by Matt Shanahan on April 11, 2012 in Advertising, ARPU, Audience Development, Behavioral Analytics, Digital Revenue Optimization, Loyalty, Revenue Optimization
Through 2015, much of the B2B media revenue growth forecasted by Veronis Suhler Stevenson shows a substantial portion will come from events — both live and virtual. Most notably, over 70% of clients are increasing investment in geographical events that can be replicated in multiple locations – geo-cloning, as one client called it. And because events require longer lead times, extensive production and marketing investment, optimizing event revenue becomes dependent on trade-offs – specifically, trade-offs between the revenue potential of various events. So how do you measure revenue potential of an event? Event revenue mainly comes from two sources: vendors and attendees. In the case of vendors, their revenue directly correlates to the number of attendees to which they gain [...]
by Matt Shanahan on January 13, 2012 in Behavioral Analytics, Subscriptions, Yield Optimization
While trials are a common mechanism for generating paying subscribers, trial conversion rates for most publishers are in the low single digits. The majority of users starting a trial do not have the budget or authority to convert into paying subscribers. Often times, the trial user is exploring or investigating, and most trial users become fence sitters whom without sales help don’t convert. Because the sales force doesn’t have the capacity to contact every trial user, focusing efforts on the right fence sitters becomes the key to increasing conversion rate and revenues. Research shows that focus on the most engaged trial users is the same as focusing on the right fence sitters and increases conversion rates by 100% or more. In [...]
by Matt Shanahan on November 7, 2011 in Advertising, Audience Development, Behavioral Analytics
Building on our original findings in 2010 about audience loyalty, scout® research has been looking into what creates loyalty. Understanding the nature of loyalty, would obviously allow a publisher to nurture and grow the audience. For instance, is a fan a fan because she reads all the homepage articles? Or is she a fan because of a certain section of content? So what did we find out? Site-wide fans typically make up 20-30% of the visitors. Site-wide fans are the ones with a broad reading habit. Think of them as the cover-to-cover reader. In contrast when you analyze most fans’ behavior to figure out what they are a “fans of”, it is typical to find an individual fan has an [...]
by Matt Shanahan on July 1, 2010 in Behavioral Analytics
Posted by: Matt Shanahan In my previous post, the lack of provenance for visit data was described as a big hole in web analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Yahoo! Web Analytics. Provenance allows a publisher to enrich visit data with information from circulation, CRM, or other databases. Provenance also enables visitor analysis to identify patterns in behavior. These two capabilities help publishers maximize the lifetime value of visitors with improved targeting and prediction. Improved targeting comes from visit data enrichment. The easiest way to increase the potential pool of advertisers, is to create more targeted segments. Visit data enrichment allows publishers to slice and dice their impression inventory in smaller chunks. The smaller and more targeted the chunks, the more [...]
by Matt Shanahan on June 24, 2010 in Behavioral Analytics
Posted by: Matt Shanahan Provenance is one of the big holes in web analytics today. Reporting and manipulating visit data based on the source that generated the visit data isn’t exposed. Some vendors offer expensive data mart add-ons to patch the hole, but this creates more headaches. Consequently, the ability to understand individual visitor behavior isn’t possible with web analytics such as Omniture SiteCatalyst, Google Analytics, Webtrends Analytics, and others. Surprisingly, very few publishers are aware of this limitation and its impact on the revenue model. For publishers, the lack of provenance puts real operational limits on monetizing subscribers or audience members. I’ll cover these limitation in my next post. This post looks mainly at the technical side. So what is provenance? [...]
by Matt Shanahan on May 7, 2010 in Advertising, Audience Selling, Behavioral Analytics
Posted by: Matt Shanahan Web analytics fall short as a tool to monetize audiences. Web analytics are designed primarily to provide statistics about the aggregate audience but not insights into individual members. For instance, web analytics can tell you what the most popular page is for an audience, but it cannot tell you which member consumed the most pages. To effectively sell audiences, publishers need tools that move beyond audience statistics to building individual profiles of members. Reach and frequency are key metrics for selling audiences. In the B2B media industry, selling audiences requires a publisher to know how many audience members belong to a specific industry (reach of a segment) as well as the frequency of visits for each [...]
by Matt Shanahan on April 16, 2010 in Audience Development, Behavioral Analytics
Posted by: Matt Shanahan Okay, I’ll admit it—I’m a bit of an information junkie. I’m constantly digging for new information about the things I care about—fact, figures, and interesting new perspectives. I like to find and leverage information. At least half of the information that I use day-to-day, I get from the Internet. And while I might process more information than the average person, I gather it in the standard way. Information gathering (i.e., visits) pretty much comes in two flavors—routine and ad hoc—each offering its own opportunities to the publisher. Routine visits are by definition, pattern-based. Routine visits involve specific topics and content on a regular basis. Routine visits might be what you read daily over your [...]
