It’s an LTV Game Now
Last week, I published a video on LinkedIn talking about how publishers need to spend more time focused on LTV. The traffic era is coming to an end, so in its place, we need to focus more energy on maximizing the revenue we generate from our current readers.
As a crash course, lifetime value is a function of time and revenue. In other words, how much can you make per month from a user and how many months can you keep them around?
Both of those matter because if you ignore time, you’ll make some bad decisions on the monetization side. For example, you could load up your site with a ton of bad ads, which would increase revenue per user, but it would decrease how long they stick around. On the other hand, if you don’t ask them for any money whatsoever, the reader coming back for ten years wouldn’t matter.
What this ultimately means is that publishers need to get better at understanding how to properly handle different types of readers because not all readers are created the same. Here are some examples of scenarios and ways of monetizing them.
Scenario 1:The user has never visited your site and is coming from Google or social media. I would experiment with a slightly more aggressive ad experience, including the possibility of an exit intent high impact advertising unit. It’s unlikely that the user has any brand affinity or will come back, so maximizing revenue on this user is necessary.
Scenario 2: The user has never visited your site, is coming from Google or social media and then clicks to a second page. I’d cut the number of ads almost entirely and promote my newsletter or free registration. The user got what they wanted with the first article and then decided to move onto a second one. That’s the start of a publisher/reader relationship and you want to increase your chances of keeping them around for the long-term.
Scenario 3: It’s a repeat of scenario 1, but a few days later, the user comes back to your site. Theoretically, you’ve dropped a cookie on that user because you’ve got a CDP. In this scenario, I’d treat that visit as Scenario 2. They may start to notice the brand again, so the objective is to start building a longer-term relationship with them. Once again, a newsletter sign up will be more impactful than the short-term advertising revenue.
Scenario 4: The user has signed up for a newsletter and comes to your site from the newsletter. In this scenario, the goal is to have an incredibly clean user experience with the objective of getting them to pay for something—a subscription, a ticket to an event or purchasing a good.
Monetizing based on user behavior is how you maximize revenue while also maximizing longevity. Not all people are going to become loyal readers, so generating maximum revenue in the short term is necessary. However, you also don’t want to scare them away with a horrible experience. The goal should be to move them from a one-time visitor to a loyal reader while monetizing along the way. That’s how you grow LTV.
