Category: In the News

Indeed, Reddit has steadily accelerated its shift away from being “anti-publisher” over the years, since launching partnerships with publishers like Time magazine in 2017. While referral traffic from the platform is steady for publishers who put in the time and consistent effort to build a Reddit strategy, the primary goal is talking with Reddit members and using the platform as a resource to mine for story ideas. 

“Reddit is so core to the identity of the internet, so much of what happens on Reddit then branches out to Facebook or Twitter,” said Washington Post reporter Gene Park, who handed over the Reddit reigns last year to the Post’s audience team after two years at the helm. “My approach was to foster a lot of goodwill, if you have a good reputation on Reddit, you have a pretty good stranglehold on what the rest of the internet thinks of you.”

While Parks was steering the Post’s Reddit identity, he introduced potential readers to the breadth of the paper’s coverage and helped get reporters more exposure. This approach has transferred to the Post’s TikTok strategy: Being part of the conversation rather than actively selling anything. When the Post wrote a piece about the death of the electric guitar, Parks posted it to the guitar subreddit saying “you might enjoy discussing this.” It was the most upvoted piece in the subreddit’s history.  

Parks’ success metric was being able to enter into bizarre or unlikely subreddits where the members already knew him, reputational clout that is hard to measure. Now, as a gaming reporter, his past as the Post moderator has granted him certain privileges, people defend him when his pieces are being discussed. 

“It’s a way to garner and foster goodwill and trust,” he said. “Facebook is a horrifying battleground, Reddit will help win another battleground.”

Still, overt content sharing for traffic referral within subreddits is swiftly shut down by community moderators. And Reddit referral traffic is increasingly spotty: While it made a big push for users to move to their app a few years ago, the app does not send referral traffic. Unless you’re using a link shortener with link tracking, or UTM parameters for link tracking, Reddit app referral traffic shows up in analytics just like text message, WhatsApp, or other dark sources.

“What’s left, the desktop and mobile webpage referral traffic, makes it look like Reddit is in steep decline,” said Parsely data insights lead, Kelsey Arendt. “But with their app downloads, I have a hard time believing that to be directionally accurate.”

Referral traffic is small but growing in cases. Over the last six months, while people have been working remotely, content diets have changed. Reddit’s niche communities and subcultures speak to this. “During the pandemic, we had an uplift in referral traffic coming from Reddit,” said Ahmad Swaid, head of content at youth-focused culture publishers Dazed Media. “Perhaps because people are at home more, willing to share more or have more time to go into the archives.”

Dazed has been growing its relationship with Reddit over the last three years, but hasn’t yet launched an editorial partnership. A regular Dazed column, Beauty Fetish, uncovers the strange quirks emerging from the web, which Reddit is a hot-bed for. Dazed, for instance, spoke with people behind r/panporn, the official appreciation society for people who like looking at pictures of make-up and beauty products that are almost empty.

Once a pretty hostile environment for marketers, the platform now says that globally almost 70% of members respect brands that make an effort to participate on the platform. It’s revving its pitch to brands in the U.K, it officially opened its London office last month, with five staffers, where between 7% and 8% of its more than 430 million active users live, (its second-biggest global market). In 2019, U.K. views of Reddit grew by 64% year-on-year, said the platform.

Reddit is most influential as a story source for publishers. U.K. publishing group Reach made more of a push on Reddit earlier this year. Its largest brand Daily Mirror has a profile page and it also makes use of Reddit’s flagship Ask Me Anything feature with big-name columnists.

Reddit has slightly pipped Twitter as a way for Reach’s brands to source stories, especially on its brands The Daily Star, whose audience is partial to the more bonkers, often animal-focussed stories.  

“We’re having a lot of fun with the [NewsWhip] integration, you can spend too much time down Reddit rabbit holes — there’s so much there — it’s like a gold mine,” said Yara Silva, group head of social, Reach Nationals (Daily Mirror, Daily Express, Daily Star and OK! Magazine) at Reach.

