevant content that appeals to their interests. It’s a win for advertising partners and affiliates because they know exactly what type of ad-content to promote on the goldilocks ad space that they now have access to. That audience-specific digital real estate will make it possible for them to cash in on greater ROIs that justify committing to high-end CPM digital ad spaces.

A detailed first-party data strategy has the potential to make any website very profitable. So long as publishers continue to build and maintain relationships with advertising partners that are eager to pay for access to their hard won audiences, first-party data informed ad-revenue strategies will always result in new and abundant revenue.

Community-Focused Tools And Tactics To Hit KPI and ROI Goals

This was originally posted on INMA.

If your current Digital Experience Platform(DXP) isn’t serving your community, or rather, is not enabling your organization to serve, sustain, and expand your community, then it’s not worth your money.

Furthermore, if you are fortunate enough to be host to a community, particularly one that enjoys engaging with and discovering the realm of their interests that you’ve created, you’re sitting on a gold mine of growth potential and first party data.

It’s no secret that an active, non-toxic community is a powerful driver of audience growth, but in order to make the most of community driven conversion opportunities there are some preparatory measures that can be taken.

Community Foundation

Before we begin honing in on the inner-workings of your community, take stock of the tools and strategies you currently have in place and assess whether or not they are providing a worthwhile ROI. Some questions to ask as you set about this task are:

Infrastructure and Discoverability

Does your site’s architecture drive visitors intuitively to where the community is at its best, or are there a number of barriers in their way?

Consider where on their journey users are confronted with a sign-up form of some sort. Then, evaluate if there’s greater potential for conversion by giving them a bit of free reign to see the value you have to offer elsewhere. Giving unregistered users enough access to see but not join on-site discussions or special events like a live Ask-Me-Anything community chat could be just the kind of content that is worth their time and, subsequently, their registered first-party data.

Does your current comment interface and strategy help or hinder engagement?

Providing users with the means to easily jump into the comments section and join discussions is an effective way to improve engagement. Recently, Viafoura partnered up with News-Press & Gazette Co. (NPG) to help them over-haul their prior approach to comment sections that relied on manual approval, resulting in endless queues of user contributions stuck in limbo. After integrating Viafoura’s Automated Moderation onto their platform, NPG saw a drastic improvement in their overall engagement as well as the complete reactivation of previously stagnant communities across a number of their sites.

Community Health

Have you and your teams taken measures to ensure that when new visitors arrive they’re greeted by a wholesome and inviting community?

If some of the first things visitors see are comments and discussions rife with vitriol and toxicity, they won’t stay long – if at all. In order to keep the peace and foster a welcoming space for newcomers, it’s imperative that you provide clear and concise community guidelines. These guidelines will assist in the preservation of your community’s well being by giving its members and your moderation teams consistent parameters to follow while reinforcing your brand values and interests while doing so.

In order to scale down some of the more taxing and meticulous moderation tasks (profanity, hate speech etc.), adopting an Intelligent Moderation Engine is a turn-key solution for immediate deflection of toxicity.

Create a Playground of Engagement

Plainly: creating an engaging and discoverable user experience (UX) will invigorate your audience. As publishers, there is an obvious responsibility to provide your readers with high-quality content that stands out in the vast and highly saturated digital media landscape. More specifically, as digital publishers, the journey that users go on as they experience your site and its content is just as important.

A digital media platform that gives its users a range of capabilities to engage – be it through exploration, discovery, or community – is guaranteed a far higher chance of earning consistent growth in registrations, longer time spent on-site, and an increasingly concise understanding of their audience’s behaviour and interests. All of which can contribute to an improvement in ad-revenue by providing you with the data necessary to prove the worth of your premium ad space to potential partners.

Topic and Author Follows

Topic and Author following capabilities are highly engaging points of conversion and excellent data collection avenues. By tracking what content and which authors are being followed via built in analytics, editorial and content strategies can be adjusted to meet the evident interests being shown in the declarative data that comes from these community specific actions.

