1st-Party Data, Reporting, and Improving Advertiser Retention

The second half of 2023 is only a week away and that means my one-man operation is working to fill all available sponsorship opportunities across A Media Operator. And so, I’ve been doing a lot of outreach to new prospective partners.

One response—positive in nature—jumped out at me and is worth digging into because I think it’s something we often forget as operators. This individual who had once been in b2b sales said:

One report we gave email sponsors was a list of the people who responded to their campaign each month (company name and titles in two separate tabs to protect user identity). Is this something you provide to help show ROI?

The short answer for AMO is that no, I don’t have that capability yet. Yes, I can track how many people clicked and I can even track the email addresses of those clicks. But without additional 1st-party data (like who they are), I’m unable to really provide much value. That will change over time as I continue gathering more. 

But this got me thinking. My editor tells me I have been writing about 1st-party data too much. She says, “what else is there to say that your readers don’t already know?” But as I was looking at that email, I realized that all of this investment in 1st-party data culminates in the potential to dramatically increase your renewal rates with clients. 

How do most media companies report performance?

• Website: Ad impressions, Number of clicks, ad CTR, scroll depth of an article, viewability, etc.
• Newsletter: Opens, ad CTR, number of clicks

But if you’ve been reading my constant stream of coverage on this topic, you’ll recognize something missing from those metrics. It’s all generalized information. It’s selling quantity. You drove 100 clicks to an advertiser or there were 100,000 impressions. There’s no conversation about quality.

And what is quality if not a conversation about the who behind an ad impression, click, open, etc.? Ding ding ding… that’s 1st-party data. (Sorry, editor!)

But in the headline, I mention reporting and improving advertiser retention. How are they linked? If you can show advertisers who engaged with an advertisement—even if they don’t convert right away—you can arm your sales team with an easy conversation about renewing.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

A partner comes to you and tells you that they are interested in reaching heads of logistics at companies that have $50 million and above in revenue. And so, you run the campaign. Perhaps it includes a dedicated send targeted to that specific segment that leads to a piece of gated content that you are hosting on your site. At the end of the campaign, you tell the client how many people clicked on the ad and then send over the number of leads.

But what I will tell you with absolute certainty is that the number of leads you send over will be a small percentage of the total people that clicked on that advertisement. And so, let’s imagine you email 15,000 heads of logistics, have a 50% open rate, have a 5% CTR on the ad, and then a further 10% conversion rate on the gated page. Here’s what that looks like:

• 15,000 sent emails
• 50% open them, so 7,500 people see the copy
• 5% click the ad, so 375 people
• 10% convert on the gate, so 37 leads

Of the 375 people that actually landed on the piece of gated content, you were only able to drive 37 people to your advertiser. That means there are 338 that had demonstrated some interest in the advertisement, but for any number of reasons, they didn’t convert.

Looking at those four bullets, you can imagine a pretty clear cut performance report. But what if you went one step farther and gave some data about the 338 people that clicked the advertisement, but didn’t ultimately convert? Maybe you share:

• Job Level & Job Function
• Company Name

There’s no contact information, so the advertiser can’t easily go off and start spamming their inboxes. But now what advertisers are receiving is additional data about the people who actually engaged with the advertisement, even if they didn’t ultimately convert.

On its own, this data is massive for the advertiser. They have started putting their brand in front of some percentage of their target audience. Being able to quantifiably show that gives publishers a massive step up compared to their competitors who are still only reporting on aggregate data.

But when you arm your sales team with this report and send them out to get the renewal, good things happens. The conversation can be as simple as, “Hey, advertiser, here are the people that were interested in what you had to say, but didn’t immediately convert. Do you want to try another piece of content that you can drive to these people?” This is an additional line item that they are paying for, which means you are growing the account size.

I make it sound simple, but you’ve just taken your 1st-party data, packaged it up into a clean report, and then used it to leverage a conversation with the partner. And if you think about it, why wouldn’t the advertiser want to renew with you? You are telling them there are people that, with a little more encouragement, might become leads.

Take the sale further and structure the conversation as lead qualification. You promote a second piece of content to those people that clicked, but didn’t convert. All of the people that then do convert become hotter leads for the advertiser’s sales team. Getting the same person to engage with multiple ads about a sponsor demonstrates a lot of intent.

You could also do this sort of follow-up campaign one level up in the funnel at the open. 7,500 people opened and only 375 clicked. What can you do to get the other 7,125 to click a piece of content? I think the issue with this is that open rates are less dependable than they used to because Apple Mail shows 100% open rate no matter what.

Whatever strategy you choose, you must be able to collect the data about who has been engaging with the ads and report that to your partners. And you have to arm your sales and account management teams with this data so they can talk to partners.

This is the future of media advertising. And while I am myopically focused on B2B in this piece, it directly translates to consumer media as well. Whatever 1st-party data you have about someone can be used to build a segment and then have that same engagement data reported at the individual level.

Publishers that do this will absolutely recapture budget from the largest platforms because we can not only target the types of people advertisers want, but we are able to do it with the right context. When you can blend context and 1st-party data, you become stronger than any other advertising channel.

Thanks for reading. If you have thoughts, hit reply or join the AMO Slack. Next week I will be opening up ticket sales for the AMO Summit, so make sure you’ve got it on your calendar for October 26th.