The primary challenges facing digital media today revolve around unpredictable whims of advertising revenue, which most publishers still rely on. According to the Pew Research Center, advertising generates around 69% of U.S. news industry revenue, while audience and content monetization generate around 25% of news dollars.

There are three essential editorial metrics associated with ad revenue. Here are some ways to improve yours.

Audience. The audience is built on three pillars: new, returning and loyal visitors. In terms of profit, you want to grow your new audience and bring it back to the site as often as possible, evolving into the loyal core audience.

Engagement is a complex metric involving quality time spent on a site (reading, scrolling, social media activity) and recirculation.

Recirculation defines visitor's journey from one page to another within a single visit.

These are critical factors in determining the number of viewable impressions during a visit, and the odds of the visitor coming back to the website in the future. One page view typically results in the user being exposed to a certain number (N) of advertisements multiplied by the number of pages visited on the website. A visitor’s return rate multiplies this exposure (ad impressions) by itself.

I would like to share two hands-on cases that illustrate how online media managed to grow revenue by improving visitor engagement for a given traffic source. One of them worked superbly for social media referrals, and the other for direct visitors. These case studies involved digital media.

Enhance the main page

Headlines and home page layout are meant to drive content drill down and can be assessed effectively in figures. Direct visitors typically use a site’s URL or their bookmarks in the browser and land on the home page. That page usually has a variety of different content blocks, such as: news, popular articles, recommendations and other content that should hook and retain the visitor. Generally, editorial staff selects this content intuitively or places the newest articles on the home page. Make sure this material is interesting, relevant and recent.

Which news should you offer direct visitors?

Ideal front page composition challenges editors daily. You can rely on analytics and make data-driven decisions by tracking News CTR (click-through rate). The hottest news drives more traffic and clicks, but also becomes irrelevant pretty fast. You can track a publication’s lifecycle in a real-time analytics dashboard and replace under-performing articles at exactly the right time. Some news fades away within an hour and should be replaced right away, while others can last for days and should remain on the homepage longer. Traditionally CTR for news blocks is measured as clicks relative to impressions.

For content, it is important to create powerful headlines and visuals that generate sufficient interest for the visitor to be inclined to explore the content further. Try to monitor your “hot and happening” news hourly and take any actions necessary to avoid cluttering your main page with irrelevant or outdated news.

Rotate home page content automatically

Having a sticky home page and eye-catching recommendations compels a user to spend more quality engaged time on your site. Consider trying to use a main page articles auto-rotation feature, which several progressive analytic providers offer. This feature tracks CTR for each item placed on the home page and picks up more popular news.

After we implemented this feature on our client's site (Naij.com), we increased the average depth from 3 up to 5 pageviews per visit, which naturally drove more ad revenue to the website from the direct visits. This functionality can be employed for blocks labeled “most popular,” “recommended,” “see also,” etc., to increase direct and referral traffic recirculation flow.

Retain social networks traffic



Social media have a tendency to drive highly bouncing traffic to the site – people land on an article, read it and leave. Your mission as a publisher is to retain this visitor with engaging content by showing the most-relevant articles (and ads on the page) so they will return in the future, which guarantees recurring page views – and revenue.

It's in your power to increase your social traffic return rate by improving engagement during the first visit. In my experience, first-visit engagement time correlates with visitors’ propensity to return. Users who spend more than 2.5 minutes on the site during the first visit are 40% more likely to come back within 30 days.

To extend recirculation, you should offer a “next great read” to your visitors right after they reach the bottom of the gateway page, or even embedded into the body of current text.

For instance, we helped one of the European Forbes' websites deploy a brand-new functionality capable of automatically feeding up the next article popular among a similar user cohort. This subtle enhancement improved average visit depth by 20%. This feature is setting the trend of social feed-like experience on digital media premises. Reach Forbes' height!

These are only two basic aspects proven to affect overall ad viewability within a site by keeping a visitor’s attention. There are many more data-driven practices to improve overall performance – and consequently revenue – of online media and boost audience and social media interaction. I plan to cover regularly them on Linkedin Pulse.

Please feel free to follow my updates, ask questions and share issues you are facing. I will be happy to exchange experience and cover topics that concern you the most.

Aleksander Krutko is the senior data analyst for the .io company, a real-time analytics service provider for digital media, and is considered an expert in data science. .io is focused on solving problems that regular web analytics services are incapable of solving. Be as good as Forbes.