Supercharge 1st-Party Data With Interactive Experiences

The conversation about 1st-party data has changed a lot since I started A Media Operator five and a half years ago. What was normally just something B2B operators cared about is now something discussed by publishers big and small.

And for very good reason. Having a robust understanding of who your audience is and what they are engaging with can inform your coverage, convince advertisers to work with you and drive smart marketing strategies to boost reader revenue.

When we look at 1st-party data, we typically consider it through two lenses:

• Declarative: What they tell you about themselves, including their name, job title, location, company, etc.
• Behavior: What they engage with, such as the stories they’re reading or the white papers/webinars they’re downloading or attending.

In both cases, you’re able to build a picture of your audience. Blending the two types of data together creates a great picture. You can know that someone {name, job title, company} is reading about a topic {what you track}. The only real downside to behavioral tracking is that it’s passive. You’re trying to infer what the user cares about based on their consumption rather than getting them to explicitly tell you.

What if you could supercharge your declarative 1st-party data and get a much clearer picture of what your audience cares about? Keep reading because that’s what our partner BlueConic makes possible with Experiences by Jebbit.

There are three primary use cases for this.

• Improving audience data and engagement
• Connecting data to email
• Creating new ways of monetizing through ads

So, let’s dig into all three.

Improved audience data engagement

In simplest terms, there are two ways to make more money with our websites. We either get more people to visit us, which is getting harder as platforms pull back on the amount of traffic they send us, or we keep the people around longer.

How do you keep people around?

Obviously, you’re going to create great content, driving them down the page, getting them deeper into your article, etc. At some point, they’ll have gotten what they needed or, as with most of us on the internet, their attention will get pulled in another direction.

That’s where an interactive quiz can come into play. Embedded somewhere in the article (middle or end, you’ll want to test), you drop in a widget that asks the user a question. Let’s say the article is about 1st-party data strategies (meta, huh?). You might ask the user, “Do you have a 1st-party data strategy at your business?”

It’s a straightforward yes or no, but depending on their answer, you would guide them down a number of possible incremental questions. Here’s a pathing that could work.

You’d want to invest a little in design (something that Experiences by Jebbit allows; see this Mashable example), but imagine what you could do with this data. In a behavioral-only world, you know that the user that landed on that article cares about 1st-party data strategies. But what you don’t know is where they are in their journey.

By adding this sort of a quiz to the article, you can start to glean where individual users are in their cycle. So, you ask them: do you have a 1st-party data strategy? It’s binary: yes or no.

Irrespective of what they answer, you can learn a lot about them. The yes/no already results in two potential audience segments that you can market to accordingly. But why stop with one? If they say no and then, when prompted with the three reasons of what holds them back, they say “priorities,” you could present an article that lays out the improved revenue potential and why getting company buy-in is important.

In other words, by using the quiz, you can drive users toward content they are more likely to engage with because they tell what they care about rather than you trying to infer based on what they’re currently reading. Sometimes, just asking is enough to get that second, third and fourth click.

But audience engagement is just step one.

Connect data to email

In the above example, the primary objective was to get the user from one story to another by having them tell us what they’re most interested in. Along the way, we’re gathering a ton of really good data.

The challenge is that, for a lot of this data, it’s anonymous. Let’s say a random user comes to AMO and takes the quiz. I know that they have a 1st-party data strategy and that they are already gathering both behavioral and declarative data. But I don’t know who they are. Taking anonymized declarative data and attaching it to a person is critical. The way we do that is typically with either email, address or phone number.

For the sake of this article, let’s stick to email addresses. To do that, we’re going to come back to our trusty, badly-designed workflow.

Instead of directing the user to various articles (as described in the last section) after they answer the question of either “what kind of data do you gather” or “what holds you back from having one,” push them to give you their email address. In this case, I propose one of two email courses where you send a few messages to them over a couple of weeks digging deeper into the topic.

This accomplishes two things.

First, you can connect the answers to those questions to an individual email address. You can also connect all the other passive, behavioral activities they’ve done—most specifically, the other articles on the site they engaged with prior to giving you their email address.