In terms of engagement, users who follow particular authors or topics also have a far higher propensity for return visits because of the notifications they’ll receive when more content tied to what they follow is published.

Conclusion

In this digital age where an extensive and engaging digital experience platform is paramount to the success and longevity of digital media organizations, taking the time to create rewarding and enjoyable experiences for your audience communities is the least we can do. With the right tools and approach to a community focused growth strategy, publishers will make short work of achieving their ROIs and surpassing previous KPI goals.

First-Party Data Or Social Media Advertising: Which To Use?

Companies all over the world spend millions of dollars on social media advertising. For many years, it’s been one of the best avenues for brands seeking to expand their reach and visibility. By building a social following, brands gain direct access to customers already interested in their services and from there, speak to them directly and set about converting them into paying customers.

However, social media metrics leave much to the imagination, which is not an ideal way to set about developing audience strategies. Likes and comments on social posts are hard to quantify without more specific data, though some of the declarative data uncovered therein can help further an understanding of audience behaviors. Without access to concrete, sophisticated data, how can you build relevant audience profiles to augment your publishing strategy? And without those profiles, how do you know what to advertise to new audiences? How can you convince third-party affiliates to advertise on your site?

Publishers have recognized first-party data as not only a viable alternative to social media metrics, but a far more valuable resource with rich insights instrumental to audience growth and activation, subscription revenue, ad revenue, retention, and so much more. By investing in a first-party data strategy and taking advantage of resources that help you acquire, analyze, and interpret insights, publishers can track audience engagement across their digital property portfolios. By doing so, they’re able to make informed strategic decisions that drive conversion and support the efficacy of their audience funnels, thus ushering unregistered visitors into paid subscriptions.

Publishers report less value in social media advertising

A telling sign of how publishers are rethinking their approach to audience insights and how to spend their advertising dollars is revealed through the Publishers and Social Media: 2021 Trends report conducted by Echobox.

Based on a survey of 159 publishers from over 40 different countries, the findings revealed that 63% of respondents believed discovering and tapping into new audiences is now more important than ever. For publishers hoping to lead the curve, this report indicates an evident need for audience expansion strategies that connect to fresh eyed audiences as opposed to relying on brand-aware users who sought them out through social media channels.

In the same study, only 29% of publishers chose to prioritize investments in new social media channels. While many respondents said social media continues to be an excellent resource for “more referral traffic,” little is mentioned about the conversion rate to transform referral traffic into paid content subscriptions.

Additionally, social media algorithms continue to remain beyond the control of publishers who must do their best to anticipate upcoming changes and implement contingency plans for detrimental algorithmic changes. Four out of ten respondents say constant changes to Facebook’s algorithm cause an extreme and unexpected impact on traffic. This inconsistency makes it hard for publishers to predict accurate growth in both website visits and new subscription rates.

First-party data is a response to the changing times

Sometimes, the best growth strategy is less about bringing in more traffic from social media to a publishing site and more closely tied to establishing an approach that optimizes existing traffic with behavioral data. These insights are used by publishers to enhance content strategies by aligning writers and editors around data-driven audience insights. Data-informed teams are far better prepared to produce more content that strikes a chord with audiences and leaves them eager for more and prone to return visits with longer page visit durations.

Part of the reason for this approach is in reaction to updated consumer privacy protection laws. Mandates like GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy protection legislation have begun a depreciation, or retirement, of third-party cookies, which Google will indefinitely eliminate by 2023. These cookies have traditionally been used by brands and publishers to acquire audience insights and support advertising campaigns.

According to Google, 90% of North and South American publishers say stricter consumer privacy laws have forced them to adapt their strategies. Now, the vast majority of these publishers are leaning into first-party data in order to acquire more accurate and detailed information about their customers. First-party data allows publishers to build enriched audience profiles that third-party cookies and social media engagement could never provide.

