Just over a week ago new media age published a story outlining that Procter & Gamble had become one of the first companies to launch a program rewarding online publishers for consumer engagement. Apparently the remuneration model is based on defined measures of engagement that include signing up to newsletters and watching videos.
Huzzah!
Here at PostRank the concept of audience engagement is second nature to us, and we’re excited by the fact that one of the world’s largest advertisers understands that the quality of community, not just the quantity, is something that should be measured and rewarded.
It’s no secret that advertising on the web is an inexact science at best, and that pageviews have been the key measure of where advertisers place their bets. It’s also no secret that figuring out how to measure the ROI of social media has become a scorching hot topic with no clear answer.
While we weren’t sure how it would all shake out, two years ago we anticipated the importance of tracking and measuring discrete social engagement activities with online content across the web. It enabled us to figure out which publishers had the most engaging content and actively engaged audiences. Two years later we’ve got the evidence to show that the rise of social hubs as places where strong communities live and grow means that pageviews are only part of the story.
Think about it this way: in the world of sales, pageviews are analagous to the number of people walking through the door. They come in, they have a look around, and if you dazzle them with fancy endcaps or appealing displays, they might spend more money than intended. What you don’t know though, is whether it was a drive-by experience, or one driven by loyalty. And since building loyalty with customers is one of the strongest channels to long-term revenue, why wouldn’t an advertiser want to go to those places where they know loyal communities exist?
It’s about connecting with the right people who want to hear the message, driving down the cost of each sale and driving up the average dollar value of each transaction.
We think it’s high time that advertisers started to look at audience engagement with online content as a key driver of revenue. By understanding how deeply a publisher is connected with readers and measuring that loyalty through specific engagement activities wherever they happen on the web, advertisers will get more bang for their marketing buck.
Based on what we know so far, the engagement criteria P&G is using is a step in the right direction, and we applaud it. However, engagement involves a vast array of interactions that goes well beyond measuring video views, sign-ups for newsletters, and playing games directly on a publisher’s site.
At PostRank, we know that 80% of a publisher’s engaged audience is commenting, tweeting, bookmarking, recommending, and doing myriad other things with the publisher’s content somewhere else on the web (i.e. not on the publisher’s site). P&G and others like them need to extend their view of how to reach loyal audiences and we challenge them to widen the net to include the kind of engagement analytics that PostRank has built its business around collecting.