Articles by: "Isabella Jenkins, Client Revenue Partner – Permutive"

Three ways publishers can grow ad revenue in 2024

December 4, 2023 Isabella Jenkins, Client Revenue Partner – Permutive

In the past year, publishers have weathered several storms. In particular, they’ve grappled with a downturn in ad revenues due to traffic and signal loss.

At the heart of this struggle is declining addressability in the open web. Publishers have lost signals for 70% of the internet as Chrome sunsets third-party cookies and users choose cookie-blocked browsers and employ ad blockers. Current forecasts predict that publishers worldwide will lose $54 billion in ad revenue due to ad blocking in 2024.

Against this challenging backdrop, however, there are tools and tactics that publishers can incorporate into their arsenal to drive success in 2024.

Shifting to direct-sold

As the open web addressability gap widens, budgets flowing through the open marketplace pipes will continue to decline. According to Digiday research, 83% of publishers have experienced significant revenue loss on the open marketplace in 2023. Many of the issues experienced in the open web are alleviated by direct relationships between publishers and advertisers and by addressing all audiences rather than the 30% available in the open. Permutive data from over 150 publishers shows a 62% increase in direct-sold audience revenue in Q2 2023.

Trusted Media Brands (TMB), whose titles include FailArmy, Family Handyman, Reader’s Digest, and Taste of Home, is one example of shifting to direct sales and seeing success. TMB has been working on their data strategy to ensure it can understand audiences across all browsers, especially in cookie-blocked environments like Safari.

TMB now delivers direct-sold campaigns 94% of the time using first-party data. The work has resulted in a 140% increase in revenue from deals using first-party data, a 31% increase in RFP win rate when data is on an IO and a 2X increase in deal size when data is present on an IO vs no data. Building direct partnerships with advertisers to increase revenue has never been more important.

Going beyond collecting first-party data

As third-party signals dwindle, publishers will become the new data providers. This exceeds a publisher’s ability to capture data across all audiences, including cookie-blocked environments. To grow revenues in 2024, publishers must capture more attributes from a known audience and use advanced modelling techniques to offer advertisers a more comprehensive and scalable audience package.

The ability to model out niche and hard-to-scale datasets, including high-quality, self-declared ones, is another mechanism publishers must add to their toolkit. Take lookalike modeling as an example. It is the most prevalent technique to extend an interest, behavioral or intent-based audience.

Classified platform Gumtree employed this technique for its direct advertising campaigns, leading to higher rates and new business, upweights, and renewals. They served over 22m impressions to “lookalike” and “clicker” audiences (users who clicked on other ads), extending campaign reach and improving campaign performance (+27% in CTR).

For use cases where a brand requests distinct groups, publishers can use classification models that take multiple seed audiences to know all possible classes for a specific category or attribute. For example, users who are labeled as “in a relationship,” users who are labeled as “single” and users for whom no relationship data is available. This model ensures a user is only bucketed into a single class, i.e. not categorized as both in a relationship and single simultaneously.

Educating buyers

Publishers must continue persuading buyers to recognize the advantages of direct collaboration. To do this, publishers’ go-to-market strategy should and can demonstrate their ability to satisfy advertiser demand by providing quality audiences from interest, intent, and in-market audiences. And showcase their technical ability to scale and ensure reach across all relevant platforms and browsers.

Publishers should craft engaging narratives about their audiences through insights, spotlighting how audiences are built, and being transparent about audience creation, and publishers must exemplify how their first-party audiences contribute to enhancing performance in real-time, effectively meeting advertiser objectives.

Penske Media Corporation created audience cards for presale analytics for each individual brand sales team in conjunction with the marketing team to capture each brand’s core audience. Post-campaign, PMC helped advertisers understand the real individual behind each impression, using their data to help partners get a holistic view of their target audience. PMC’s campaigns showed a 5x increase in performance (CTR) in campaigns that only used first-party data and a 5x increase in driving effective CPA for a clothing retailer when using PMC’s first-party data.

