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Perspectives | Supporter Spotlight

Feed your UGC community to help your content strategy succeed

You’ve put in the hard yards, integrated an effective Digital Experience Platform (DXP) with engagement and moderation solutions, and finally established a safe space for your audience. With a community framework in place, and a moderation solution in action, you can use your newfound spare time to give due praise to the golden geese of your flock: the user generated content (UGC) contributors. 

First things first. You need to answer some questions: Who are the high energy User Generated Content Contributors eager to publicly make their mark? Can their contributions be used as aspirational behavior for other more passive users? If so, what are some ways to go about this that don’t feel disingenuous?

Positive reinforcement is a sure way to encourage users further down your audience funnel and strengthen retention. By putting the contributions of your community up on a pedestal, you reward those ultra-valuable UGC Contributors with recognition. However, you also broadcast to your community and beyond the kind of behavior your brand values and celebrates. 

There will be clear ROI once you’ve integrated a solid UGC contributor element to your existing audience-first content strategy. You should experience ample revenue gains (in both ad and subscriptions). You will also foster a consistently expanding community of users steadily flowing through your audience funnel.

In order to determine how best to integrate UGC Creators into your strategy, you’ll need to first consider what tools and techniques are available to you. Then, consider how to optimize the efficacy of UGC Content. And, most importantly, how to do it in a way that uplifts your brand and drives its success.

Highlight user comments

On a smaller day-to-day basis, implementing a pinned comment strategy is a great way to highlight members of your community as well as set the tone for budding conversations. 

In some cases, having your editorial/content team kick off the discussion in the comments section with a pinned comment as a conversation starter can lead to immediate engagement and user contributions. Once those user comments roll in, swap out your comment with a user contribution that endorses your brand values, sets the tone, and encourages others to join in.

Editor’s pick

A useful strategy is to think about where you can reach different audiences at different stages of the audience funnel. For example, if your editorial team sends out a newsletter, including a piece of UGC in an “Editor’s Pick” segment is a great way to show you value the contributions of your community members. It gives registered members a reason to bring their own opinions and perspectives to the table in the hopes of being featured as well. 

To reach audiences that may not be signed up for newsletters, building these Editor’s Picks into readily available on-site content can inspire registered users and connect with as of yet unregistered visitors. Sharing these contributions with a broader audience has the potential to, once again, establish an aspirational behavior for other users to strive for and improve engagement.

Badges

Not unlike highlighting what your UGC Contributors have shared, badges are a way for you to distinguish between different types of users engaging with your content and help foster a unique community specific to your site. Rewards beget rewards in this case, as users who have put in the time and energy to earn a badge of their own are far more likely to keep up their efforts and stay active and engaged.

Harness the unique value of UGC

At the end of the day, the audiences that seek out content and invest their time, energy, and money into your publication are the bread and butter of the publishing world. Now more than ever their involvement in the content creation process could easily be considered a collaboration. Not only do their unique data offerings help publishers steer nearer to providing pitch-perfect content, but their content contributions have the potential to help boost subscription and ad revenue. Not to mention their enthusiasm has proven to be contagious and drives abundant audience growth.

When we celebrate our audience members’ loyalty and contributions, we demonstrate how much we value them, and strengthen our connection. That, in turn, allows us to learn more about them so that we can continue to provide them with the high-value interest focused content that they deserve.

Perspectives | Supporter Spotlight

How to convince your unknown audience to let you get to know them

Online news organizations have had a rough go of swaying audience behavior. First you had to get them to click. Then you had to convince them to stay. Now you have to keep them coming back. And with any luck, they’ll tell you who they are while they hang out. But the question that needs to be answered to get them past any of these thresholds is: Why should they?

The biggest barrier in converting anonymous users to known community members isn’t a reluctance to hand over data. Because despite waning trust in Facebook following the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018, social media platform still counted 1.93 billion daily active users in its third quarter of 2021. Elsewhere, a study conducted by data privacy company Entrust shows that almost 64% of consumers are quite willing to let companies know who they are if they feel they’re going to get “relevant, personalized, and convenient services” out of it.

Experience matters

There’s the rub: relevance, personalization, and convenience. Relevance can cut both ways. It can be about the content you produce, but it’s also about the interactive environment you create and how essential it is for your user base to get the most out of your platform. Personalization can be a provision for registration. (If you sign up, we’ll make sure you only see the things that interest you.) Convenience is about having fewer hoops to jump through to get to the things you’re interested in. All three are experiential conditions.

So, what does it look like to provide an experience that leads to registrations? First, tackle convenience with a simple sign-up process. Then, start hosting engaging, community-led features on your owned platform that make sense not just for the content you produce, but for the types of interactions people want to have around that content.

A perfect example is The Independent, the national U.K. publication that went fully digital in 2016. It implemented different engagement solutions, including live blogs for breaking news, live AMA series on current events, and automated comment moderation. One popular AMA series is hosted by travel correspondent Simon Calder, who answers questions about ever-changing travel restrictions due to Covid-19. Part of a recent strategy was to make the UI of their engagement solutions simpler for users.