Measuring a campaign’s effectiveness is typically expensive, both in terms of hard research costs and the human resources required to manage a study. According to one publisher we spoke to, this means fewer than 15 percent of campaigns get measured, while the rest try to satisfy advertisers with impression, viewability and click data.

Major tech platforms like Facebook and YouTube do offer brand lift data as an always-on metric. In other words, these platforms are proving their brand-building capacities each time. By contrast, most publishers rely on past data or comparable research, not data specific to an ongoing campaign.

But what if publishers, too, could provide hard data for every campaign, regardless of size or duration, demonstrating the brand lift that each one has delivered? 

Five factors will drive scalable brand lift metrics

Publisher-provided campaign data, the kind that shows brand lift, is a game-changer, transforming ad hoc research — offered only to clients already willing to spend big budgets — into an always-on metric, proving the value of advertising to each and every client to win bigger and always-on campaigns.

For advertisers, it means that every post-campaign report they receive from publishers doing this contains data about a campaign’s effectiveness across key brand metrics. Meanwhile, it enables publishers to build up an invaluable bank of knowledge about how advertising works in their environments, fueling future pitches and giving salespeople confidence to recommend best practices for optimizing campaigns.

In practice, turning brand lift into a scalable metric requires five key elements:

1. Simplicity: Few teams have the time or resources to add yet another process to each campaign setup. So that it becomes part of business as usual, measuring brand lift must require only a light touch and should be fully automated.

2. Consistency: Brand lift should be measured the same way for every campaign. This is partly to maintain simplicity, but also to enable comparability between campaigns, allowing  publishers to build up detailed benchmarks to contextualize results. Looking into more than 7,000 recent campaigns measured identically by Brand Metrics, the average campaign increases brand awareness levels from 56 percent to 60 percent. Consideration rises from 29 percent to 32 percent, while preference increases from 17 percent to 20 percent and action/purchase intent rises from 7 percent to 9 percent. Some campaigns don’t create any uplift at all, but others massively exceed these averages. Knowing the difference is business critical.

3. Cost efficiency: To become a true metric, brand lift must evolve from being an ad hoc cost (which always begs the question, “Should we measure this campaign at all?”) into a flat-fee, all-you-can-measure model, thereby encouraging usage at scale without forcing sales teams to worry about incremental costs.

4. Automated outputs: When measuring campaigns at scale, publishers must be able to extract the results easily via automated post-campaign reports, or else through an API feed directly into their own data lakes and dashboards. Report-writing time can then be redeployed into more business-building activities, such as interpreting the findings and providing advertisers with advice on future campaigns.

5. Sample comparability: Measurements need to occur inside the very ecosystems where the campaigns are happening, not in the laboratory setting of a research panel. Using panels leads to sample effects that distort the comparison, as well as differences unrelated to campaign exposure. The use of panels also makes comparisons between channels, markets and global benchmarks impossible — and the tactic can’t be scaled. Just like the big tech platforms, publishers should be capturing measurements purely from within their own ecosystems. Only then can potentially misleading variations be eliminated, allowing brand lift to become an always-on metric.

Emerging solutions focus on metrics that matter

With advertising budgets under increasing pressure, publishers and broadcasters need to justify every dollar, on every campaign, to win more spend from cost-focused agencies and marketers. To win back more budgets from the big tech platforms, they must answer an age-old question — “Is our advertising working?” — with confidence.

Of course, any solution to that challenge, working with the five key elements above, also needs to operate within the restrictions of GDPR/CCPA, and within a world where third-party cookies are fast disappearing.

Fortunately, such solutions exist and are working for publishers right now, enabling them to ensure that brand lift is a standard offering available to all advertisers. This is shifting the conversation away from pure delivery metrics and towards the metrics that really matter. Finally, publishers can prove that advertising in their environments really works. Many media owners already do. And, as revealed by data, the ones that make moves that deliver scalable brand metrics early, stand to claim an audience share that slower adopters will almost certainly miss.