How Ranker Grew Sales Fourfold From First-Party Data Play

As publishers sharpen their first-party data pitch to advertisers, they're also benefiting from revenue gains. Pop-culture list-based publisher Ranker is attributing fourfold revenue growth, year-on-year, since layering on more targeting capabilities, thanks to improving audience metrics and making marketer ad dollars go further. Because of the publisher’s content—lifestyle recommendation lists where people have cast over a billion votes on its lists covering film, tv, music, sports and travel—it has access to a wealth of declared preference data. As conversations about the importance of first-party data have grown for advertisers ahead of Google's deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome—plus, buyers increasingly asked the media company to define and determine the uses of its first-party data—it became clearer just how valuable Ranker’s data was, said Dana OMalley, national vp of sales at Ranker. “Third-party data has long been the standard—for too long—but it’s often stale or only updated in 30-day batch files,” said OMalley. “This is changing on an ongoing basis in real-time. For instance, we know this user loves romantic comedies and likes to bake. We can now see that immediately and target accordingly.” Figuring out how much revenue publishers can generate by flexing their own first-party data is a little squishy. But, as publishers building up first-party data strategies find, it’s less about the quality of Ranker’s data improving but how it's used. In this case, it's using its data to target audiences in more sophisticated ways than simple context, overlaying standard audience taxonomy segments in a much more timely way. Lowering cost-per-subscription for a streaming client Over the year, Ranker has been working with audience platform Permutive to refine its segmentation to build a scalable and viable contextual offer for marketers. While the voting mechanism is a clear-cut—and unique to Ranker—way of figuring out preference, the publisher collects other signals to inform segments, like content consumption, affiliate interest and newsletter sign-ups. With this it created over a thousand interest, intent and persona-based cohorts for targeting across all browsers, as audiences on Safari and Firefox have gone dark, to get deeper knowledge about reaching entertainment seekers beyond context. It can also create lookalike audiences to scale across various direct, private marketplace and programmatic guarantee campaigns. The results so far have been promising. Agencies have ... lost track of what the data is and where it comes from James Prudhomme, CRO of Optable In the first week of a two-week campaign with a streaming service, Ranker used contextual targeting across all the client’s audience interests. It then built cohorts of higher intent audiences—thanks to its work with Permutive—and saw metrics lift, including an increase of click-through rate by 31% compared with running just contextual. Cross-device conversion rates improved by 175%. It’s worth noting in testing around targeting audiences without third-party cookies, that any ID-solution-based inventory will be more performant than uncookied inventory, but it won’t be at parity with third-party cookies. BuzzFeed is the Latest Publisher Adopting Yahoo's Third-Party Cookie Replacement That said, the higher CTR led to a 63% lower cost-per-subscription for the streamer, thanks to efficiencies in audience targeting. Other ad placements also saw improvement in the cost-per-subscription. Now, roughly 90% of the campaigns it runs have this type of targeting applied—back in March, in the earlier stages of its work with Permutive, it would have been more like 50%. RFP win-rate has increased by 25% over six months. That’s led to a fourfold revenue growth year-on-year. The publisher wouldn’t share details. Pushing buyers to understand the available data With Google’s extension of the cookie depreciation deadline, some of the frenetic energy calmed down, said OMalley, although there is still a lot of work, testing and educating to do, especially with ad buyers. “Agencies have got accustomed to viewing data in a dropdown box in a DSP, they’ve lost track of what the data is and where it comes from,” said James Prudhomme, CRO of data solutions platform Optable. “As publishers work on their own first-party data strategies and pitches, it’s pushed buyers to understand exactly what data is available.” Going forward, the publisher is looking at how it can draw more niche audiences at scale beyond entertainment verticals, drawing on audience survey capabilities within Permutive to fill gaps in data—for example, building demographic cohorts like age, which it can then model out. And audience metrics only go so far in proving ads work. Ranker will offer clients brand lift surveys to measure campaign performance and insights surveys to offer partners more information on their customers. With No Third-Party Cookies, Brands Must Prioritize Martech The publisher has been getting more creative with what it suggests to advertisers, expanding beyond endemic entertainment brands. Consumer packaged goods brands, especially, complement entertainment—letting it deepen ties with new advertiser clients. Someone staying in watching Nine Perfect Strangers could be served an ad to order in Domino's. “People like shows because of the quality of writing, which is different to liking them because of the quality of the cast,” OMalley said. “Can we include those kinds of nuances and granularity?”

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How Ranker Grew Revenue Fourfold Thanks to Its First-Party Data Play

Pop-culture fans have cast over one billion votes on Ranker, building a wealth of data

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Lucinda Southern

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