Otherwise, users who want to participate in any discussion on The Independent’s platform have to sign up, and boy, have they ever! Over 12 months, The Independent reported a 100% increase in registrations, with over 2,000 monthly registrations driven just by the comments section. The newspaper attributes 1 million article views from AMA content, and reports 15 times more time spent on the site after a user registers.

Gametime

Meantime, the Philadelphia Inquirer ushered in Gameday Central in September 2021. Its goal is to create excitement around Philadelphia Eagles games. From the Gameday Central hub on the Inquirer’s website, viewers can watch a live pre-game video that’s also streamed on social media. During a game, users can interact on the Inquirer’s platform with a live blog, polls, comments and pinned comments. Managing editor of sports Michael Huang recently told Digiday that Gameday Central has attracted thousands of users.

It’s not surprising that a major sporting event would attract this much attention. But what’s interesting is that the Inquirer combined several experiences at once to keep users hooked.

Engaging solutions

Our own research shows that it only takes a few engagement solutions to make your users spend more time on your website, and when they do that, they’re 25.4 times more likely to register. Features like sharebars, email notifications, trending carousels, and personalized newsfeeds generate more page views and considerably increase dwell times. In fact, a user that clicks on a personalized newsfeed profile spends on average 42 minutes more per month on a news website than an anonymous user.

It also can’t be understated just how significant a well moderated comments section can be, because when it’s safe and generates civil discussions, even users who don’t necessarily contribute will spend time reading the comments. When we culled the data from 5 of our media clients, we found that both registered and unregistered users spent an average of over 1.6 million minutes in the comments.

So, you can try to convince your audience verbally that registering is a good idea, or you can incentivize them with a rich experience they won’t want to miss out on. A live blog during a major sporting event, an AMA about a hugely unpopular policy: these are things people are talking about on social media already. What if they were talking about it on your troll-free platform instead?

Industry-Research

Analyzing the past, present, and future impact of Covid-19 on readership

We’ve spent the past several months analyzing the impact of Covid-19 on audience engagement throughout the world. With a few months’ worth of engagement data available, we wanted to take a deeper look into answering the following questions in the context of the crisis:

  • How much are people reading? Namely, has their engagement risen or fallen in any significant way and how that engagement has changed over time with the rise and fall of case numbers.
  • Where are readers finding content?
  • Which content, and which types of content, have readers found most engaging during this period?

For this analysis, our Data Science team reviewed more than 175 billion pageviews from the beginning of the year across 56 million articles, about 7 million of which were about Covid-19.

Traffic and consumption patterns among audiences

First, we analyzed consumption patterns in terms of the total number of articles published each day on Covid. We saw a small rise in the number of articles as the crisis began to grow internationally. Then there was a huge peak in coverage in mid-March, around the time that the U.S. and U.K. announced major policy changes. 

That was followed by a 45% decline in the number of coronavirus-related articles between that mid-March peak and the end of May. 

We then looked at consumption patterns among audiences (seen in the graph above), the overall traffic numbers, broken out by pageviews on non-Covid articles and Covid articles, show that: 

  • Journalists were covering coronavirus before it truly caught the public’s attention. There were more than 7,000 articles per day published on Covid starting at the beginning of February, but our data shows that audiences weren’t paying attention until the very end of the month.
  • Traffic and coverage peaked at the same time, the second and third weeks of March.
  • Traffic has declined faster than traffic, with a nearly 60% decline in traffic from peak to the end of May.

The latter point aligns with our assessment that consumption patterns in recent months have suggested the onset of reader fatigue.

How reader behaviors varied in certain regions

Our next step was to see if country trends reflected those patterns, so we analyzed engagement across countries where we were able to get data about new cases.

In the U.S., we saw that people started reading about Covid-19 significantly before new cases were exploding. The peak day for traffic on coronavirus stories was 36 days before the peak day of new cases.

Yet, engagement with Covid stories has waned at a much faster pace than actual cases — new cases have only declined 20%, while traffic has declined about 80%.

In Europe, we saw a similar pattern of engagement peaking before new cases reach highs, but we saw greater alignment between engagement and the fall in cases.

Readers in Brazil were only engaged around the same time that other countries peaked.

Google properties, Facebook referred most traffic

When dove into the referral data, Google Search and Facebook saw significant jumps in traffic.

When we looked at the total volume of search traffic to Google, we saw a massive rise in mid-March — more than 60% or 200 million daily pageviews. In the case of Facebook, traffic also grew significantly, to the tune of 35%, or 70 million daily pageviews. 

This change in traffic, with a greater percentage of traffic coming from search, is in line with what we typically see during major news events, where readers more often rely on search to seek out relevant information. However, we usually think about that phenomenon on the shorter timelines that are usually associated with breaking news events. Because Covid coverage has been prominent for several months, it’s notable that the dominance of Google Search as a traffic source has been sustained over time.

What’s more, the growth of traffic from just these two sources accounts for about half of the increase in traffic to publisher sites, with the other half coming from an increase in direct traffic.

Google News and Twitter also each saw 60-70% increases in the volume of traffic during this period. When you think about our previous understanding of how audiences find information via search over social, Twitter’s rise is especially notable.

