Guest writer: Aurélie Pols


Are publishers and content editors looking at their issues in a right, holistic way?

Well, actually they are… starting to… and it is about time! As the market conditions that are somewhat forced upon them don’t allow them to stick their heads in the sand anymore. Finally, facing the fact that margins are eroding due to increased penetration of the online channel, publishers and content editors are both increasingly looking for new ways to desperately win back those euros that seem to slip away.

But how, why and when seems to remain the ultimate question. Across Europe we see copycat strategies: free content followed by paid content and then limited free content, etc. But let’s face it; something that works for El País is not comparable to De Standaard in Belgium, let alone my favourite, The Economist, who works on a more niche market!

These “paper” based companies still work very much in silos as chief editors struggle to keep an editorial line and financiers constantly remind them of the pressure they are under, even more so today. The guys selling the advertising are reluctantly reminded of the presence of the online world, as an increasing number of clients specifically require “something different”.

These actors are today faced with increased competition from other channels – as well as free formats such as Metro - and again, decreasing margins as online sales are a lot less “profitable” than the good old paper formats, while publication costs have already been squeezed to the limits. The financiers should be happy but, unfortunately, they are not! The only way to make up for the loss of margins is volume. You make less money per unit? Fine, increase the units while assuring your margins. And that’s where most companies stick their hands into the sand once again as they have already been through the first wave of promises unleashed by the dotcom boom & bust, they remain reluctant to carefully consider their options and actually act upon them. Add to that the change management issues as “paper” based journalists remain reluctant to adapt their ways of working, not assuring that all content produced is actually reusable in different formats.

So, what’s the solution?

Centralise content, accompany teams in this change management strategy, assure some technological freedom to test out new things, measure what works and what doesn’t and act upon findings accordingly i.e. make someone responsible!

So, where’s the problem?

More and more publishing companies have turned their eyes to Web Analytics to hopefully find their magical cure to their tragedy, while often missing this overall view and the opportunities to try something that will actually make a difference. Web Analytics is also thought of as some kind of island where some heroic guy or gal takes upon him/her to make the thing work… alone.

Indeed, Web Analytics is (only) about the measurement part but if you don’t assure the centralisation of content and the adoption of measure procedures, getting those long sought-after KPIs might be somewhat of an issue. Add to that the fact that content editors and publishers partially base their success on how much traffic they can gather while Web Analytics vendors base their pricing also on traffic and you are stuck with a very interesting conundrum: too much money is spent on the tool (even though rebates have been huge, at least here in Belgium from what I’ve witnessed) that there is nothing left for consultancy or guidance about how to actually make all this data yield useful insight. And I’m not even talking about the time and effort it takes to keep those in-house machines up & running and those precious processes adopted.

Ok it’s easy to set-up the list of most read articles online.
Heck, even BBC World regularly broadcasts on TV how many hits (sic) they got on their online articles in order to allow for editors to show that their work is actually worth it. But what do such figures actually mean, when put into context? So, you’ve got your top article of the day or of the month, the most read content sections, great. What does this bring to your bottom line and are you really outperforming your competitors?

Some Web Analytics vendors are currently walking the “media” road (after the travel sector) as I read through Eric Peterson’s WebSideStory/Visual Sciences whitepaper about “New Metrics for the New Media” a couple of months ago. I personally love Eric’s work, it’s always challenging and gives good ideas for what we should be striving for in terms of KPIs. But I directly got stuck on page 5: Average cost and average revenue per Visit. OK, I get the theory and could actually imagine the practice but what how could such a KPI be actually be built?

Let’s discuss the cost side!

Different models would be possible here, ranging from total cost of for example CMS, human resources to create content, hosting, etc. but most companies are rather reluctant to set-up this type of calculation. But as for any econometric model, it’s never perfect so just start somewhere: set-up for example 3 models, direct costs (human resources & hosting), add medium term costs and then take into account the entire lot of costs. It’s not about which calculation is right, it’s about getting a feel for what goes out and what comes in.

And then my favourite revenue site of the equation for publishing sites. Easy one is paper subscriptions or some kind of revenue generating deal. There, mostly conversion of the process is of essence in the beginning and, as the client is learning along the way, surfing behaviour can start being segmented according to the data gathered, starting with subscribers, guest members and anonymous surfers in order to get to some notion of recency, frequency and general content usage by different groups of visitors.

Things like, “is your archives section actually viewed and used by some users and at which frequency” might raise questions about maintaining this type of service. On the other hand, as more and more people are talking about long tails lately, throwing it all away, if it doesn’t cost you that much to maintain doesn’t make much sense either.

Now you understand: Web Analytics is about nuances and small (yet beautiful), well thought of changes.

Same goes for internal search. If IT is thinking about throwing a lot of money into developing a new search module, ask yourself if it’s actually worth it and what percentage of your online population actually use the search option. Whether they are satisfied with it is another issue but if we are talking about less than 2% of your online population that is actually using this module and if on top of that users are mainly anonymous, your money might be better spent elsewhere.

Getting back to revenue and if we are talking about publishing sites – so not classifieds because they generate revenue through those classifieds as well, for the time being – we are often talking about advertising based models. Ah… AdServers The name of the game then becomes trying to link adserving data to actual web analytics data. And that’s where it often goes wrong.

Web Analytics is based on tagging, usually done through your content/document management system. Ads, on the other hand are served through placeholders on your pages but depend upon an entirely different system. They have their own stats (impressions and clicks mainly) but the 2 systems do not communicate together. For now. The only way to define whether a visitor is actually generating revenue (viewing these banners) is by defining per page type how many ads there are on these pages and to attribute a percentage of your ad sales to that. Not a very accurate way of working in order to define which type of action actually drove the right, valuable kind of traffic publishing sites so desperately need. And no way of knowing whether these ads where actually sold and at which price unless you use general averages.

Add to that that ideally, based on surfing behaviour and what is known about the visitor, ads should be personalised. It’s not the same thing to throw a credit for the purchase of a new Opel Corsa to a student subscriber than to try to promote the acquisition of a Lexus to a CXO. If information about the subscriber is available somewhere, this should be used to target advertising. Haven’t we all been talking about that ever since the 90’s? Media buying agencies should therefore also engage into an effort to assure that the service they are selling is actually worth the euros you’re paying for it as there will come a time where hiding behind impressions and branding KPIs might not cut it anymore.

I personally remain convinced that current Web Analytics tools, based on page views, do not serve the publishing or content editors well today. Many have invested here in Belgium in powerful tools such as WebTrends but are stuck in a very simplistic reporting mode. This is partially due to the pricing structure but also the lack of vision about how to best use this tool and bring about change through rendered reports as Web Analytics heroes are not empowered to request data integrations, let alone push for action based on the findings. My best bet for this industry remains Google Analytics for the moment and with the acquisition of DoubleClick, I’m very excited to see how data could be linked together to serve this sector better.

Aurélie Pols is a web analytics team leader and co-founder of OX2, a pan-European interactive agency based in Brussels. She is one of the main voices of web analytics in Europe through her blog and writings. Her experience stems from economics and statistics (econometrics) applied to the banking and insurance sectors for over a decade to technology and eBusiness strategies. Today she leads the renowned and organically grown Web Analytics European Dreamteam (WAEDT) working on a pan-European level. Clients include ING, InBev, Toyota, Bridgestone, Stanley and Shurgard-Public Storage.

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