How a Publisher Bubbled Up Demand From Advertisers

By Lisa Kerins, VP, Publisher Sales and Business Development, NCSolutions

Earlier this year, we helped a large web publisher make a lucrative discovery: its platform delivered an average $3.95 return on advertising spend for beverage brands, making beverage its best-performing CPG category for incremental sales. This helped the publisher bubble up advertising demand. 

Across all CPG categories, the same publisher provided an average reach of 20 million U.S. households and more than $2 million in incremental sales per campaign for its advertisers. Its sponsored product ads performed better than any other ad unit, it also learned.

Naturally, the publisher was thrilled with these findings. It was able to show in clear, demonstrable terms that its platform was providing real value to its advertising partners, helping them increase sales and invest their media budgets more effectively. In turn, the publisher used the insights to inform its own messaging to clients, changing its market position to reflect its unique strengths as an advertising platform.

This is just one of the many ways publishers have used an NCSolutions Meta-Study to analyze and improve their advertising business. My consulting team has the pleasure of working with these publishers to uncover these findings.  

Ad effectiveness studies are commonplace for brands and publishers, as they provide vital information on how consumers react to specific campaigns and different messaging. But a meta-study, which combines the results of several different studies, provides advertisers and publishers the opportunity to tie all of their studies together and draw conclusions from unique nuggets of data that can be used in their narratives. It’s advertising intelligence at the most comprehensive level—and it can deliver actionable business results. A number of our publisher clients have driven insights from meta-studies that have led to big results:

• Recently a social media app that is popular with Millennial and Gen-Z consumers commissioned a meta-study from NCS. This study revealed the magnitude of the purchasing influence of this younger generation. While the younger generation isn’t always the primary purchaser, they still drive a significant increase in CPG purchases through their household influence.
• For another platform, NCS found that the app’s ad products are most effective when bundled together. When brands extended their campaigns across the app’s various ad formats versus using a single ad format, reach increased by 20% on average.
• A counterintuitive insight about a platform was unearthed in another meta study: the return on ad spend for campaigns on their website actually increased when their advertisers decreased weekly frequency. The platform was able to identify the optimal advertising window before ad fatigue set in. This allowed the publisher to provide insights to its advertisers on when they should refresh their creative to ensure continued incremental sales. 

The strategy worked, and the publisher was able to prove that to brands in the most tangible terms possible.

Publishers are under increasing pressure to prove the worth of their advertising, and the mega-insights from NCS Meta-Studies can be the difference between winning business and not.

Helpful insights from meta-studies are just a click away. See how your platform can gain action-driving insights like it has for others.