Did audiences engage for longer periods? Our data says yes

When we looked at overall engagement, we saw that visitors spent 35% of their time on coronavirus-related articles in March, falling to 20% in May. While that breakdown may seem surprising to news consumers, our global dataset includes sites that fall outside of news, say sports or entertainment, which shows us that audiences were still spending time on non-Covid content as well.

We then looked at Average Engaged Time, we saw that readers spent 34% more time on Covid articles than non-Covid articles. This matters because this behavior points to more than a click. It demonstrates sustained engagement with the content.

How readers engaged with certain types of content

We also wanted to see if audiences favored certain content structures over others. Therefore, we analyzed the top 100 Covid-related stories by Total Engaged Time and categorized them into articles (traditional, short-form narratives), infographics/interactives, live blogs, and longform pieces.

About half of the top 100 pages were articles. For live blogs, they only accounted for 39% of the top 100 list. However, they drive almost half of all engagement, showing that this frequently-updated format has resonated well with readers. Additionally, infographics and longform content were among the top pieces by engagement. 

When we delved further into their referral sources, we saw that articles received traffic from various traffic sources, while live blogs were most popular via homepages, which we classify as “internal” traffic in Chartbeat. Infographics performed best on search, while long-form pieces were a hit on social media platforms.

What the data tells us about the past, present, and future of audience behaviors

Let’s take a step back and answer the questions posed at the beginning of this piece and what they mean for content producers:

How much people are reading?

The publishing community began covering the pandemic ahead of the uptick in reader engagement. While the volume of coverage has been sustained, it has also outpaced the volume of traffic. That said, this traffic is still higher than pre-pandemic levels. 

However, the data suggests the onset of coverage fatigue, which also points to a need for new coverage strategies as the pandemic continues. Our country-by-country analysis shows that traffic tends to climb quickly as the virus spreads, but peaks within days of a lockdown. This illustrates a relationship between engagement and how regional measures are impacting the lives of readers. That said, traffic remains higher-than-usual when compared to pre-pandemic data we’ve analyzed.

Where are readers finding content?

Google and its related entities have been significant referral sources to external traffic to coronavirus-related content, well above Facebook, which in its own right has also referred substantial levels of traffic.

Which content, and which types of content, have readers found most engaging?

Engagement is higher on content that is directly related to coronavirus, but we’ve seen that readers are favoring the up-to-the-minute urgency that live blogs offer.

Therefore, what we can see on the whole is that reader attention, as measured by traffic and engagement, is higher than ever for publishers. The prevailing question, however, is if it will continue to stay that way as the pandemic continues and what, if any, impact it will have on longstanding interactions between audiences and content creators.

Research

Publishers are focused on revenue and time on site

Due to recent trends in news related to the Covid-19 outbreak, publisher traffic is booming. Not only are people visiting publisher sites more, they’re also sticking around longer and reading more content.

Last month, we surveyed publishers, agencies, and brands to ask them about their top priorities for the year. We uncovered insights related to revenue and engagement in 2020, which are more relevant now than ever.

Ninety online publishers responded to our survey—a mix of representatives from both small and large businesses from a variety of different verticals. We’ll share the results we uncovered, indicating a focus on revenue and engagement, and strategies for tackling those goals.

Whose goals are they?

When we took a look at survey respondents by job function, we saw a mix of representation from sales, business development, revenue and ad operations, product, editorial and executive management. The majority of respondents came from revenue, ad operations, and business development. This is probably why revenue made it to the top of the priority pile.

This mix of survey respondents came from publisher businesses of a variety of sizes. They included everyone from large publishing houses in the global news sphere to smaller niche-based publishers looking to reach their audiences more effectively.

These publishers cover a variety of topics. The most heavily represented were business, entertainment, news, and technology. Some of these publishers span more than one news vertical and we allowed each respondent to select all of the verticals that were most relevant to their operations.

All of this to say that a wide range of people from publishers of all types revealed their top KPIs for their businesses across the board.

Top KPIs: revenue and time on site

Respondents were given a list of potential KPIs to choose from. Most respondents selected revenue and time on site as their top KPI for the year.

Not far behind these KPIs was direct advertising revenue, returning visitors, sponsored content click-through-rate (CTR) and reader revenue and/or subscriptions.

The focus on time on site and returning visitors indicates high interest in user engagement. Publishers don’t want visitors to come around once and then leave. They’re looking for people to stay, consume more content and come back again.

Other top KPIs are a clear support of revenue-driving efforts.

Tips for increasing revenue and time on site

The best way to increase both revenue and engagement metrics like time on site is easier said than done. It is important to reach the right person, with the right content, at the right time. In reality, doing so requires a holistic strategy behind the content itself, your site’s design, and exactly what monetization efforts you’re deploying for each user.

Valuable content

You know your site visitors better than anyone out there, including their definition of valuable and entertaining content. On top of this know-how, recent events have proven that publishers can do a lot to act on current events to stay relevant for their users.

We’ve seen publishers do the following:

  • Take down their paywalls for Covid-19 related content.
  • Replace in-person events with virtual events to encourage people staying inside and possibly recoup revenue lost from cancelled live events.
  • Curate lists of entertainment ideas, products, and services related to their niche to inspire people while they stay inside.