Second, you get them engaging with your content in the inbox, which starts bringing them back into your ecosystem. If a user comes to your site, clicks on an article, engages with the quiz, goes to another article, and then leaves, you’ve capped your engagement with them. However, by getting them to subscribe to something, you’re now in a position where you can continue promoting content to them that’s specific to their needs.

And at the end of the email series, you can email them a question based on which path they went down:

• Do you need more 1st-party data monetization ideas?
• Are you still struggling to implement a 1st-party data strategy?

Depending on how they answer this in-email question can dictate further promotion of content and improve their engagement with your brand.

Let’s pause…

At this point, you’ve taken a very big step in supercharging your 1st-party data collection and improved your audience engagement. By asking targeted questions based on the topic of the article, you learn a lot more about who is reading your content.

In the above examples, you’ve accomplished two things because you got the user to tell you more about their data strategy.

1. You got the user to go from one article to a second, thus improving your pageviews per visit, which can impact both advertising revenue and increase the likelihood of them gaining some brand affinity.
2. You got the user to give you their email address so you could convert them from an anonymous user into a known user, allowing you to track their behavioral interactions and deepen their user profile.

By accomplishing these two things, you make your publication significantly stronger. The value of a user improves considerably once you know who they are and what they care about.

But it doesn’t have to stop here. What if you could use this sort of interactivity to directly boost revenue? I’m glad you asked…

Creating new revenue opportunities

This data can be used to grow revenue in many different ways, but the most immediate is growing advertising revenue. So, let’s go through that.

On the advertising side, you can easily turn these interactive quizzes into sponsored units. That’s what Mashable did in the above example. Here’s another example from PC Magazine.

The outcome is that the user is directed toward a number of Lenovo-specific products that they can buy for back-to-school. Yes, the offers are personalized to some extent, but you won’t see a Dell laptop show up on this because it’s sponsored.

This is a lot better than just showing a banner ad because you can go back to the advertiser and tell them how many people engaged with the unit. Passively seeing an ad versus engaging with an ad has a material impact on the amount of money you can charge. Since the outcome of this unit is pushing people to buy laptops, monitors and other computer-related paraphernalia, the advertiser can also see how much actual product was sold.

I wouldn’t sell this individually; there’s still value in banner ads. However, as part of a bigger package, this can be viewed as a down funnel opportunity.

It can also work on the B2B side. And for that, let’s return to our trusty workflow.

The workflow looks different because we’ve exchanged the email course component for another intent-driven question. We’re helping our advertiser understand who is most likely to be in the market for a new customer data platform.

And so, once they answer what kind of data they gather, you push them to answer a clear-cut question: are you in the market?

If the answer to this is yes, you’d want to drive that information to your sponsor. You can include an incremental question that says, “Would you like to talk to [Sponsor] about their offering?” If they answer yes, you can send that data directly into the client’s CRM. If they say no, you can still promote a piece of lead gen where the sponsor gets a somewhat colder lead.

In both outcomes, the sponsor is happy because they’re getting someone who has started the buying process and they can attempt to influence the outcome. You should also be happy because you’ve effectively used the advertiser to underwrite your data capture. You know a lot more about your audience while your advertiser covered the bills. That’s a win-win.

As I said above, I wouldn’t sell this product on its own, but as part of a more robust marketing plan, this could be a smart way of driving quality leads to your partners rather than just bulk leads with white papers and webinars. You can prove a bit of intent very easily just by asking.

Let’s wrap up…

Ultimately, you’re trying to do three things with this sort of in-article, on-site interactivity. First, you want to get your audience moving from passively reading to actively engaging, which contributes to retention.

Second, you want to connect anonymously gathered data to email addresses through interactive quizzes.

Finally, you want to unlock incremental revenue through engaging ad experiences. If done correctly, it doesn’t need to feel so commercial because the questions and answers can be both entertaining and informative.

If you want to learn more about how to roll this sort of interactivity out on your site, click here to connect with BlueConic.