With a lot of recent changes and new trends to catch upon for publishers, the focus has shifted on monetizing activities and beating the competition. This is not a healthy sign to grow the business. At this point of time, the need of the hour should be to engage with the audience, old or new, along with creating a better strategy with the advertisers who, for improved results, are ready to pay the premium price.

With already holding immense experience of decades of this industry, it is time for the publishers to leverage this expertise with proprietary data, combining smartly with technology, to reach out to the right user, sharing the right content at the right time – could help the entire media ecosystem to grow and thrive in this current age of standing out from the others.

New Challenges With Changing Times

Back in the pre-digital revolution time, the publishing industry flourished tremendously and was a master in marketing rightly and making sure the users were engaged with the great content and kept coming back for more.  In this age of digitization and automation, the speed and the volume at which the information and content are flowing have no limit. But the logic of marketing remains the same – with a change in the medium of reaching out to users.

Publishers are sitting on a goldmine of user data on real people and not based on approximate inferences from third-party cookies. These publishers know the exact interests of these subscribers – this data can be used to rightly pitch them the content they are looking for to give them a better experience and keep them coming for more content. This can help build more engagement – and thus can demand higher ad rates from the advertisers for the already engaged users.

In 2024, publishers are increasingly leveraging advanced analytic strategies and digital transformations to stay ahead in the dynamic landscape of digital content. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced digitalization play a central role, enabling publishers to gain deeper insights into user behavior, preferences, and content reach.

So, the challenge is to reach a magnanimous scale of the user base that attracts the interest of the majority of marketers and advertisers. It is easier for the gigantic publishing empires to generate enough audience by themselves to gain the required traction and generate meaningful ad revenue at premium prices justifying the brand value. The medium and small publishers have been facing a major issue in growing their subscriptions and user base.

Why You Need To Reconsider Your Analytics Strategy?

The key is in its details. The idea should be to set up a detailed long-term goal for the publishing firm, dig deep into the data, and interpret the data to align with the goal. Here, data can play a very significant role for publishers. To get insights from the data, there is analytics that helps you to break down the complexities of the data and shows you seamless information about the audience, and its interests – helping to build a long-term brand value amongst the users. 

A lot of publishers rely on Google Analytics as their data bank to gain the insights they require. But it comes with its issues. Once your website reaches a certain limit, the data then becomes a guess rather than factual. So basically, instead of analyzing all of the data, there’s a threshold on how much data is analyzed and any data after that will be an assumption based on patterns.

Say you’re looking through all your traffic data from the last year and find you have 5 million page views. Only 500K of that 5 million is accurate! The data for the remaining 4.5 million (90%) is an assumption based on the 500K sample size. This comes off to be a limiting threshold as your data in a third-party analytics platform may become more inaccurate as the traffic to your website increases.

Another disadvantage to sampled data is that you might be missing out on opportunities you would’ve noticed if you were given a view of the whole. For example, as the data is already being predicted, we are unable to see the real occurring pattern. The bigger your business grows, the less you can risk making business decisions based on assumptions that could be inaccurate. 

But to stay ahead of the curve publishers need to think beyond digitalization. With the advent of AI, ML, and advanced technologies publishers should resort to the latest data-driven analytics strategies to provide the best experience to the audience.

Data-driven AI-empowered Analytics

With data-driven analytics personalization algorithms can be employed to deliver tailored content recommendations, enhancing user engagement and satisfaction. Real-time analytics have become a cornerstone, allowing publishers to swiftly respond to changing trends and optimize content at the moment. 

Predictive analytics is also gaining prominence, assisting publishers in forecasting audience preferences and anticipating content demand. The integration of data from various sources, including social media and user interactions, provides a comprehensive understanding of audience interactions with content. 

Publishers are adopting sophisticated data visualization techniques to communicate insights effectively and facilitate data-driven decision-making. Additionally, ethical considerations around data privacy and transparency are becoming integral components of analytic strategies, fostering trust with users. A few of the many advantages of AI-empowered analytics are:

• Enhanced decision-making process.
• Deep insights into reader behavior, preferences, and content performance.
• More personalized targeted and engaging content.
• The data-driven approach extends to ad placement and targeting.
• Customized solutions to address unique needs.
• Technological advancements.
• Increased reader satisfaction and retention.

Apart from data-driven AI-empowered analytics open-source analytics can also contribute to the rapidly evolving publishing industry.

Hello Open Source Analytics!

With the existing ample content and data present in the house, a viable way out is to use or develop an in-house analytics platform. It becomes a full-fledged all-in-one customized web analytics platform giving the most conclusive insights. 

You can also evaluate the full user experience of your visitor’s behavior with Conversion Optimization features, enhance your SEO, access full Visitor Profiles, use our data-sensitive Tag Manager and so much more.

Benefits of Open Source Analytics

1) 100 % of data ownership

The aim is to decentralize the internet and be a platform that hands you back control. There is no external source peeping in your insights and your audience’s privacy remains intact. The application can be hosted on your server and you get the freedom to choose where to store the data.

2) Deeper user insights

By having raw data access, the sky’s the limit. Having that data means unearthing what was once undiscoverable. Tracking any data you want about your users and their interactions (pages, clicks, goals…), from many different mediums (website, mobile apps, custom apps, IoT…) becomes easier. 

3) Flexibility

Every business and website has different wants and needs which change over time. The insights that matter to you may not be of importance to someone else, that’s why having adaptable analytics software is essential. This is what makes your in-house analytics efficient. With the immediate implementation of the analytics, you can immediately begin gaining measurable insights to make smarter data-driven decisions. 

4) Extremely Cost-Effective

For many publishers, choosing the right analytics tool can be expensive and time-consuming and flexibility considerations may not come into the picture until it’s too late. This oversight could cost you dearly. This in-house analytics is a one-time cost with yearly low-cost maintenance for necessary updates.

5) Scalability & Security

To keep the diverse audience engaged, publishers need to create dynamic content- but how will you manage the data piles? Open-source analytics tools can be adapted and scaled to handle increasing data volumes. With the increasing content libraries and user base scalability is essential for addressing the expanding needs of publishers. And with a growing user base, the responsibility to secure their valuable data also increases. The transparency of open-source software allows publishers to review the source code for security vulnerabilities contributing more secure analytics environment for actively addressing potential issues and ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of their data.

6) Content Strategy & Ad Revenue Optimization

By analyzing user behavior and content performance data, publishers can use open-source analytics to optimize their content strategy. Insights into reader preferences, engagement patterns, and popular content types help publishers create more compelling and relevant content. Open-source analytics can assist publishers in optimizing their advertising strategies. By tracking and analyzing ad performance metrics, publishers can make data-driven decisions to improve ad placement, target specific audiences, and maximize revenue.

7) Integration 

Multiple publishing platforms,  content management systems (CMS), and advertising systems can easily be integrated with open-source analytics solutions. The integration of various tools and platforms manifolds the capabilities and efficiencies of open source giving publishers competitive advantages. This seamless integration allows publishers to gather data from multiple sources and gain a comprehensive view of their operations.

Time To Rethink?

It is never too late to consider switching over to something more beneficial to you in terms of growing the user base, increasing the subscriptions, and boosting your revenue. From AI-powered data analytics to digitization, Pubtech is a trusted partner who would be able to help you customize analytics for you. Having delivered 200+ successful customized projects for their clients, they are the technical experts to bank upon.