These strategies can expand beyond issues related to the current global pandemic. For example, providing sporadic free content related to holidays, current events, and cultural milestones is a good strategy for publishers looking to engage new readers.

Pleasing to read, watch or browse

Having the valuable content is half the battle. You also need to make sure your content is easy to consume on all types of platforms, is pleasing to the eye, and easy to access.

Here are some tips inspired by advanced publishers:

  • Consider segmenting your user experience by loyalty. Users that return to your site to consume content more often might see more organic content or more opportunities to subscribe. (Side note: Defining exactly what loyalty means for you can be tough. We’ve spoken to publishers who define it using everything from pageviews in a set number of days to breadth of interest on site.)
  • Change your paywall depending on who’s looking at it. There’s more than one way to put up a paywall, and provide options like free trials, complimentary access with a purchase or exclusive access to certain pieces of coverage might be a good option depending on the user.
  • All content should be responsive, keeping various types of mobile audiences in mind.

The right mix of content initiatives and monetization efforts is the best medicine for hitting your KPI goals this year, no matter the landscape. Staying authentic, valuable and top of mind for your site visitors is the best way to keep them engaged and drive revenue.

Advertising | Perspectives

Marketers: Here’s how we can ensure that consumers learn to love advertising again

When it comes to digital consumption, I’m about as avid as it gets. While I use my Amazon firestick to find a new show, I simultaneously scroll through Instagram and shop on my laptop. I forego physical books so I can listen to podcasts while playing Candy Crush. I’m not “techy” in any form; I’m simply a product of our highly digital generation.

And, like everyone else, I’ve grown up with various forms of ads. TV, magazine, newspaper, billboards – you name it. However, today’s ad environment is with us even more pervasively. In our digital society, it’s harder to escape screens filled with ads and calls to buy now.

Don’t get me wrong, I recognize the role of advertising. As a marketer, I understand how ads benefit our ecosystem. I know why YouTube runs ads on video, Hulu has commercials, and CNN features personalized article recommendations.

However, I have realized that there’s something that marketers must do in order to restore the value of advertising. We need to change the consumer mindset around advertising. Of course, winning back consumer trust is no easy feat. To do so, we need to examine how the industry changed from enjoyable and glamorous to over-saturated and salacious. And we need to figure out where to go from here.

Advertising’s “Golden Age”

The Golden Age of Advertising (the 1960s to the late 1980s), was a time of big ideas and larger-than-life personalities. From Volkswagen’s “Think Small” and Apple’s “Think Different 1984” to Burger King’s “Have it Your Way,” and innumerable ads in between, the campaigns were engaging, witty, and captured consumer attention. With television making its ascent into every household, magazines catering to every interest, and newspapers as the primary source for getting the word out, advertising thrived. People actually looked forward to seeing pages filled with their glamorous idols touting the latest products and fashions.

So, what changed?

Calculating too much

In the Golden Age, ads thrived because they were vibrant, fun, and intriguing. They offered a creative and engaging experience that made consumers want to learn more and own the products. Today, advertising focuses heavily on data, personalization, and research. Frankly, though the goal is to appeal to consumers, digital advertising’s constant in-your-face tactics are off-putting.

The market is oversaturated, crowded, and cluttered with disjointed marketing messages. Too many times, a popup ad has interrupts and degrades the consumer experience, causing them to close the page altogether and never return. And beyond simply losing advertisings luster, we’ve lost the trust of consumers. They’ve been burned too many times by clickbait and fake news, not to mention unexpected and even unethical uses of their data, which has caused them to ignore or block ads altogether.

However, instead of acknowledging this discomfort, consumer avoidance makes the advertiser push harder to increase engagement. The disconnect is real. As a consumer, I am acutely aware of the ways that ads ruin my experience. And, as a marketer, I focus on ways to get ads in front of consumers. To help heal our unhealthy advertising relationship, I propose a different idea: creating ads that serve a purpose. Ads that help the consumer experience, not hurt it.

A new golden age

Purpose-driven and values-based marketing is a growing area in which brands are reconnecting with consumers on ideas that matter to them — culture, society, politics, etc. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of consumers prefer to purchase products and services from brands that stand for a purpose which reflects their own beliefs.

Nike’s famous “Dream Crazy” campaign, featuring Colin Kaepernick, struck a chord with consumers, both good and bad. But a year after the initial launch, Nike shares have surged 36% over the year, adding nearly $6 billion to the company’s market value. Marketers, the lesson learned here is that consumers don’t mind ads. But they want ads that mean something to them.

Advertising also thrived during its first golden age because of brand loyalty. You could show a consumer a logo — Nike’s Swoosh, McDonald’s Arch, Starbucks’ Siren — and they would instantly recognize the brand. To stay top-of-mind, brands made it a point to circulate their logos on newspapers, TVs, billboards, etc. But today, consumers are too desensitized to care. And data-driven efforts are not the brand-building campaigns of yesterday. Brand loyalty and successful marketing campaigns must be driven by value, so as not to turn off the customer or lose their attention.

A new Golden Age is right around the corner. We can win back consumer trust and show them the value of a smart ad campaign. This will happen as we evolve beyond disruptive nature of the digital ad industry and create well thought out content that focuses on a long-term brand story and excellent user experience.

