Capturing the right print and digital data

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Matt Lindsay Arvid Tchivzhel
The move to digital news publishing has resulted in endless amounts of data and, thus, significant opportunities to analyze that data to drive revenue, tailor content, remain competitive and more strategically appeal to advertisers – to name but a few. However, many publishers are unsure which data to capture for insights that will actually make a difference when applied to the business.

Start with the end in mind
When setting out to uncover answers from data, begin with your business goals and what you want to accomplish. What are you going to do with the information contained in the data to improve your business performance? Will you use data to improve pricing strategy, target potential customers for acquisition, retain customers that are high risk for churn, measure customer lifetime value (CLV) or produce more engaging content? Or, will you use it on the advertising side to better define your unique audience, help drive CPMs for local and programmatic ad inventory, determine how to implement paywalls to maximize both advertising and customer revenue, or produce content that is valuable to advertisers?

Focus on the right data
Data can be valuable as an input to analysis or as a tool for matching disparate data sets. Once you understand which areas of the business you hope to impact, you'll want to think about capturing key data points that can match multiple data sources across traditionally disparate silos of data.

For example, to understand how your customers are behaving online, you must capture a login ID or email address that can be matched offline. To define ad inventory, you need to tag your ad impressions so you know exactly which ads were delivered to each user. If your focus is circulation, gather revenue and cost data that directly impacts performance. This should include delivery and production costs, digital advertising and audience revenue, as well as print advertising and audience revenue.

The right level of detail
Capture data at the level of detail that is ideal for your analysis. High-level averages can be misleading. For instance, average sell-through rate on a website may mask that some high-value inventory categories are consistently sold out, where low-value categories are consistently undersold. Aggregation of high-level data can cause misleading results and lead to inaccurate findings. Capturing granular and detailed data instead of relying on data sampling is critical to accurately measure and implement your strategies.

Matt Lindsay will address the Key Executives Mega-Conference on Tuesday, Feb. 24, during an afternoon Quick Bite session.  His topic will be: "Solving the Big Data ROI Challenge: Getting the Right Data for the Right Price."

Learn more about the Mega-Conference

Choose the right tool
Look for a tool that combines print and digital data for a holistic representation of your audience. A data analysis tool should seamlessly pull data from multiple sources and make it easy to understand how to take action based on the results.

Tools that promise to do everything are usually not built for a publisher who needs to implement a comprehensive strategy across multiple departments. Too often, data management platforms (DMPs) are built to only serve one purpose, which is usually advertising. A true DMP must have robust customer acquisition and marketing capabilities in addition to seamless integration with ad exchanges. As you align your vision across different departments, the data must represent a single truth across your organization.

One of the most important things to consider is who owns the data and customer. Publishers have struggled to maintain a direct relationship with their customer when using various third party data providers and applications. Retaining data in such a way that all departments within your organization can use it is critical, since actions taken by one department will likely affect others. Be wary of any application that limits your access to the data it generates.

Still Unsure Where to Start?

Pricing: An immediate opportunity for ROI is smarter pricing for your subscribers. Using data on digital engagement and behavior for pricing can quickly bring higher yield. Testing has shown that for the 10-20 percent of registered print customers who heavily engage with your online content, being aggressive with pricing can yield as much as 300 percent additional value with minimal stops, while being less aggressive with those who are not digitally engaged can help save up to 2 percent of incremental price stops.  

Marketing & Customer Service: Prioritize marketing and customer service strategy based on CLV. Rather than mass marketing to your entire audience, target your marketing campaigns focused on customer segments and even individual households. This can help improve expense-to-revenue ratios. Most mature businesses such as hotels and airlines use CLV to market, upsell and retain customers.

Advertising & Paywalls: Analysis on how to implement your paywall (and where you should put a porous registration-only vs. hard paid paywall) also is a key way to achieve the delicate balance between advertising inventory and revenue and digital subscription sales. Finding the optimal point is always variable by content, platform, geography, day-part and audience, so a dynamic paywall is best to accomplish that goal. At the same time, dynamic advertising pricing reflects the concept developed by airlines and hotels of using value of inventory, demand/supply and time to delivery to drive higher CPMs. Using data on audience, behavior, offline data, customer value and other key metrics allows the local advertising operations to identify and sell the high-value inventory directly.  

Editorial: Using the data and metrics described above, editorial departments can understand what content, platform and times are right for publishing articles. Instead of following the print publication schedule where the content is due for the printing press at midnight, a publisher can use engagement and advertising metrics to generate the biggest return for each article published. Sometimes timing each article so that it has time to accrue page views and revenue is more important than overloading the site with so much content that the full incremental value of each article is unrealized.

Publishers have many opportunities to use data to drive strategy and improve business performance. Knowing what you want to accomplish with data will keep your organization focused and your return on these investments high.

About the authors

Matt Lindsay has more than 20 years of experience in helping businesses improve performance and grow revenue through economic modeling. In consulting roles over the past 15 years, he has shared this expertise and developed pricing strategies and predictive models for clients, including the Intercontinental Exchange, Gannett, The Home Depot, NRG Energy, Tribune, IHG, McClatchy, the Everglades Foundation, Walton Foundation, Dow Jones and The New York Times. Lindsay can be reached at matt@mathereconomics.com or (770) 993-4111.

Arvid Tchivzhel is director of consulting services for Mather Economics, where he oversees the delivery and operations for all consulting engagements, along with internal processes, analytics, staffing and new product and services development. His experience is largely focused on the publishing industry and helping clients manage revenue/circulation and devise long-term strategies driven by data analysis.

Mather Economics, Lindsay, Tchivzhel
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