How Publishers are using Customer Data Platform to boost their income.

Publishers have found a new way of increasing their revenue without hampering user experience. Not only it increases the revenue for Publishers but also helps them to delight their customers. Yes, this is how Publishers are using CDP to make most of their investment from content generation.

Customer Data Platform(CDP) was developed to address the problems faced by Advertisers with managing their first party data and making the best use of that data for marketing and communication purposes. But with rapid development in the CDP space, the use cases of CDP is not limited just for the advertisers.

Various forward thinking publishers(media companies) are now using CDP at greater extent for solving their issues with customer data and finding new avenues of income generation. CDP can help publishers in orchestration and unification of their customer data. It also helps them get an in-depth understanding of their user behaviour and amplify their decisioning with better insights.

The rich data which is collected at publishers’ end, not only serve them to establish a superior communication channel with their users. But it also helps showcase to potential advertisers about the quality of your content readers and how much your content is worth. Which can ultimately help publishers get more premium value for advertising on their website properties or apps.

 I already work with DMP platforms. Why CDP now?

DMP like any other management platforms, is a digital ad tech platform, which helps to do audience segments which are coming to your website or app into clusters based on their behaviour or interest. Those grouped audience segments are, of course, valuable to be sold on DMP platforms, but limited in terms of quality or richness of the segmented users. DMP collects data as anonymous and creates a group of those users, hence limited personalization. Data for DMP Audience is majorly collected from using Third-party cookies in browsers.

Let’s try to understand the value of these segmented users from Advertiser’s perspective. Usually, in any advertising platforms such as Google Adsense, Google Adexchange, Media.net or any other Demand Side Platforms(DSP), any digital channels(publishers or content platform) will get higher revenue if you have highly targeted audience which are relevant for the advertisers. Evidently, advertisers will bid higher for these target audiences.

From your side, you can’t do much, it terms of showing up audience relevancy to advertisers. This role needs to be fulfilled by the mediating advertising platforms and networks. These platforms here work as DMP themselves or associate with other DMP vendors, which can collect user data and segment those based on interest, demographic, behavior, affinity, etc.

Now advertisers can target relevant audience on these platforms. But again, these platforms are restricted to collect data at the macro level. They may not identify and collect users’ personal identifiable information(PII) and use it for ad targeting purposes. It’s done to maintain and protect the user privacy.

But CDP can collect PIIs and target those users for personalized communication, messaging and advertising purposes. CDPs can integrate data from Offline sources as well. CDPs abide by almost all consumer privacy policies and prevent user identity by not disclosing PII data to the third party.

CDP can collect many data and can stich that data to a unified profile. CDP can track complete user journey across multiple channels, devices and various platforms to create a more robust and personalized communication system. You yourself can get an idea. If you have such high quality and rich data, what value it can add to your direct sales teams and get premium ad revenue for your audience.

To further understand the difference between the two, you can read further here at: Difference between Customer Data Platform(CDP) and data management platform(DMP).

Customer Data Challenges faced by Publishers

DMP like any other management platforms, is a digital ad tech platform, which helps to do audience segments which are coming to your website or app into clusters based on their behaviour or interest. Those grouped audience segments are, of course, valuable to be sold on DMP platforms, but limited in terms of quality or richness of the segmented users. DMP collects data as anonymous and creates a group of those users, hence limited personalization. Data for DMP Audience is majorly collected from using Third-party cookies in browsers.

Let’s try to understand the value of these segmented users from Advertiser’s perspective. Usually, in any advertising platforms such as Google Adsense, Google Adexchange, Media.net or any other Demand Side Platforms(DSP), any digital channels(publishers or content platform) will get higher revenue if you have highly targeted audience which are relevant for the advertisers. Evidently, advertisers will bid higher for these target audiences.

From your side, you can’t do much, it terms of showing up audience relevancy to advertisers. This role needs to be fulfilled by the mediating advertising platforms and networks. These platforms here work as DMP themselves or associate with other DMP vendors, which can collect user data and segment those based on interest, demographic, behavior, affinity, etc.

Now advertisers can target relevant audience on these platforms. But again, these platforms are restricted to collect data at the macro level. They may not identify and collect users’ personal identifiable information(PII) and use it for ad targeting purposes. It’s done to maintain and protect the user privacy.

But CDP can collect PIIs and target those users for personalized communication, messaging and advertising purposes. CDPs can integrate data from Offline sources as well. CDPs abide by almost all consumer privacy policies and prevent user identity by not disclosing PII data to the third party.

CDP can collect many data and can stich that data to a unified profile. CDP can track complete user journey across multiple channels, devices and various platforms to create a more robust and personalized communication system. You yourself can get an idea. If you have such high quality and rich data, what value it can add to your direct sales teams and get premium ad revenue for your audience.

To further understand the difference between the two, you can read further here at:

Customer Data Challenges faced by Publishers

Audience Management: Publisher have data available from multiple sources, whether it’s CRM systems, Emailing Platforms, CMS(Content Management Systems), Ad platforms, Social Media Channels, Analytics Software, Subscription Management tools and many others. Since data is spread across multiple sources, managing that data becomes a very tedious task.

Data Anonymity: This is also one of the major challenge faced by publishers. Data collected from most of the platforms are anonymous and publishers do not know about the individual and hence, their preference. Because of this, publishers cannot convey their communication effectively and in a more personalized format. Therefore, converting those anonymous users to their subscribers becomes very difficult.

Data Unification: The data collected by all platforms are distinct from each other, as the mechanism of collecting data in each of these platforms are different. Unifying that data is utterly important to understand anything at the macro level to gain better insights. It’s also required to stitch that data with the individual user for identifying and creating a seamless customer journey, which is very difficult under these circumstances.

