Archive | March, 2010

Making Visitor Loyalty Part of Targeting

Long Tail of Visitors

Posted by: Matt Shanahan In Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, the theme was how low demand products could generate substantial revenue by rethinking sales and distribution. The argument is that selling less quantity but more products a company yields as much as selling more quantity but fewer products. Does the long tail apply to digital publishing? If so, how? As the mantra goes, publishers sell audiences. In every website monitored by Scout Analytics, we find an audience defined by a long tail of visitors that looks like the graphic below. From this picture the long-tail rule may be focus on the short tail. In other words, selling more frequency from fewer visitors can yield as much as selling more visitors […]

Importance of Visitor Loyalty

Posted by: Matt Shanahan Publishers spend lots of time and money on complex web analytics, but they’re reporting the wrong thing – unique visitors, visits, and page views. What should be reported is visitor loyalty and what contributes to increasing loyalty. Visitor loyalty is the basis for a business model on the web. Whether the business model is based on ad revenue, pay-per-view, or subscription revenue, the real foundation for success is a large and loyal set of visitors (a.k.a., large and loyal audience). To constantly improve revenues, a publisher need to understand who are the loyal visitors and what makes them loyal. Unfortunately, the Visitor Loyalty reports in web analytics packages don’t help answer those questions, but rather report […]

Digital Equilibrium

Posted by: Matt Shanahan On a daily basis, part of either Silicon Alley Insider, TechCrunch, or paidConent.org debates media company survival strategies. A surprising missing element in the debate on media survival is ad inventory. In the digital world, there are only so many page views performed by an audience (finite impressions). In the print world, massive amounts of “ghost impressions” were sold that the audience never saw. How many magazines, newspapers, etc. have been thrown out without ever being read – inventory bought but not served? In the digital world, ad buying and ad serving come to a new harsh reality – equilibrium. That new equilibrium combined with better targeting and new competitors is what is rocking the ecosystem and business models. In transformation from […]

Advertising Revenue Optimization

Posted by: Matt Shanahan Scout Analytics launched its first offering in Q109 focused on subscription revenue optimization. We first launched the blog last summer to begin sharing our experiences and strategies on how measuring loyalty could be used to boost revenue productivity. The response has been great. Along the way, we received more inquiries on how loyalty could be used for advertising revenue optimization. We have now been working with a number of organizations on just that. During the up-coming months, this blog will focus on experiences and strategies that can be used to drive top line ad revenues.