Innovation

The Facebook effect: What real-time marketing means for online publishers in the digital age

Earlier in my career, about 10-15 years ago, digital experiences (at that time, just webpages) had what was known as the “eight-second rule,” meaning an eight-second load-time max per webpage.

At the time, eight seconds was about as fast as you could get. But today, the aspirational load time is more like one sub-second. Anything that takes longer is going to drive users elsewhere. Immediacy is the new normal.

Part of the reason for this shift is obvious: Technology is more advanced, and we now have the ability to reach more consumers on more devices than we previously could.

But the other part of this equation may be less readily-apparent. Consumer expectations have evolved. Immediacy isn’t a nice to have. It is a must-have. So, retailers, publishers, and brands must now provide content in real time.

This shift has largely been driven by social media. Today’s internet users are accustomed to opening their Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram feeds and seeing fresh, personalized content updated moment-to-moment. In light of this, decisioning engines now need to decide what to show a customer or reader in less than one second.

Real-time marketing is no longer on its way—it’s a fact of the digital age. To keep up, online publishers must assess readers’ preferences moment-to-moment and provide the most relevant content available. And they need to try to keep users on their own sites, rather than driving users off to third-party sites.

Here’s what online publishers need to know:

Machine learning helps ensure that your content adapts to reader preferences in the blink of an eye.

The other day I took my son to see the Marvel movie Venom. In the movie, a space alien arrives on Earth and can only survive by combining with a human host. The alien unites with a human and creates this amazing fusion: The human is only powerful with the alien’s power and the alien can only survive on Earth with the human.

Similarly, savvy tech leaders are partnering with machine learning technology to enhance customer experiences across a range of platforms. Real-time marketing is a departure from the status quo approach to personalization, which involves making suggestions based on a users’ declared preferences and/or on privacy-intrusive profiling.

For example, when you sign up for a media site, you’ll likely be asked what topics you’re interested in. (This might be politics, business, or pop culture, for example.)

But often, what people actually click on ends up being vastly different from their stated preferences. This means that publishers need to be aware of the disconnect and suggest content accordingly. This is the user’s observed preferences which are perfect for a machine learning system to detect and make content decisions based upon.

Readers’ preferences change moment-to-moment. This is unlike an online store where the user is typically going to buy something and may look at a related product. In the case of online media, the reader will be a target for a wide range of content. Picking up on various signals that the user gives off in the moment to determine their interests is critical, while also leveraging external factors such as stock trends, weather, news events, or trending articles can also help generate relevant recommendations.

The future of online publishing is all about understanding what readers want in the moment. If you don’t have a super-responsive site that can pick up on trends, you should consider implementing technology that picks up on readers’ individual preferences in real time. Otherwise, you’ll lose them.

Send readers to native content on your site—but do it in real time.

If you’re able to capture a reader’s interest and suggest trending articles at the bottom or side of the page, that’s a solid start.

But any recommendation service that’s sending readers to a different site has several flaws. First, while the publisher might perhaps make some ad revenue, they will be losing that user for at least a moment—maybe that day, or even forever. From a customer service standpoint, it’s always preferable to drive users to more content on your site as opposed to someone else’s.

On a recent trip to New York, I met with a major news media company who confided that they’d been losing website viewers since they can’t effectively respond to real-time trends across their entire site.

Here’s what happened: They got a scoop on a story and published it on their main site. As expected, the main site was getting a lot of clicks and was driving traffic from search engines to their site to find the article. But they still had a problem with getting that hot content recommended at all locations across their site to aid in recirculation.

Their existing system could not react in time to put the scoop on the other pages of their site. And you can’t capitalize on a trend if you’re not making sure it’s not just prevalent on your homepage but everywhere on your site. To do this, you need to have a way to make sure your site is fully dynamic and responsive.

If you aren’t, you’re missing out on a major business opportunity.

If nothing else, make sure your company values align with the content you’re linking to.

When you drive traffic to another site you have no control over the quality of that content. It could be good content, or it could be horrible. Either way, that experience will reflect on the brand of the referring site.

And if that content doesn’t align with your core values, you’re losing brand affinity. And that will hurt you in the long-term. When you leverage a real-time marketing solution on your site, you can showcase your brand’s ideals and values by aligning your brand with certain causes valued by your customer-base.

Nike is a great example. This fall, Nike designed a campaign around Colin Kaepernick, the NFL player famous for refusing to kneel during the national anthem at games. Despite a major boycott, the campaign earned Nike $6 million dollars in additional revenue.

When you know what your readers are seeing, it’s easiest to deliver content you can vouch for. Anything else is a risk for your brand.

In the real-time age, publisher sites need to keep up with the customer expectation that the content is going to be just as relevant and immediate as what they are accustomed to on their social media feeds.

Pretty soon, readers won’t settle for less.

About the Author

As CEO of LiftIgniter, Jon Shalowitz brings a wealth of experience in building innovative, fast-growth companies. Jon has deep roots in Enterprise SaaS products, especially in the areas of digital transformation and user engagement.  Most recently, he was CEO of Badgeville, an Enterprise SaaS company that analyzed and optimized over 1 billion consumer actions per month for leading brands.