Data Activation: Helplessness of activating that data across various channels, which is seamless, can be quite frustrating for anybody. Most of the time you can only use the data only on that same channel, because proper user identification is possible only on that channel. But in case you are looking to deliver omni-channel experience for your users, it becomes quite a challenge.

How Publishers can get started with CDP?

To be fair, it will be righteous to say that CDP is not for small publishers. Usage and implementation of CDP can be a costly affair. This platform is catered towards premium publishers. Approx. cost of implementing a CDP can start from $5,000 per year and can go up to $200,000, completely depending on the vendors which you are choosing, functionalities which you are looking to address or problems which you are trying to address.

It actually depends on whether you can get the return on investment which you pouring here. For example, let’s say you are having around 100,000 visitors per month. And average revenue which you are generating is around $3,000X12=$36,000, which includes Ad Revenue, Sponsorship, Direct Deal, Subscription, etc.

If CDP can help you attain addition 25% to 30% growth in revenue. And the cost of onboarding CDP and recurring maintenance cost is less than that of 25% to 30% additional growth, which you are getting from utilizing CDP. Then you can sustain and get better ROI. That is why, it’s advisable to discuss with CDP vendor thoroughly about all your queries and costing.

Once you get the idea about everything, then you can move ahead with orientation of CDP. Evaluate the CDP thoroughly with various vendors, understand their pros and cons. Companies such as Segment, Treasuredata and BlueConic are doing a fantastic job in this sphere. Talk to their representatives to understand how you can leverage CDP for your growth.

To understand further about the CDP and how to evaluate them, you can look into : How to choose the right CDP platform for your organization. 

Main Use Cases which CDP addresses for Publishers

CDP can be a really helpful tool to help publishers create enormous value for your users as well as themselves. Here are some of the major use cases which publishers are identifying as best use of Customer Data Platforms.

Audience Monetization: Value of your audience completely depends on the quality of audience which you are attracting and how that audience is grouped and made available to the advertisers. Yes, DMP is an excellent platform to do so, but again as you got the idea from above points, that the quality of audience segmentation and that also associated with individual user is far better with CDP. The users which were anonymous once are now known persistent customer profiles and will create very detailed segments. This will attract more premium advertisers who will pay higher rates for this level of quality audience.

Content Recommendation: Recommending the content which is highly relevant to users can solemnly increase average time of site spent by users and also helps in reducing the bounce rate. Which will help in uplifting the page views on your website. This will not only help your users to consume the content which they are looking for, but also help you generate additional revenue which you would have not generated if they users had bounced off from your website. With such a detailed profile associated with the known users, CDPs can really magnify applicability.

Premium Content Subscription: Now that you have all the details about your users and how they are interacting with your brand on all different channels, you have a very comprehensive understanding of your users and their journey. Using this valuable information, your marketing teams can now convert your users who are just browsing your website to customers by making them subscribe to your subscription plans. You can provide them with customized plans or discounts based on their preference. You can distinguish between the users who are having higher intent for buying and those who are just surfers or unknown readers. And based on that distinction, you can plan out your strategy to attract those customers first and add other users into sales funnels strategy.

Website Personalization: This is one of the most beneficial use cases of the CDP for publisher. People which are provided more personalized experiences are expected to engage and interact better. You can integrate data available from Customer Data Platform to other website personalization tools to create superior impact to the users and increased content consumption. Based on the preferences which users are having, you can personalize the complete experience of your website as per the liking of your users. This is going to increase your onsite engagement drastically and make them more comfortable on your site.

Reminder/Renewal Messaging: Retaining your current subscribers or casual readers is very critical for overall growth on your website. These are the loyal people who consistently consume your content and spread the word of mouth about your brand. Because of such a detailed level of personalization and segmentation, CDP act as a vital source of data input which facilitates appreciable communication experience with your users. You can send reminders for renewals with personalized messaging at the time of renewal. You can send consistent messages across channels. You can motivate your frequent readers to take immediate actions by giving them customized offers and discounts, especially created for that buyer. Overall, it will help to reduce your churn-rate.

Contextual Content Experiences: It simply means providing the right content to the right audience at the right time, this will lead to enhanced consumer experiences. You already understand how important it is to provide content which are contextually relevant and can captivate your audience. Using CDP, you can have better audience insights and can intelligently segment your audience. To increase engagement, you can refine your media and content for more targeted experiences. Complete omni-channel experience can be provided that also real-time.

Pertinent Advertising: Exhibiting irrelevant ads to users can really hamper the overall experience of any user. CDP can help in showing appropriate advertising to users which align with the interest of the users. Up-to-date and detailed consumer profiles will help in excluding or including the users in advanced segments and target highly relevant ads to them. You can also subdue ads for premium subscribers, which is one of the key selling point to them.

Conclusion

CDP is not any new technology, rather more enhanced version of technologies which you might already use at your end. It integrates and unifies all your available systems and data, making it more like an aggregator with intelligence. It can not only help in increasing your revenue but also help in understanding your customers better and creating a better experience for your users.

As a publisher, you can own your data and have more control over it. The constraints of data which are limited to a specific channel can now be combined with other channels, that can provide a seamless macro level insights which was not even possible earlier.

Adding Customer data platform to your ecosystem can definitely help you gain competitive advantage and expand your horizon towards entering data-centric world and fuel your business growth.

To get more information about how CDPs can help, you can get more information on cdpinstitute.org. This organization helps advertisers and publishers to better understand the use cases and implementation of Customer Data Platform. It is founded by David Raab, who actually coined the term CDP, and has extensive experience in the Martech field.