Signal Free: Reach + engagement = a race to the top for news

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Pippa Leary wrote a very compelling piece in Adnews this week. It’s worth reading in its entirety, but in short Pippa spoke about the challenges of ‘one and done’ traffic both in its sustainability for a news organisation as a source of user engagement and growth, as well as the value that is presented to advertisers from these audiences.

News brand affinity is all about depth and breadth

It is entirely correct that reach when viewed in isolation doesn’t tell a great story when it comes to digital channel engagement. Smart advertisers are looking for reach PLUS engagement. Large volumes of users, who come back consistently and demonstrate behaviours that they possess some sort of affinity to the media brand. This provides a breadth of users as well as a depth of engagement.

This year I’ve seen one of the more eye popping examples of where this goes wrong. Forbes has become a brand that has cracked the top 10 of the Ipsos news rankings. It has an impressive 4.548m users. Where it gets weird is in August (and July) users only spent 1 minute on the site per month.

Compare this with News com au (30 mins), ABC (38 mins), The Guardian (21 mins) and The Age (28 mins) this was a pretty jarring stat. This isn’t to say the writing on Forbes is not of a high quality, it’s more making the point that the engagement level of 1 minute seems incongruent with a brand that has engaged, involved readers.

Leary is likely pointing out the importance of engagement as an overlay to reach for examples like this. And she is right.

News can be a high value context for advertisers, as long as the audience has a connection to the news brand.

A large part of the news brand value proposition to advertisers revolves around the credibility and fondness its readers and consumers have for the brand. This is what makes strong news brands different from other media brands. It is what news brands use to lift themselves out of the commoditised infinite ad inventory of the wider internet, and position themselves as something more valuable. Advertisers making the considered decision to buy news environments will expect a level of audience quality in return for what is likely a premium buy.

Of course, not every single reader of a news brand is brand adoring loyalist. Most news brands will have a range of users:

• Rusted on - these are regular readers, weekly if not more, with well trodden habits and sections.
• Loyal but uncommitted - these readers visit every so often (fortnightly, monthly) and consume based on the time they have. It’s likely they like your brand but you’re not particularly salient
• Irregularly prompted - these may be social followers who visit once a month. They like the content but you’re one of many in their repertoire, so visitation requires a prompt.
• One and done referred - these aren;t your customers. They’re platform customers and you’ve managed to get fed some scraps in response to a query.

Ideally as an advertiser you want more of the first two, some of the third one, and as little as the fourth one as possible. The challenge is most businesses, of all subjects not just news, don’t package inventory this way.

In the meantime as an advertiser you can seek to understand both the breadth of audience (reach) and the depth of audience (engagement and time spent) of news properties, or any properties for that matter.

One and done referrals are becoming less and less, unless you want to buy them

Platforms built their dominance by providing orderly access to the wonders of the web. They were a conduit to external destinations more than a self contained destination themselves.

Not anymore. All the major platforms are becoming much more fixated on keeping their users on their properties. It makes sense - why let these valuable users, with their valuable data and valuable ad exposures go and use sites and destinations you don’t own?

Meta provides a striking example of this. The below was compiled by Press Gazette and demonstrated Facebook referrals from March of 2018 compared with now. Every site saw drops.

Twitter is another example. Twitter was for years a source of highly engaged referral traffic especially for news organisations. News orgs, as well as journalists, would share content. Users also were strong sharers of content, and this could create huge momentum around topics and articles. Some news organisations grew million users plus Twitter followers.

Now these same organisations are lucky to have their posts viewed by 1% of these followers, let alone generate any meaningful traffic. Below is an example

NY Times

55.3 million followers

Average post view range - 45,000-60,000

The Age

942.2k followers

Average post view range - 2,500-4,000

SMH

920k followers

Average post view range - 2,000-3,000

News com au

683k followers

Average post view range - 1,000-2,000

CNN

63 million followers

Average post view range - 150,000-400,000

Fox News

25.2 million followers

Average post view range - 40,000-80,000

Note this isn’t referrals, this is the amount of times the post has appeared on the Twitter feed of users. So you’re lucky if 1% or more of your Twitter followers are even shown your posts.

Free referrals are a relic of the past. If you want to activate these audiences you’ve built, the requirement will be to pay.

What can I do as an advertiser?

The simplest thing to do is understand where any media company generates their traffic. The good ones have loyal users who generate the majority of their consumption and inventory. These users return, they value the brand, and likely value the advertisers that support the brand.?

The publisher can tell you this, or you can use external tools to give you an idea. It is pretty easy to understand source traffic for a destination and how regular their core is.

The other thing to be mindful of is aggregation or bundling of ‘news’. All news isn’t created equal when it comes to engagement. Simple questions around the provenance of an aggregated set of inventory can help. Can you tell me what sites are in this pool? What is the composition? What are the most engaged sites? Can I remove specific sites? All very normal straight forward questions.

There are a lot of news sites in Australia with significant reach and engagement with their audiences. These are valuable environments for advertisers. As are smaller publishers with equal or greater engagement and audience affinity. It’s this reason why the approach Pippa Leary is advocating for is such a smart one. And it’s why news environments continue to be valuable to advertisers and the audiences they covet.

What else did I cover on signal+ this week?

I looked at six very good reasons why sports rights are only going to keep getting more expensive; and analysed the emergence of server to server tracking where platforms bypass the normal roads of data to create private ones that can scoop up loads of valuable and free advertiser data to sell.