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 member. In B2C media, the same dynamics exist, but the segmentation parameters are different. Armed with reach and frequency, a publisher can understand the inventory of their impressions and establish a stronger footing for negotiations regarding performance of campaigns against an audience demographic.
Why don’t web analytics provide reach and frequency? Because they are statistical tools and don’t describe individual members. In audience selling, publishers are selling impressions of individuals and need prediction about individual members. Does this member come hourly, daily, weekly? Is the audience member a casual fly-by? How many pages will be looked at by the member on average? While there is always an exception to the rule, audience members are by and large predictable and behavioral analytics can be leveraged to create individual profiles that can be used to understand reach and frequency.
Publishers need to move beyond statistics to individual profiles. It is the only way to truly understand reach and frequency, and the first step in audience selling. The next step in audience selling is to improve the quality of targeting. We’ll cover that in the next post.
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