As publishers navigate the complexities of 2024, these three paths to revenue will enable publishers to not only weather the storm but emerge stronger and more adaptable for what’s to come.

Advertising | Perspectives | Revenue | Supporter Spotlight

User privacy and revenue are directly linked for publishers

October 14, 2022 Isabella Jenkins, Client Revenue Partner – Permutive

It seems we’ve entered an era where an increasing ratio of stories on the advertising industry are opining on what new regulations may come to pass or when big tech companies will (or won’t) deprecate third-party cookies. With so much coverage focusing on external pressures, it’s easy to fall into the trap of forgetting what lies at the core of digital advertising: the consumer.

What regulators and big tech alike are providing aren’t, at their essence, constraints on the advertising ecosystem but rather the opportunity for consumers to choose how their data can or cannot be used for digital advertising. And when given that choice, consumers are increasingly acting in ways that protect their own data privacy.

What publishers need to know is that this means advertisers are facing an environment where half of users are browsing in environments that restrict cookies (Safari, Firefox, etc.). Of those who are browsing in Chrome, 40% disable tracking on their own. This leaves only 30% of the open web available for targeting with advertising. As consumer choice grows, so will the percentage of audiences that are traditionally unaddressable.

Luckily, publishers are better equipped than any other part of the ecosystem to directly connect with consumers. Largely, consumers aren’t objecting to their data being used responsibly by the website they’re on or the app they’re in, but rather they’re opting out of being tracked across the internet by adtech or big tech. This means an overwhelming majority of consumers’ data is visible to the publisher alone.

Protecting consumers and revenue alike

The evolution to more responsible marketing practices — where data is secure by design — is primed to benefit publishers. With that, there needs to be a focus on solutions that are grounded in user consent and choice in order for publishers to be able to operate sustainably and protect both their consumers and their revenue.

The right data infrastructure and insights gives publishers 100% addressability and the tools to activate audiences consistently across all media transaction types. This means publishers are uniquely equipped to offer advertisers the opportunity to extend the scale of their own data by partnering directly to activate first-party audiences.

Publishers’ rich audience data enables advertisers to reach high-value audiences with targeted messaging, without infringing on user privacy. This is invaluable to advertisers, helping them to continue reaching consumers with relevant content, even as addressability declines. For example, U.S. News’ first-party audience data allowed its advertisers to see an uplift in engagement of up to two times by activating valuable cohorts.

Further, Bauer Media’s Illuminate offering has been shown to positively affect user perceptions and purchase consideration. Post-campaign research for a leading manufacturer showed a 44% increase in users who said they would be highly likely to buy from that brand, compared to non-exposed.

How publishers benefit from user privacy

It’s clear that the close proximity publishers have to their audiences is transforming the digital advertising ecosystem. What publishers do with this opportunity will redefine how they are able to successfully activate and monetize their users in the future.

We’ve entered an era where publishers are responsible for user privacy practices when it comes to the collection, management, and usage of consumer data. They serve the needs of consumers who are growing increasingly aware of how their data is used as well as advertisers looking to buy across highly addressable publisher inventory.

Fortunately, this ecosystem is also one where publishers will be fairly compensated for the value they create, as they are positioned to provide addressability, relevance, and scale for advertisers. And these advertisers are seeing results.

By working directly with publishers, a global beverage CPG brand course-corrected over-indexing in Chrome, helping solve its addressability problems and reaching double the audience that was previously hidden in Safari. That same campaign was also able to deliver 2.1x the number of impressions served in Safari vs Chrome, which resulted in a 21% lower CPC and a 123% higher CTR compared to the benchmarks.

Publishers and advertisers must work together to restore consumers’ trust in their data privacy. Concern needs to go deeper than worrying about the deprecation of the third-party cookie or simply meeting regulatory compliance. Building consumer trust comes from publishers seeking consent and data solutions that are secure by design.

About the author

Isabella Jenkins is a Client Revenue Partner at Permutive. Isabella supports publishers on new Permutive products and features to ensure their platform use aligns with their data strategies. Isabella has over six years of experience in adtech, previously heading up Client Success at Captify.