The Meaning of Measurement, Digiday Publishing Summit Key Biscayne, September 21st, 2016
1. 1Source: comScore MediaMetrix Multi-Platform June 2016
OUR COMMUNITY
by the numbers
#1 lifestyle platform for
women for over a year
72M
unique visitors per month
294M
social media fans
#1 site for millennial moms
ages 18-34
1,900
bloggers/influencers
2. WHAT WERE WE TRYING TO SOLVE FOR
How do we serve our brand advertisers the best
performing inventory?
How do we keep our contributing partners
engaged?
How do we help our best publishers?
How do we manage the quality in our network?
How do we decrease “waste” in this world of
viewability??
Q U E S T I O N S K P I ’ S
• Decreased
impression waste
• Increasing
revenues for
bloggers
• Higher ecpm’s
• Better ad
performance
3. Size of our core audience
Viewabiltiy rates
Banner engagement rates
Length of time on page
Click rates
Comscore contribution
Type of content
Mobile optimized sites
8 KEY CHARACTERISTICS
having our cupcake and eating it too
4. Increase the frequency of running
the scoring
Refining the scoring system to
account for new data points and new
weighting
Defined a methodology to better
understand who are our most
important publishers
Need more granular data –
placement level
We saw immediately a decrease in
padded campaigns
We have seen higher cpm’s for
programmatic inventory
What we learned so far
WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED SO FAR?
Still have a ways to go
5. 4 take a-ways
4 TAKEAWAYS
What have I learned?
Manage your
inventory toward top
performing products
You don’t need a
“fancy” system to
start to make some
changes
Refresh scoring data
frequently
Familiarize yourself
with the metrics
advertisers use to
define their success
Editor's Notes
SK
ADAGE
Millennials -- they grow up so fast. After a decade of being chased by marketers for their youth and their power to set trends, the kids are having kids. Of the 80 million millennials in the U.S., one-quarter are now parents. Eighty-three percent of new moms are millennials, and marketers are making the mistake of treating them as one monolithic group.
This is important because -- just like their own mothers -- millennial women tend to control the purse strings in most households, and with millennial parents wielding $200 billion in spending power, marketers have a lot to lose by not getting it right. But who is the millennial mom and how do you reach her?
She-conomy
Women account for 85% of all consumer purchases including everything from autos to health care:*
91% of New Homes
66% PCs
92% Vacations
80% Healthcare
65% New Cars
89% Bank Accounts
93% Food
93 % OTC Pharmaceuticals
58% of Total Online Spending
The generation commonly referred to as “Millennial” is currently snug in their 20s and early 30s, pursuing high-powered careers and having kids of their own. You may think “Wow, they grew up fast,” and you’re not alone. In fact, it might be shocking for some to discover the buying power of this group, estimated to be $170 billion per year according to comScore SCOR -3.77%, making Millennials a valuable segment of the population for marketers to target.
Though Millennial moms are often considered a niche group, the reality is that approximately 68% of all babies are now born to these women (Meredith’s Parents Network, Communicating with Millennial Moms, 2010), and there are infinitely more touchpoints for brands to interact with consumers now, in contrast to the opportunities available through traditional advertising. How marketers acknowledge these intersections makes all the difference in how successful they are in winning brand loyalty from these powerful and strategic shoppers, sharers and spenders.
(Forbes, 2013)
Our issue with a complex network of sites is understanding not only what types of inventory work for our clients but where are the pockets of value beyond just reaching categories like content or audience segments. We wanted to understand which types of inventory perform and we needed to do a large data analysis to get there. We analyzed about 2,000,000 data points on our publishers to identify which ones are performing the best across our entire network.
Some of the questions we were trying to identify which were how do we make our inventory better for advertiser, less wasteful for delivering our high value direct campaigns, and make more money for our most important publishing partners, and finally deliver a better and more relevant ad experience for our users.
Step 1) How do you go about deciding which sites to put into which tier? We looked at a variety of data points.
Size of Audience
Viewabiltiy
Click rates
contribution to Comscore
type of content
length of time on page
Do they have a Mobile optimized site
Step 2)
Score each one. How important is viewability to you vs click rates? How important is your comScore number vs your quality of the audience? Score everything!!
By the way viewability is important to everything because it drags down your brand awareness scores in in your OBE studies. Either because something isn’t seen or because something is seen too much by the same user because you’re over delivering to them to make up for the less than stellar viewability score.
Step 3) Crunch numbers
Nothing fancy, Excel is the poor man’s database, and that’s was just fine for us.
Step 4)
Break all the inventory up into Tiers.
Step 5)
Change all of your product to target against the Tiers.
Step 6)
You now need to determine what the value of each Tier is and then decide which buckets of your revenue you will serve in each Tier. You also need to manage inventory by Tier.
Working at a network provides you with certain challenges that aren’t something many of us necessarily face in our lives. But the methods that we used here can be used on a smaller scale with single URL sites and premium sites that have a variety of URL’s for a variety of reasons. It’s really about managing the Yield on your properties so it accomplishes a few things:
Ultimately so your clients are happy.
Ensuring that clients are getting the right audiences at the right time means making sure that their messages are contextually relevant across your entire network. This also optimizes their performance, because their brand lift and perhaps even purchase intent will be heightened by the way you’re managing your inventory
That your partners are performing optimally.
In a network model we have contributing editors. Either bloggers, or guest editorial writers or whole sites that are partners or affiliates. They’re all relying on you to sustain their livelihood with the best revenue you can possible send them. They’re hoping that somehow you’re optimizing their audience and inventory. That each piece of ad code they put on their pages will yield them more than 50 cents. That they have meaning, value.
Optimizing your overall portfolio of inventory is really the main objective of any good analytics/yield group at any company. So am I getting the best cpm for this inventory? Am I managing my inventory in a way that I’m squeezing everything out of it. And no, programmatic is not the answer to that question. That’s what a lot of industry leaders want us to believe, because they believe that somehow you’ve magically managed the shit out of your inventory and the “left overs” are something that they should monetize for you. If you believe that, I have a bridge I can sell you in Tampa.
Understanding what your clients value when they buy something is the first step to segmenting your inventory, and the better you understand what they value the better your starting point for scoring your own inventory.
When you start you may not be able to update as frequently as you would like, but come up with something that you can refresh the data frequently to incentivize creating high quality inventory you can sell
Walk before you can run. Start in excel and build from there. The important thing isn’t doing thing perfectly the first time, since you will probably want to make adjustments as you go, and make sure you are not overweighting some categories of data.
Once you know what different clients value, be it viewablity, or engagement, make sure you are including those measures in how you segment your inventory so that you are prioritizing what is important not just what is measurable.