I think I’ve been working in B2B magazines and media far too long. For more than 20 years I, and the professionals around me, have been tightly bound to the almighty BPA “Circulation Statement” and its rigid codification of our audience and their value to advertisers.
I’m tired of all that. (And no, this is NOT a rant against BPA and BPA statements!)
It’s not a big surprise that how we measure the audience, who we’re measuring and when has changed. As more and more news and information (as well as business intelligence) is created for and consumed via the internet, everyone in magazines and business media has been asking questions about changing metrics and our responses to them.
But, I wonder, have we been talking about the wrong changes? The wrong “new metrics”?
For the past few years I, and many of my colleagues have been refining our “circulation strategy” working to integrate “digital editions”, understand new ways of gathering “requests” deploy new types of subscriber demographics and figure out how to record telemarketing calls.
All of this is central to our ability to maintain traditional audience numbers and satisfy advertisers’, but is it the central question of our audience development work anymore?
New sites and new behaviours
Recently, here at Chemical Week and Chemical Engineering we underwent a major re-deployment of our websites, e-messaging and overall online offerings. While not “bleeding edge” by any measure, our new websites have met or exceeded our own internal goals and forecasts. This is true in overall site traffic and other standard web “metrics” as well as advertising and subscription revenues.
We have a good story to tell concerning our web statistics, but that “good story” even more clearly shows the holes in our overall understanding of our customers’ current behaviours and future behaviours.
Our advertisers, and sponsors want to know not only how many site visitors viewed content, or clicked on ads, they want to know who clicked on what content and what ad. It’s not rocket-science, its basic lead generation.
In addition, we need to know how content users and site visitors are testing, buying and using all of this information we have for sale. It’s not rocket-science, it’s basic direct marketing.
We struggle to identify, manage and report these numbers because we have not completely connected our site traffic measurement systems to the traditional “metrics” and systems we’ve always relied on (fulfillment vendor databases and BPA statements).
Are we ignoring the elephant in the room?
A recent posting by Randall Rothenberg of the IAB summed it up nicely. Referencing an article on audience measurement in The New York Times, Rothenberg lamented the lack of emphasis on one of the web’s primary purposes, “the ability to match buyers and niche sellers through the perfect media vehicle.”
I couldn’t agree more. Despite many years doing just that with print media (crudely, to be sure), online we seem to focus on broad measurements like page views and ignore the very measurements we’ve traditionally provided … quantifying the direct connection between buyers and sellers.
Even assuming some naivete on my part concerning online metrics, why is it that publishers like us here at AI are having to request and custom build the systems to capture these metrics? Why is it that all the database, audit and fulfillment vendors we work with seem startled by our need to connect site usage behaviours to customers in our databases?
While we in audience development have been focused for example on the minutae of “digital editions” (forcing this new technology into existing metrics “buckets”), we’ve not been pushing vendors and systems to link-up website behaviours and our extensive customer databases.
We’ve not been requiring our vendors to be “best of breed” database AND e-commerce/order management systems (ok, so I’m starting to sound a little web 1.0!) . Until these systems seamlessly allow us to capture customer order data, gate/manage site access as well as customer privacy/permission information, we’ll continue to be forced into deploying parallel systems … once again ignoring the critical final step. Connecting customer ordering behaviour with website usage behaviour.
We want to make this final connection NOT because it’s great to have MORE data, but because it’s a natural extension of the types of information/metrics we’ve always provided advertisers and sponsors.
Action items for 2008
Deploy “connected” systems. Without raising the long festering “central database” issues/concerns, I do think we’ve gone beyond “nice to have” when it comes to connected online registration/database/ordering systems. Not only will we be completing these feedback loops this year, we’re going to assume all our vendors are ahead of us getting this done. From the moment a customer clicks through to our websites to when they consume the content, we’ll directly link all their behaviour to their master record. No more will we rely on broad aggregated metrics, we’ll know who’s using what information/tools/site features and when.
We’ll be armed and ready when advertiser clients demand and get “the ability to match buyers and niche sellers through the perfect media vehicle.”
Ahead of the curve systems-wise, for once. It’s time for “legacy” vendors and partners to be ahead of publishers. In 2008, I don’t want to have to scope out every detail of how these systems should work, I’ll expect my vendors to have done the R&D and be ready to tell me how to make these connections.
We’ll be spending our time educating and enlightening advertisers and clients, our vendors and partners will have the “turn-key” solutions ready to go (or, they won’t be our vendors for long).
This year, I’ll put up with training a partner on “who is BPA?” to be able to use and exploit the cutting edge website and audience development tools being deployed by large and small online content and information suppliers.
It’s time for me to know more about what IAB is doing than BPA. 2008 is the year that I’m going to “walk the walk” when it comes to full understanding (is that even possible?) all the “new metrics” and ways to exploit them. And, I’m hoping BPA will help me “talk the talk” by helping me use and exploit the new metrics and measurements that are relevant to advertisers and inegrated marketers.
I’m hoping we’ll spend our time learning to quantify how our customers engage our content, not how to record telemarketing calls (a current audience developers and BPA obsession). OK, that was a small “rant” at BPA.
And fun was had by all …
Whether it’s finally making these connections happen systems-wise, catching up with advertiser needs and wishes, or simply pushing the envelope with BPA and vendors, I’m excited to be handling audience development jobs and projects. Let’s hope all my colleagues and vendor/partners enjoy the ride as much as I will.