How can you strengthen the foundation of a publisher’s success?
Media consumption

How can you strengthen the foundation of a publisher’s success?

While various aspects, such as number of page views and time spent on viewing, correspond to a website’s popularity, the users themselves are the most important factor. The audience is the foundation upon which publishers build their success. However, sustainable growth requires more than just great content – an effective strategy should include activities involving the various traffic sources that attract visitors.

One of Slovenia’s largest publishers, TSmedia, came to Gemius with the challenge of significantly increasing the audience of its websites. TSmedia has great potential for internal traffic on its owned websites. Nevertheless, attracting an incremental audience requires a budget for external traffic. How can it be spent most effectively? As there are different external traffic sources available, which is the best choice: campaigns on search engines or on other portals?

Solutions to increase the number of visitors

The first step is to know which sources are already attracting an audience. The web analytical tool gemiusPrism allows the observation of traffic by splitting sources into types. This shows whether or not there are enough shares from a particular traffic type (e.g. search engines), and the domain traffic informs of the influence from internal and external sources, such as social media and the other websites of TSmedia:

The most effective self-promotional activities are based on knowledge of where to find a target audience which is not yet visiting a certain portal. In this case, gemiusPrism provided a duplication report across TSmedia websites. It turns out that the itis.si and bizi.si websites hold the majority of unique visitors from which traffic can be generated. Therefore, bizi.si was chosen to run self-promotion for najdi.si.

Such duplication statistics can be measured thanks to the usage of 3rd party cookies. In order to improve the measurement of mobile sites and to avoid cookie deletion irregularities, gemiusPrism offers the options of 1st party cookies and browserIDs.

External campaigns are the next step in increasing a website’s traffic. These can be paid ones like Google Adwords, although very often publishers reach a negotiation, putting links on their websites to drive each other’s traffic.

In TSmedia’s case it was important to select the partner publishers with the greatest potential for new traffic, meaning as few users visiting both sites as possible. The most useful tool to provide such knowledge is the duplication analysis from the gemiusAudience research:

This data shows that avto.net and zadovoljna.si are the best sites to consider for a partnership with itis.si. However, before making any decisions, the target audience should also be analysed, and this may change the share of duplication.

As a result of internal and external promotion campaigns, the traffic from particular referrer domains to TSmedia’s sites has doubled over a period of 6 months.