Brent Lazo is the Director of Analytics at Perform Media, overseeing digital measurement and insights across our media properties and platforms.
As platforms and devices have continued to evolve, so too has the manner in which audiences consume and engage with content. Today’s digital consumer is exposed to content from a broad assortment of sources, but the manner in which it is surfaced is largely from a select few “front-door” platforms — most obvious of which being our daily interaction with Facebook and other Social platforms.
The emergence of Social platforms as an increasingly primary source of news and information has created a disconnect between traditional digital audience measures and a publisher’s true audience reach. Meaningful content engagement is now occurring “off-platform,” and with the emergence of publishing platforms such as Google AMP and Facebook Instant Articles, the line between what is “on-platform” and “off-platform” will only continue to blur, further complicating publishers’ ability to accurately measure and de-duplicate audiences reached through each distribution touchpoint.
Traditionally, the industry has looked to trusted third-party syndicated data providers for a sense of how digital properties measured up. Though these firms have made efforts to keep up with the increasing consumption on mobile and from platforms such as Facebook Instant Articles, there is still a huge gap in reflecting comprehensive audience reached through off-platform means. In response, a few major publishers have recently stated that no longer can we solely look at a comScore figure to understand the size of our audiences. While this is true, the method and source(s) by which to accurately count these new audiences has yet to be standardized. As a result, publishers are creating their own methods to describe their audience across platforms, which creates a lack of consistency and a potential slippery slope.
Here at Perform Media, this is something we’ve been talking about for quite some time. As we’ve seen the evolution of our own content consumption, it has become increasingly evident just how much engagement we’re missing out on if we only look at our on-platform performance. In fact, our football brand Goal was recently named the most shared publisher on Social Media, so properly quantifying this portion of our audience is particularly important to us. But it’s also important to us that we avoid the pitfall of just looking for the biggest number, and ensure we place an emphasis on users who are actively engaging with our content in some way. We will never have a like-for-like comparison to the old school Page Views and Unique Visitors, but we want to strive for a meaningfully consistent method of measuring engagement on any platform.
So what’s our approach?
Our analysis focuses on four of our global editorial brands: Goal, Sporting News, Spox, and Voetbalzone, and the four biggest audience engagement touchpoints for us: On-site, Apps, our distributed Video player, and Facebook. (We also have meaningful audience engagement on other platforms globally, including Twitter, Instagram, and LINE, but for now we are focusing on Facebook, where we see the most impact and have the most confidence in measurement.) Audience measurement for On-site, Apps, and our distributed Video player is relatively straightforward. Our Google Analytics reporting tells us that in January we reached 82 Million Unique Users across these platforms. For purposes of this analysis, this “On-platform” audience figure includes Google AMP and Facebook Instant Article pages.
When it comes to Facebook audience, the first figure usually discussed is Reach. For these four brands, we collectively reached more than 232 Million People on Facebook in January, based on an extrapolation of our 28-day Reach figure. There is no doubt value in this audience and is a reasonable reflection of the opportunity we present in terms of putting content in front of users. Surely this is directly important in scoping what we can offer brands and how we can deliver branded content exposure. But in our opinion, this should only be considered a starting point in distributed audience measurement, which for Perform looks like the below:
Looking solely at total reach is problematic in that it does not give any indication of the engagement or resonance our brands and content might actually have with these 232mm people. With many publishers being able to claim reaching tens or even hundreds of millions of users each month through Facebook, the obvious implication is that each publisher is counting many of the same users in each of their figures. In traditional on-site engagement, a Unique User has expressed some level of affinity for each site he/she visits, but this is not a prerequisite for a publisher’s piece of content surfacing in any given user’s feed, controlled by the algorithms and influenced by the behavior of our connections. This is of course the reason for the multiplier that often exists when comparing a publisher’s reach with the amount of users who have actually liked their page(s).
Here at Perform Media, we are then focusing on a few other chief metrics relating to Facebook, among them, Organic Reach and Engaged Users. One of the benefits of the Facebook platform for any marketer is that the potential to reach audience is limited only by how much you are willing to spend. There are no doubt publishers emerging whose entire audience strategy is based on acquiring paid traffic through Facebook and monetizing the engagement acquired through these users. Our audience reach is almost entirely Organic, at 93.4% of our total Facebook reach in January.
Nearly all of the audience reach we see is a by-product of users who have chosen to connect to our pages and/or engage in some way with our content.
Taking all of this into account, in our opinion the Facebook audience metric to best demonstrate as core to the overall view of On&Off platform audience is Engaged Users. This is representative of all of the people who were not only exposed to our content in their Facebook feed, but also took some action on the post(s). We’re also focused on this editorially as we look to grow the overall figure and increase the rate of Engaged Users, relative to our total Reach. The engagement will always be a derivative of the total Reach, but we can best control for the inherent swings by looking at how many of the users we have converted to take some action; this is particularly true at the post level.
This then leads us to our overall audience view, where we can look at our Engaged Audience from Facebook as well as our Total Audience Reach:
With this view, we’re engaging 108mm Monthly Users On&Off platform across our global editorial sports properties and platforms. This reflects an increase of 32% from what we’d see when only looking at our On-Platform users. Facebook users are also contributing 239mm Monthly Social Platform Content Views/Engagements. When we look at that in the context of our site and app engagement, it increases our total engagement from 1.9bn to 2.1bn:
Publishers in 2017 are in an interesting position. Our audiences are changing the ways in which they find and engage with our content, but the traditionally accepted ways of measuring audience no longer accurately reflect all of these touchpoints. Until a standard exists, we’re on our own to most accurately position the audience opportunity we present. Here at Perform Media, we feel that as publishers it’s important that we maintain a level of consistency and avoid going down a path where we suddenly find ourselves considering anyone who sees a Google Search result from our brand as part of our audience.
What will survive any change, though, is focusing on engaging and interesting content and products. At Perform Media, we favor a measured approach to how we view our audience and its growth, which is one that aligns with our content and product initiatives. Despite our capacity to tout a significant reach figure, it’s not the measure we’re going to hang our hats on. If you focus on engagement, then audience will always follow.