Category: In the News

That access, along with the indirect preferential treatment AMP pages got in mobile search, was one of the chief benefits for many of the publishers using the framework, many of whom adopted AMP grudgingly and spent years grousing about AMP’s monetization issues (including some that were partly the fault of advertisers).

But even with that advantage gone, publishers that have invested in the framework are unlikely to walk away from it, sources at four different publishers told Digiday. For one, AMP still offers a framework that provides a good user experience on mobile, where so much content consumption happens. Additionally, the experiences that favor the AMP framework, including AMP Stories and, to a lesser extent, Google Discover, represent another possibility for incremental traffic — and Google’s plans to make pieces of AMP work inside publishers’ pages will keep them from dumping it.

“Our product team would be very interested in not supporting AMP any longer,” an SEO director at one large digital publisher said. “But they’re looking at a lot of work to make up.

“The work to make non-AMP pages as performant as AMP pages is not insignificant,” that source added. “The conversations are going to be not around saving resources but tradeoffs.”

When AMP launched in the spring of 2016, it was seen in some ways as Google playing catch up to Facebook, which had launched Instant Articles the year before. And Google more than caught up, in part by extending the reach of AMP across several media platforms and leveraging its open source nature to build more support for it.

For all the progress Google made in adding a foundation to ad networks and vendors’ proprietary formats, many publishers say AMP’s monetization opportunities still lag well behind what’s possible for their own mobile sites.

“It’s still a significant gap,” said one executive at a large digital publisher, who asked not to be identified while discussing a key partner.

That source noted that those issues go beyond things like how quickly the ads load. “[AMP] limits your session depth, which kills you,” that source said. “If you go from 1.8 pages per session to 1.3, that’s a big deal.”

But publishers have known about these issues for years and have stuck with AMP, often for the simple reason that building fast, high-performing mobile pages is very hard. And as Google continues to prioritize high performing mobile pages, sticking with a proven format makes sense. “Our non-AMP pages are never going to be as performant,” a second executive said.

In addition to that tradeoff, publishers have two reasons to keep an eye on the AMP framework: Google Discover and AMP Stories.

Since its launch in 2018, Discover has turned into a promising, if unpredictable, source of traffic for publishers. Sources at three different publishers said that, on good months, Google Discover delivers up to 25% of the referral traffic they get from Google.

“Google’s really trying to give away free traffic [with it],” the first executive said. “I wouldn’t build my business on it, but it’s interesting.”

The giveaway is also coming at a moment when publishers are getting more interested in AMP Stories, as well. After a slow start in 2018, the format has gotten more traction, thanks partly to its inclusion in Discover. A few publishers were excited by last month’s news that programmatic demand would be available to monetize content in those formats as well.

Moving forward, publishers may also be hoping that they can pick and choose certain parts of AMP to integrate into their mobile plans. That will be a point of emphasis for AMP moving forward, said Rudy Galfi, the product manager of AMP at Google.

“Flexibility around monetization is an area where people want to go with a non-AMP path initially,” Galfi said. “The point is that you can have an assimilation of various experiences together.”

“We want to work on making that work.”

Can marketers measure brand lift on a 90 percent opted-out audience?

The cookieless future is already a reality for Ster, the exclusive sales house for the Dutch national public broadcaster NPO. Due to a strict interpretation of GDPR, Ster made user tracking opt-out by default, resulting in a 90 percent opt-out rate. Ster has since ceased all advertising cookie usage, making performance measures such as post-view, plus running any form of programmatic activity, extremely difficult.

With standard performance metrics largely removed from the equation, Ster could trace the direct revenue generated by providing brand lift measurements to advertisers. In the second half of 2020, Ster saw 30 percent growth in digital display campaigns, half of which it directly attributes to adding brand lift measurement to every pitch.

Ster also set a minimum budget threshold for campaigns to qualify for brand lift measurements, resulting in a 45 percent increase in average order value for H2 versus H1. Some advertisers even quadrupled their average campaign spend. “Looking forward to next year,” said Tom Van Bentheim, manager of digital strategy, operations and technology at Ster, “there are conversations with some of the big agencies, where all campaigns will include brand lift measurement as standard.”

How to measure small campaigns, and thousands of them

Local news publishers typically deploy smaller campaigns, which are harder to measure. Not only that, they tend to run these campaigns in huge numbers, which makes measurement even more difficult. JPIMedia, one of the UK’s largest news organizations, ran more than 2,000 directly-sold campaigns in the past year – up to 300 per month. In addition, its clients are predominantly SMEs. As a result, average campaign impressions and spend tend to be modest, which makes measurement more challenging.

With Facebook as a key competitor, JPIMedia made the strategic choice to measure brand lift at scale. The publisher efficiently ran brand awareness, consideration, preference and action intent metrics across most campaigns. Now, a year and a half after beginning to take this approach, JPIMedia has seen 55 percent year-on-year growth in average direct-sold display campaign impressions for September 2020. Next year, it is looking to drive a further 70 percent increase.

Brand lift data has also informed what JPIMedia Research Director Simon Baty called “a positive feedback loop on campaign outcomes.” In other words, the publisher is now  better able to apply insights to improve future results for its customers. Achieving an initial average brand lift improvement of 11.6 percent, in recent months this number has increased to 15–16 percent, even reaching 21 percent in October.

Next steps: demonstrate a powerful impact (beyond clicks)

The Ozone Project is a premium advertising platform, and its members include some of the leading publishers in the UK, including News UK, the Telegraph, the Guardian, Reach, Bauer Media, DC Thomson and Time Out.

According to Bryan Scott, The Ozone Project’s marketing director, “Brand lift allows us to measure and put into words the powerful impact our environments can deliver for our customers, in addition to the measures they have in place elsewhere.”

Ozone’s average campaign brand lift last year was around 21 percent higher than the Brand Metrics platform global benchmark. “Today, the agencies of course still have their benchmarks around clickthrough rates (CTR). But what [the brand lift approach] has done is to help transform the limited thinking around what the value added of a digital campaign actually is.”

Clients need more data to support their buying decisions 

South Africa’s largest publisher, Media24, leveraged brand lift metrics to take post-campaign reporting to a new level, “one that is not simply tick or cross, but able to diagnose various outcomes,” said Gareth Lloyd, head of data and analytics at 24.com. Recently, 24.com used the brand lift metrics to measure a series of campaigns with the region’s top advertisers in an effort to gauge the branding effects of mobile. With 80 percent of its audience on mobile, it was a strategic priority for mobile spend to reflect time spent. “Adding brand lift measurement has given a whole new dimension to our reporting; clients love it, and it brings them back for more,” said Lloyd.  

The picture these and other major publishers paint is clear. In a shifting market, focusing on brand lift measurement is bringing them stability — and even driving revenue directly. As advertisers become more familiar with brand lift measurement — and even start to require it — publishers are beginning to deliver brand lift as an always-on metric. In doing so, they are helping to reinforce the unique strengths of premium advertising environments.