Focus On Content to Drive Mobile Engagement

As audiences continue to migrate to mobile, publishers are under pressure to improve performance. But despite an increase in mobile traffic and ad spend, more and more ad revenue is going to big players like Facebook and Google. As a result, publishers are exploring different tactics for revenue and audience growth, including paywalls, new distribution strategies, and the ongoing optimization of advertising. Problem is, publishers have become too reliant on advertising and are overlooking a tremendous and valuable opportunity to grow their mobile business by simply focusing on optimizing their core offering -- their content. Yes, publishers can generate more revenue and drive more engagement from their audiences through content by leveraging audience data in real time. Data has long been critical to advertising sales, but an equally granular application of data has not been implemented on the content side, particularly on mobile. This is due, in part, to limitations around the type and nature data available to editorial teams. Technology is erasing these limitations by giving publishers the real-time editorial data they need to compete, remain relevant, and operate at lightning speed. As such, success is no longer a question of what data is available but, rather, how to effectively use actionable data. To better understand how content and audience insights can dramatically influence editorial decision-making and mobile performance, we looked at data from more than 1 million users across more than 15 media properties. What we found is that content density, tiered content, audience segmentation, and feed archetypes are the key factors that publishers need to understand in order to drive greater customer engagement and uncover new revenue opportunities on mobile. Give Them What They Came ForAmong the many challenges facing publishers on mobile is identifying the best opportunities to keep audiences engaged. One metric that influences the amount of content that users engage with is content density, which represents the number of articles and videos that are displayed on a given screen. The logical conclusion is that the more stories displayed, the more opportunities there are to engage, and the data proved that to be true. A user typically scrolls through a feed with 2.3 stories 3.2 times, resulting in 7.3 engagement opportunities. A 5-story content density, however, typically generates 2.5 scrolls, resulting in 12.5 opportunities for engagement. Opportunity KnocksThere is a general rule in publishing that 80% of traffic is driven by 20% of content, in other words, the vast majority of traffic is being driven by a small fraction of content. While we found the 80/20 rule to hold true, we discovered some additional trends for the other 80% of content. Tier 1 content was most effective, driving 80% of traffic. Tier 2 saw a decline, with 13% more content driving only 10% more traffic. The effectiveness declines significantly in Tier 3 and 4, with Tier 4 (33% of content) driving a notably low 1% of traffic. Top tier content calls for the closest attention from the editorial team because its optimization can make the biggest impact on engagement and revenue. Because tier 4 content is responsible for significantly less traffic (and revenue), publishers can experiment without risk. For example, publishers are monitoring top performing content closely, making manual changes to optimize performance. But with Tier 4, they could try automatic optimization on content in order to maximize return without putting the user experience or overall performance at risk. It's fertile grounds for experimentation because, frankly, there's little to lose. Go Beyond InstinctsThanks to analytics tools and carefully refined instincts, editors know their audiences very well. But no matter what, there are blind spots that result in missed trends and opportunities to optimize against more granular audience segments. For example, in looking at the data, we identified four audience segments (Male High Income, Male Low Income, Female High Income, Female Low Income) and saw that income had a significant impact on the volume of women's article views. Specifically, women with high income ($75k+) were reading more content than low-income women. We then compared article share rate across income and gender and found that women were 12% more likely to share content, when compared to the general population, but the higher income visitors were 22% more likely to share. The Need for FeedsIf content is king, the mobile feed is its kingdom and a publisher's ability to view the performance of a feed is critical to understanding audience behavior. We observed a number of common feed scenarios that are worth noting to improve optimization. "The Steady" is a pure reflection of a story's position, with the top-positioned story generating the most traffic, while the following positions generate incrementally less. "The Scroll Spike" is more common on mobile in that it mirrors the pattern of the feed. For every scroll the user makes, the first story to appear at the end of the scroll receives a spike in traffic. "The Anomaly" presents a key opportunity for editorial teams to monitor for exceptions to the rules. For example, when a story in the third position on a second scroll suddenly spikes, it's an anomaly given its position. A publisher can optimize the spike by moving that story to a different, higher position and build on its momentum. Speed is key here in order to capture the full value of anomaly content. While data is not new to the publishing world, the foundational habits that can connect live readers with tailored content are only now being put into place on mobile. With this new capability, publishers will need to leverage editorial insights with the same vigor that is, until now, almost exclusively applied to advertising. In this fiercely competitive landscape, content and audience data represent the most valuable tools to win. Uyen Tieu is cofounder and chief revenue officer at Rumble, a company that helps publishers gather data insights on mobile engagement through its Smart Mobile Management System.

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Focus On Content to Drive Mobile Engagement

Uyen Tieu

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Uyen Tieu