Industry-Research

Strategies to drive audience recirculation on your news site

Newsrooms think about the content journey and the strategies needed to keep readers moving throughout their sites. Content elements should never lead to a dead-end but rather connect to other content on the site. The goal is strong recirculation, a measure that shows how much of an audience goes from one piece of content to another on the site. It also helps newsroom evaluate their strategies to optimize the way in which they move their audience through the site.

To understand how content links can aid audience recirculation, The Lenfest Institute for Journalism partnered with the Graham Media Group’s seven local broadcast newsrooms. Their research study, Using Links to Keep Readers on News Sites, evaluates the impact of four factors on driving clicks on a content link:

  • The use of text-only links or a combination of text and images,
  • The placement of the links on the page,
  • The type of content included in the links, (e.g. Related Stories or Popular Stories), and
  • The wording used to describe the links.

In total, an average of 1.42% of those who visited the news sites during the study clicked on a content link. While 1.42% is a low rate of engagement, it did outperform industry-norms. Outbrain, an online advertiser specializing in presenting sponsored website links, reports healthy click-through rates somewhere between 0.10 and 0.25%.

Key findings of The Lenfest Institute research include:

  • Images with links generate 63% more clicks than those of text-only.
  • Links at the end of a page generate 55% more clicks than links in the middle of a page. Further, links at the end of the page are even more successful on mobile.
  • Related content links earn 14% more clicks compared to popular content links.
    • However, popular content generates more clicks when the referral page is located on Facebook.
  • Keeping messaging simple matters. Generic wording (e.g. Related Stories) earns slightly more clicks than more complex wording (e.g. What Else People Can Read on This Topic).

The study confirms industry findings that only a small percentage of users click on content links. However, the study also shows specific elements in design, layout and messaging can influence clicks in a positive manner. It’s important for newsrooms to explore these elements and other practices to test what best helps guide readers through an engaged content journey.

Perspectives

Why Slate picked engaged time as their north star metric

On their 20th birthday last September, the digital magazine Slate reported 17,000 paying subscribers for their membership program, Slate Plus. Today, that number is at 35,000.

The surge in subscribers owes in part to the Trump bump—Slate Plus membership jumped by 46% after the election. But the underlying catalyst is that Slate has gone all-in on loyalty to lower their dependence on platforms like Facebook and monetize their incredibly loyal audience. By launching new podcasts (and using them as platforms to promote Slate Plus), revamping their newsletter, and doubling down on comment moderation, Slate has committed to creating engaging content that keep readers coming back.

That commitment necessitated a shift in how Slate thought about measurement, moving away from a focus on unique visitors to a metric that matched their primary goal. Establishing engaged time as a “North Star metric” enabled teams across the organization to put loyalty at the forefront of their initiatives.

Connecting the dots between audience loyalty and engaged time

Digiday’s Lucia Moses regarded Slate’s loyalty initiative with a healthy amount of skepticism: “Introducing a new measurement approach isn’t easy, though. Publishers may like to talk about engagement, but there’s no industry standard for it. … And measuring loyalty, as Slate is trying to do, is murky anyway.”

In short, fostering a loyal audience sounds great… but how do you measure it in a way that makes sense for the whole company? That’s a question Slate’s Director of Research Anna Gilbert has spent a lot of time thinking about.

Gilbert and her team considered the number of unique visits and returning visitors to represent loyalty, among other metrics. Ultimately, they chose total engaged time—how long visitors actively read, watch, or listen to a piece of content—because it helped them measure the sincerity of their visitors. “When we have first time visitors that come to Slate and read two or three articles and spend a minute and a half or two minutes, we want that to be reported and credited in this loyalty initiative. And we think that those everyday visitors, or those twice-a-week visitors, are also captured really well,” said Gilbert. “They’re worth far more than drive-by visitors who quickly leave the site.”

Wherever a reader is in the funnel, whether they’re a first time or everyday visitor, Slate is now able to answer the question: “Are they staying on Slate longer?”

Implementing a new metric and acting on insights

Gilbert acknowledged that rolling out new metrics can be hard because it requires figuring out how you move the needle. “If you write more stories, that leads to higher unique visitors. It’s a pretty clear relationship. If you’re at the end of the month and you’re not close to your goal, you know tangibly what you can do. Whereas with engaged time, the levers are not as clear. You need to figure out how to reframe your thinking around it.”

Slate’s partnership with Parse.ly has helped every team to align behind engaged time as their core metric. “Seeing engaged time in the Parse.ly dashboard helped us make a much smoother transition from unique visitors and the Big Bang Facebook days to a more real relationship with our most loyal readers,” said Gilbert.

The editorial team uses the Parse.ly dashboard to track which stories are getting the most engagement, while the sales team employs it for storytelling to prospects. The product team uses Parse.ly’s API to power Slate’s infinite scroll reading experience, which recommends relevant content once a reader has finished an article. As for identifying levers, Gilbert’s team is analyzing raw engagement data made available through Parse.ly’s Data Pipeline to identify factors—like referral traffic or publication time—that correlate with a high amount of engaged time.

What about staff working on Slate Plus? “They’re one of the most data driven teams at Slate. They’re constantly using Parse.ly to monitor engaged time in combination with subscription and marketing data from other sources to figure out what’s working or where new opportunities might lie,” said Gilbert.

