Cameron Hulett, senior vice president of publisher solutions at Acceleration, explains why it’s important that online publishers understand marketing.
Product development, design and research, attracting target audiences, understanding and interpreting data, building a loyal following, SEO, paid search, CRM. This sounds like the typical focus for a marketer – or in publisher terms it sounds like what buyers think about.
But this is where online publishers are falling short because the above laundry list of tactics describes the critical functions that ad-sales must perform in order to maximize online revenue.
Today we estimate around 80 per cent of online publishers have their own marketing department as they recognise the need to promote themselves. And they also recognise that there’s a strong (and inevitable) link between the number of visitors to their site and the money they make from advertising.
As it stands today within the majority of online publishers the marketing and ad sales teams operate in silos.
The marketers fulfil their objective of attracting new and repeat traffic to the site and use various tools to do this. Web analytics software, for example, tells them what digital route customers have taken to reach their site, how they navigate the site and how long they stay per page. CRM software tracks logged in visitors and shows them customised content.
In another silo, the ad sales team keep their heads down and sell ad space. They closely analyse inventory, ads delivered, advertising spend, who is buying what, where ad sales are doing well and so on.
At a high level the ad sales team would say they have a pretty good handle on who their target audience is. At the 10,000 ft level that might be true, but when it comes to the detail another story emerges. The ad sales team views the audience from an ad behaviour perspective and lacks the marketing team’s site behaviour and traffic generation perspective.
For example, how many ad sales teams can tell you the ad revenue generated from a particular piece of site content? How many price their ads based on visitor journeys through the site? How many advise their marketing department which search words to buy? Not many.
To best monetize a site, the ad sales team must harness the audience insight of the marketing team at a detailed level and align ad sales with generating more traffic.
Online publishers need to know what they have and what they're selling
Traditionally the ad sales teams generate the revenue, while the marketing team is a business expense. Traditionally there has been little or no integration between them. But what if they leveraged each other to achieve their respective goals? Think about how much more effective a joint marketing and sales department could be - simply by sharing data with each other.
For ad sales and marketing teams, this collaborative way of working represents a pretty seismic cultural shift. Both disciplines must adopt characteristics from each other:
- ad sales needs to put a marketer’s hat on in order to better understand the audience - and therefore sell more relevant and timely ads which ultimately have a higher price point.
- the marketer needs to better understand who is reading the ads, not just the content, so they can respond with relevant and compelling content through appropriate marketing channels – email, search, newsletters and so on. In addition, by working more closely with sales, they now have the data they need to attract visitors that meet particular profiles and for whom the ads carried on the site will be directly relevant.
The fact of the matter is that very few publishers are using their marketing data in their ad sales, either as part of their media packs (which should be fairly simple) or to continually improve yield. If ad sales learn to use marketer data, it will give them new and more innovative ways to sell the audience.
Here’s a simple example: The marketer knows his/her site has 20% of their visitors playing online games, where these visitors stay for between 15 and 30 minutes. Are the ad slots on those pages not worth more because the visitor watches the ad for so long? You bet! But the ad sales team can’t take advantage of it.
Here’s another: The ad sales team knows it can sell its “health section” at a $20 cpm. What if the marketing team could buy search terms to generate traffic at less than $20? The marketer would reach its goal of more traffic and the ad sales would generate more revenue.
From a technology perspective, the tracking of user behaviour already exists from both an ad perspective and a marketer perspective. Combining these two data sets is what will unlock significant value for both parties.
Two’s company
Fast forward 18 months and I’d like to see online publishers utilizing a dashboard which combines business critical information from both the ad sales and the marketing teams. It will show information such as which parts of the site are generating revenue, how visitors are coming to the site, which ads generate repeat visits and are associated with purchases, etc.
If ad sales and marketing can learn to work together as one collaborative unit sharing customer intelligence, I think they will have developed a serious competitive edge.