Publisher ownership of first-party data leverages revenue-driven affiliate partnerships

First-party data gives publishers the insights and sophisticated specificity to enhance and take ownership of the direct relationship with their audiences. Since audience insights are acquired through reader interaction with published content, publishers retain the rights to that first-party data. This provides powerful leverage for publishers to increase advertising revenue through highly curated partnerships with specific affiliate advertisers.

It’s a great way to appeal to affiliates eager to advertise at a time when advertising budgets are being cut. Recent economic downturns have forced companies to scale back on their ad budgets, though they do still need to generate awareness and engagement.

As the proprietors of detailed first-party audience data, publishers can incentivize affiliate advertisers to spend their limited budgets wisely on ad inserts with the greatest potential for engagement and conversion. It’s a strategy that companies like Trusted Media Brands have successfully delivered upon, which has generated 40% year over year programmatic revenue growth.

Social media casts a wide net; first-party data chooses the right bait

When calculating the ROI on advertising campaigns, a helpful way to look at the dichotomy between social media advertising and using first-party data to connect with affiliates is to think of it like an analogy for fishing.

Social media advertising is essentially casting a wide net out into the digital ocean. The hope is that you use the social media algorithms effectively to maximize reach and engagement. Through that engagement, you need high clickthrough rates (CTRs) so that you have the best potential to grow paid subscribers of your content. Those subscriptions are the final achievement to prove the merit behind your social media advertising strategy.

There are a lot of holes in that approach, which is why using a first-party data strategy to convince affiliates that they should advertise on your site is far more effective. With first-party data and the audience profiles and segmentation it can provide, you don’t need to cast a wide net and hope for the best. Instead, you’re in a position to convince the right affiliates that their products and messaging have the greatest potential to connect with the consumers that make up your engaged audiences. When we choose the right bait, we stand a greater chance of catching exactly what we’re after.

First-party data is a win for publications and audiences alike. Audiences benefit from the improvements it informs and appreciate the thoughtful content produced for their interests. Publishers on the other hand stand to benefit greatly from the ability to appeal to their affiliates and encourage them to invest more of their advertising budgets into developing extensive relationships with their publication. Everybody wins and everybody gets more of what they want!

Are You Getting The Best Value Out Of Your Engagement Tools?

If you’ve invested in an audience engagement solution, you’re probably well aware of how important the data you collect from the platform will be for the future performance of your business. Insights into how your existing users engage with content and the community built around it allows you to optimise your strategy. An optimised content strategy means you’ll produce more content that should drive additional users to convert into loyal subscribers.

Making those strategic decisions requires the right platform so that you can collect those insights. You need a solution that helps you collect first-party data and analyse on-site user behaviour. With that data in hand, you can effectively maximise the 3Rs:

Registrations
Retention
Revenue

So how do you ensure you’re getting the best value out of your engagement tools? Our latest infographic offers a helpful visual guide on what you need from your platform and how it can help achieve your overarching business goals.

The right audience engagement platform should provide strategic recommendations that you can use to help grow the nature of your business. The technology should help you answer the questions of how to grow registrations, retain existing users, and increase revenue as the end benefit for all of your hard work.

Your team should find daily value from their audience engagement platform. They should not only know how to use the platform, but they should also understand why there’s so much value to be gained from these solutions. You’ll know the platform is a success if your team:

Feels motivated to use the platform every day
Increases productivity across the entire spectrum of your business
Understands how each of the core features helps solve the underlying business needs
Has the desire to collaborate with other departments and gain the deepest understanding of user intent and behavioural insights

If answers to any of these questions are anything short of yes, it might be time to ask yourself a much harder question: do you have the right audience engagement solution? Remember that audience engagement is the first step towards monetisation and greater revenue for your business. Without a platform that can help you gain the necessary insights to make effective revenue-driven decisions, you will likely struggle to achieve those aspirational growth targets.

