Publishers today know how much effort it takes to maximize audience engagement and increase profit margins. To reach a greater audience and earn more revenue, they require a complete understanding of today's monetization solutions. Focusing solely on one aspect of audience engagement and failing to account for others is no longer viable, and subsequently, will lead to a dwindling audience and higher overheads.
For publishers to succeed in the highly competitive digital marketing era, they must have the ability to recognize which areas to focus on and improve. If they wish to truly maximize user engagement and stay ahead of the curve, they’ll also need to strike the perfect balance between content quality and quantity.
The three pillars of digital publishing
Two pillars of digital publishing have more or less remained the same throughout the years — traffic and audiences. Digital publishers are still vying for every bit of traffic they can, be it from search, social media or direct results. The age-old question of what makes an audience tick is still as pertinent as ever. Finding the answer can more successfully get audiences to subscribe, log in or take any other desired action.
The only pillar that’s evolving, and quite rapidly at that, is the tech. It’s the pillar that digital publishers need to focus on the most to succeed, and the one that relies heavily on establishing partnerships.
The emergence of ad partner networks and their proprietary technologies has placed a great emphasis on teaming up with ad firms in order to gain access to cutting-edge tech and to sell inventory to a larger number of advertisers. In the end, digital publishers have a lot to gain from establishing partnerships with ad networks and plenty of reasons to do so.
Performance-based campaigns to balance quantity
Publishers tend to make up for the declining CPMs by introducing additional verticals and pushing out as much content as they can. However, more content simply can’t make up for a lack of demand, and it certainly won’t do wonders for quality.
Without proper technical capabilities, data validation or a partner in sight, publishers shouldn’t expect that an increase in the quantity of content will deliver more revenue or subscriptions.
To scale quantity correctly, a publisher would need a tech partner: one that can provide them with all the meaningful and contextual data necessary to make the right content decisions.
And that’s precisely what contemporary performance-based campaigns using first-party data rely on — context. Contextually-relevant information such as inventory specs, audience data (the device used, interest, location, etc.), and ad creatives can help publishers pinpoint where an increase in the quantity of context is needed and for whom.
Even with all this data, optimizing a campaign for quantity is a process of trial and error. Without it, publishers are sentenced to a very expensive guessing game they can’t win. Most publishers who don’t obtain a tech partner forever remain in the awareness stage of the funnel — the most costly of all.
The relationship between content quality and brand safety
Sacrificing quality for the sake of quantity has never been a path to success, and most digital publishers are well aware of this.
Partnering up with tech firms and ad networks such as MGID is highly advantageous for publishers, seeing as how they gain access to tech that is crucial for optimizing their businesses. In addition, established partnerships provide advertisers with safety and security by connecting them with reliable publishers and finding contextually fit ad inventory.
However, this means that publishers need to hold up their end of the bargain, which in a nutshell is providing quality inventory for advertisers to fill. By this, we’re referring to the quality of content that publishers post on their websites.
The most important aspect of quality inventory is brand safety. Advertisers don’t want their creatives to be associated with low-quality content that compromises brand safety. It’s up to publishers to ensure that every piece of content that’s put out is as ad and brand-friendly as possible.
High safety rankings are the direct result of MGID’s safety optimization efforts. They indicate which items and ad campaigns are safe and acceptable across a variety of publisher networks, effectively reassuring advertisers that their ads can be placed on premium websites. Highly-ranked campaigns are more easily scalable and offer a more positive experience for publishers’ audiences.
Building a positive experience on a publisher’s website is more than just being brand safe, however. It’s also having the ability to not only reach the publisher’s audience whenever they are ready to make a purchase and but also deliver the relevant ad at that precise time.
To that end, MGID employs Contextual Intelligence. Using Standard IAB 2.2 taxonomy, MGID categorizes content and rates it for the sentiment, i.e., tone, and profiles the audience based on their behavior. Sentiment, for example, is particularly important in product and political campaigns. With all this data at their disposal, MGID is able to classify publishers’ quality content based on context and make the perfect ad placement decisions, beneficial for all participants of the ecosystem.
Conclusion
Striking the perfect balance between content quality and quantity relies on having access to data that shows exactly where improvements are needed. Technology is a crucial pillar of digital publishing, as it maintains the balance between quality and quantity and optimizes the performance of ad campaigns based on context. Partnering up with a tech firm is imperative in the current ad climate, if you wish to maximize audience engagement and succeed as a digital publisher.
