News Corp, after making significant changes internally on how it calculates the worth of its audiences to brands, is having significantly different conversations with media agencies.
Some referral traffic, as parts of audiences are known in news publishing, are worth more than others. And some just aren’t worth the effort
Pippa Leary was just a few months into her role as managing director & publisher free news & lifestyle at News Corp when she realised that what she was getting from social media wasn’t worth much.
“As part of my job, I got to look really closely at the value of our traffic and the economics behind our business,” she told AdNews
“One of the first things I got was a graph that broke up the sources of our referral traffic. And then I had someone link that to the engagement that comes off that traffic because I came into the job knowing one thing, the only work that we do here as a commercial news publisher is we turn audience engagement into client outcomes.
“I had a look at that graph, and shockingly realised that the traffic coming in from social media was worth a 10th of the traffic that comes direct, from people that either have got us bookmarked, or they type in news.com.au.”
In an opinions article, published in AdNews today, Leary points to publishers’ own rich resource of anonymised, first party data that advertisers value highly.
And yet the industry’s traditional way to measure success is narrowly focused on reach, ignoring the fact that much of the innovation has successfully enhanced and deepened engagement with audiences.
“The problem with chasing a pure reach figure is that you cannot determine from the reach figure the kinds of traffic that you're bringing in,” she said.
“However, if you KPI your editors and your commercial teams on what we're calling engaged reach, or you link engagement to that traffic, you immediately see the relative value of traffic in how it's going to create outcomes for your clients.
‘As a commercial publisher, I've got to spend time, energy and resources chasing the traffic that's going to create outcomes for my clients.
“What I've walked into is what I would call the tallest pygmy race, where all of the Australian publishers have been chasing this reach figure, and what's pumping up their reach figures is all this social traffic. It's all one and done traffic that they're buying. They're either buying or they're writing clickbait headlines to attract. It's of no value.”
For clients, it’s the results that count and not the social media inflated audience numbers, with much of the so-called users bouncing in and out of the news site.
“They're only going to get outcomes if you've got a lot of engaged traffic, a lot of engaged reach.
“If we're not getting client outcomes, they're not going to come back and re-buy with us.
“So we just think it's time that the whole industry grows up and says, ;Okay, let's all front up with a metric that shows either engaged reach or just pure engagement’.
She described her opinion article as a wake up call to the industry.
“We've got to get serious about how we measure our metrics and how we measure not just engagement, but engagement at scale, if we want to deliver good ROI for our clients,” she said.
The other issue is that if you are writing headlines to attract social media traffic, there's a good chance you will be alienating hyper engaged traffic because that's not what they're looking for.
“They're actually looking for the story.,” she said.
“So we've worked really closely with our editorial team, and they know we've changed the metric. It's about engagement … how many pages they look at, how deeply they scroll, how long they stay on the sites.
“If we don't stop this Mutually Assured Destruction race, just empty reach or reach alone, in five years the Australian publishing industry could look very, very different.
“We know change is coming. We're approaching zero search, zero social. Every publisher needs to be aware of that.
“And I think if you're not paying attention a to your direct traffic and B to how you engage your audience and get them to come back, I think you're looking at a stark future.
“It's kind of like the industry got hooked on this drug that gave them an inflated reach number. But actually, when you dug underneath it, there wasn't any substance there.
“The smart publishers will all be doing the same thing, which is taking a very long, hard look at their referrals and working out how to rebuild their direct traffic and make a better, more engaging experience for those who are coming to their site regularly.
“That's no easy feat.
“We've moved internally. Last time I was in New York, I was talking to the guy who runs global analytics and does all of the reports and he agreed with me.
“So our global Analytics reports have now moved to engaged, a discussion of engaged reach and how we're going vis a vis our competitors in engaged reach, rather than just pure reach. So that's a big step in the right direction, internally for us.
“Externally, we've talked to the trading directors at the various agencies. The irony is, of course, they already knew this. They're already somewhat highly aware of engagement and where they get the best results and which publishers they're going to get good outcomes from.
“It’s not new news for them.”
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