What the true lifetime value of your digital audience looks like

Every audience member is a valuable potential source of revenue for your media organization. However, some users offer more value than others throughout their lifetime as readers.

So which visitors should you invest the most time and energy into nurturing across your digital properties?

Dan Seaman, Viafoura’s VP of product management, says the value of a user is ultimately down to the dollars you earn from them, but he adds that user value can also be measured through the data and user-generated content (UGC) you can extract from them.

“Someone who shares a lot of content might also be more valuable than someone who doesn’t because they’re essentially contributing free content into the digital experience for other users,” Seaman says.

So what does that mean for your organization?

The engagement gap between anonymous and registered users

While almost all audience members start as anonymous visitors, the faster you can convert them to registered users, the better.

In fact, Viafoura’s data team reveals that registered users are significantly more engaged than anonymous visitors, resulting in:

11 times more page views
3.7 times more days spent active on publisher properties
18.5 times more time spent on-site

All that additional engagement is key for publishers to collect critical data and insights to better understand and serve their audience.

“Being able to use that knowledge of your users to improve your content coverage and also inform the experience provides unique value-add,” Seaman explains. “By getting users to register, you’re also forming a direct relationship, meaning you can communicate with them, personalize their experiences based on their profiles and gather behavioural data around the content they engage with.”

This means that your registered users — who offer superior data collection opportunities around their interactions — can inform your content and business strategies.

Meanwhile, anonymous users can only be monitored with third-party cookies, which are no longer reliable forms of tracking since they’re coming to an end.

The impact of audience engagement on your revenue streams

There’s a direct connection between your most engaged users and your ability to grow your advertising and subscription revenue. Your registered users are known and are more engaged than your anonymous, passive visitors. So they offer greater revenue-earning potential than your unknown readers.

“The more engaged a user is, the more time they spend on-site, the more frequently they return, the more likely they are to subscribe, the more ad views they’ll generate,” Seaman says. “And the more you know about your audience as they interact with your site, the more you can target your ad campaigns.”

Advertisers will pay for premiums to target specific audience groups. Viafoura data highlights that each registered user can generate an average of 13.7 times more ad revenue than an anonymous user when publishers have three ads on a page.

To maximize the lifetime value of a user from both reader and ad revenue perspectives, publishers need engagement tools to persuade their audience to register or subscribe.

Extending user value without cutting off engagement

Though many companies use registration walls and paywalls to persuade users to convert, interact and pay, these tactics can also cut off user engagement if they’re not deployed effectively.

“Superior registration walls just block or blur out the content, leaving the rest of the site functions and allowing users to continue to read comments,” Seaman reveals. “And if you’re going to ask people to pay, you have to make sure you’re listening to what they want and are providing them with a value in the form of community.”

You can’t lock all content and on-site features behind a registration or paywall and expect people to want to convert. Instead, you have to build their engagement levels first by allowing them to access on-site engagement features, even if the content itself is locked.

Humans naturally want to form social connections. So if you give your users the tools they need to explore your brand’s community, they’ll gradually want to register to join conversations.

Once they register, you can form in-depth profiles of your known users and guide them to a paywall when they’re highly engaged and connected to the digital community.

Users are seeking the opportunity to join communities of like-minded individuals around specific topics of interest. The more you can guide them toward an engaged, socially connected state, the harder it will be for them to lose interest in your brand.

For example, data from the Pew Research Center reveals that 81% of teenagers feel highly connected to their communities of friends on social media and 2/3 of teens feel that they can depend on social media for social support.

For these users, quitting social media comes with a price: sacrificing social support and meaningful connections. So providing your users with opportunities to socialize with others is a simple way to encourage them to become loyal to your brand’s community and content.

“The era of going to a site and having a lonely experience will be increasingly odd,” says Seaman. “From a loyalty perspective, it’s easier for you to walk away from a brand than to walk away from an actual community.”