The future of monetizing loyal audiences

As more and more publishers turn their sights to subscriptions as a viable source of revenue, Slate’s journey to fully focusing on loyalty offers a roadmap to success.

And Gilbert has hopes that the industry at large will come to see the value of standardizing engaged time. “When our sales team goes out and does pitches, they definitely talk about Slate’s loyal visitors and how much time they spend with our content. But they still show the UV number. I think establishing a clearer relationship between engaged time and revenue generation—so that we’re talking about revenue per minute instead of revenue per pageview—will help frame why engaged time matters for more than just editorial tracking.”

Perspectives

Metrics got us into this mess. And they can get us out of it.

The first dot-com boom was about tech startups collecting millions of eyeballs. About five years ago, there was a resurgence of that kind of thinking in digital media. BuzzFeed, Upworthy, Gawker, and many others made an art of clickbait headlines and viral listicles and quizzes. But the focus on “vanity metrics,” like sugar-spun cotton candy, wasn’t really good for them, or the bottom line.

As traffic declines and clickbait fatigue ensued, many of these publishers tried to reach audiences through their social channels and bore the brunt of algorithmic changes. This left them wondering if the chase for views, shares, and clicks would really pay off. Those measurements are imperfect at best, and often misleading at their core. However, doubling down on what really matters can move businesses forward so that they can surmount this problem. Beyond the obvious shift toward subscriptions, engagement, and impact, publishers know that the real difference-maker for their business is serving their most loyal customers.

Highs and lows in the chase for numbers

The underpinnings of how we got into this mess can be traced to two overarching reasons.

The first is the psychological boost of the numbers game. Just as a Facebook user beams when she sees the number of likes and shares skyrocket on an individual post, so too do advertisers and news publishers when they see rising numbers for corresponding clicks, views, social shares, impressions, and the like. In a competitive industry where measuring popularity can and often is boiled down to who has the biggest following, a quick glance at the numbers can settle — or aggravate — any existing tension.

Of course, the real point to metrics should be creating a long funnel that gets to something bigger. Metrics should assess genuine leads, conversions and end goals. But it’s easy for marketers’ performance measurement ABCs — acquisition, behavior, conversion — to be shoved aside when views and impressions — sometimes paid for in promoted posts or campaigns — already captivate so much of the budget. Still, paying for a click might not amount to anything at all.

Zane McIntyre, co-founder and CEO at Commission Factory, boils down this unhealthy relationship in AdExchanger with a strong case in point:

“When advertisers conduct tests to determine the best thumbnail for video views, for example, advertising ‘reach’ is determined by the number of people who see it — if only for a moment. But then viewers quickly leave, often after the premise they were promised is under-delivered. It’s a vanity metric and can be easily manipulated with clickbait and paid content promotion, both of which can get content in front of a targeted audience quickly and cheaply.”

Trust issues

This brings us to the second big trend fueling the vanity metric craze: trust in (sometimes unreliable) parties whose skewed metrics leaves little room for proper assessment. The often-tense relationship between publishers and platforms is just as much of an issue here as it is anywhere else. When Facebook and Twitter allow you to pay for promoted posts or tweets, the idea is that you sacrifice some amount of control to the gatekeeper in hopes of gaining more control (in the form of a following) with audiences.

But Facebook’s repeated metric discrepancies have included miscounting Facebook Live reactions, misreporting the average duration of video viewed, and over-reporting on the amount of time spent on Instant Articles. That’s highlighted the necessity for accountability, transparency and third-party verification in performance analytics. It’s an onus on the social giant, already reeling from issues of trustworthiness, to circumvent these problems. But it also lights a fire under publishers and marketers to take metrics back into their own hands — and not relinquish control purely for the sake of ego boosting and more reach.

Metrics that matter

In response to criticism over its misconstrued metrics, Facebook has established partnerships with verification partners. Automated analytics too, should be “machine recommended, but human approved,” as strategist Nasr ul Hadi emphasized at this year’s Online News Association conference. At ONA, the broader issue of getting distracted by the wrong numbers became a talking point.

The close cousin of measuring and increasing impact is increasing engagement, with the hopes that deepening a relationship can lead to a sincere boost in vested interest and more subscriptions. Take the efforts of GateHouse Media, with its chain of local newspapers. The large publisher launched a campaign last summer called “Newsroom Hero,” which profiled GateHouse Media journalists as more than just journalists. The campaign kept the focus on the positive influence and impact reporters bring to communities — whether in their reporting, civic engagement as volunteers, or in their own families. It’s the first such campaign for the publisher to focus on impact, and their hope is to translate that into more meaningful metrics — beyond the raw numbers of 35 million monthly digital visitors and nearly 23 million weekly readers.

Increasing engagement shouldn’t be mistaken for solving the metric conundrum. It’s hard to point to impact as a cost-cutting national chain of local newspapers. But as MediaShifts’s Jason Alcorn points out, it’s a milestone for a local news chain to talk in the language of non-profits, who aim for impact to satisfy funders and subscribers.

It’s a tall order indeed to turn numbers, whether high or low, into actionable insights that deliver real leads and results. But the fact that this inner conscience is being spoken aloud more and more shows that vanity metrics are no longer in vogue — and the quest for meaningful measurement might just lead to better business results for everyone.

Industry-Research | Perspectives

How to build an app subscription model that works

A year after Apple announced the arrival of the subscription app model as part of a wider sweep of changes it made to its App Store policies, the size and scope of this new app category is exceeding analyst expectations. It is also paving the way for content companies to grow audience numbers and engagement.

Content companies that embrace the model can plan their business with high confidence that they will attract high-value users and generate a predictable cash flow. This is because consumers who buy into subscriptions commit to a recurring fee and – generally speaking – stick to their decision. Their resolve is inextricably intertwined with a concept known as the Sunk Cost Fallacy. Simply put, people who have invested time or resources in something don’t want to see it go to waste. Think of the times you rented a movie and, even though it wasn’t great, you watched it to the end. Now you’ve got the gist.

Consumer commitment colored by this fascinating bias bodes extremely well for companies that offer subscription apps. In fact, as far back as 2014, research found consumers would buy into subscription apps if the price was right. Specifically, the Branchfire research into consumer attitudes toward subscription apps found that “$10 a month is the sweet spot for subscribers.”

Are subscriptions right for you?

Fast forward, and the range of subscription apps has expanded to include much more than streaming media providers like Netflix and Spotify. Data provider App Annie reports that “in-app subscription revenue from non-game apps, particularly within the media streaming, news and dating categories, is rapidly increasing.” Overall, App Annie forecasts revenue for non-game apps to grow at an incredible rate of 25% – reaching $33.8 billion in 2021.

It’s good news that subscription apps are gaining traction. But not all media companies that can offer their app as a subscription model should do so. If you’re asking users to open their wallets, you need to offer value for money.

A crowd-pleaser across the board is fresh and relevant content. Obviously, media companies do this by definition. That said, in order to merit a monthly recurring cost, the content must be exclusive, or engaging – or both. Regularly releasing new features is also a plus.

Finally, apps that remove the friction from navigation, or help users accomplish important tasks (book a reservation, register for more information, streamline sharing) are also a hit with time-crunched consumers and multi-tasking mobile users.

Do your homework

Before you decide to release a subscription app, do your homework to make sure your audience engages frequently, and deeply enough, to merit the investment in the first place. This is where audience measurement data around the who, when and why of app usage in the form of behavioral data and insights is a must. Even better if this data spans all the platforms that encompass consumers’ daily routines.

Finland’s Verto Analytics focuses on precisely this, quantifying the user journey from one device to another and measuring from the point of consumer interaction across all platforms, media, content and devices. In April Verto posted high-level research into news access and engagement across platforms, highlighting how (and when) valuable audience segments engage with news content.

The day-in-the-life data and visualization underscores the importance of offering content to consumers on their terms – and across all platforms. But it also reveals interesting “windows of opportunity” during the day when content companies might use their presence to interest consumers in a subscription offer.

Raising awareness of your app is an important top-of-the-funnel activity. However, you also need additional data to plan your app marketing and acquisition campaigns – and ultimately benchmark your performance against your peers.

You must also consider several important criteria, which are raised in the 2017 Subscription Apps Report, such as: What is the proper price range for a subscription app? How long is too long to wait for a user to convert and commit to paying a recurring cost? When are the best months to reach and engage potential users?

Compare costs and contexts

The report finds that it costs $161.38 the cost to convert an app user into a subscriber. However, the number may skew high since the subscription app category Liftoff tracks includes Dating Apps, Utilities, and Finance. These types of apps vary significantly in the value they offer and the monthly subscription fee they charge.

It is essential to remember that subscription apps (and their users) are about long-term gains, not short-term bargains. Granted acquisition costs high, but media companies can also increase conversion rates by using all channels at their disposal – including email, push notifications and print ads in their own media properties – to reinforce their value proposition.

Provided they are powered by appropriate messaging and effective targeting, subscription app campaigns can engage and re-engage audiences all year long. This is very different to other categories, such as commerce, which take their cues from seasonal triggers such as holiday sprees or back-to-school shopping.

Companies that offer subscription apps have a huge window of opportunity in which to run campaigns and hit targets. Liftoff also finds that there are some stand-out months, such as September and March, when the “cost to acquire a user who subscribes to the app pays dividends beyond the promise of a more predictable business model powered by more sustainable revenues.”

Above all, keep in mind that driving high conversion rates for your subscription app a journey, not a destination. Regardless of your app subcategory (news, lifestyle, sports) or your campaign objective, your results will be determined by your ability to orchestrate all of your channels to take advantage of all the opportunities to communicate with consumers in ways that are easy, engaging and effective.

Peggy Anne Salz is the Content Marketing Strategist and Chief Analyst of Mobile Groove, a top 50 influential technology site providing custom research to the global mobile industry and consulting to tech startups. Full disclosure: She is a frequent contributor to Forbes on the topic of mobile marketing, engagement and apps. Her work also regularly appears in a range of publications from Venture Beat to Harvard Business Review. Peggy is a top 30 Mobile Marketing influencer and a nine-time author based in Europe. Follow her @peggyanne.

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