What’s holding back your existing content distribution campaigns?

Perhaps you’re running a generalized campaign and are struggling to extract specific insights from your aggregated information.

Perhaps you’re unsure of the best combination, placement or types of hosted ads you need to include on your content to make it profitable.

Ultimately, the hurdles that digital publishers face when trying to scale up their content distribution efforts typically boil down to two things:

• You need a more efficient and dynamic approach to scaling up your content distribution
• You don’t have a good way to collect and analyze data on your campaigns to help you improve

The good news is: you can address both of these challenges remarkably easily. It just takes the right technology and approach.

Drilling Down to Details

To get the best possible value out of your content distribution campaigns, and to start boosting your ROI, you need to go as deep into the data as possible: and that means getting right down to log-level data.

Whatever system or technology you use to do this, it’s crucial that this can do three things:

Link Marketing Spend to Revenue

This is one of the biggest pain points in the industry. It’s vital that you have a reliable way to not only figure out your user value for every page of content, but that you can see exactly which campaigns brought readers to which pages, how many pages they read, which ads they engaged with and, ultimately, how much money the user is worth at the end of the funnel.

Without this, your ROI will be an eternal mystery.

First of all, you need to be incredibly precise. Simply knowing how many people read an article is not enough. Simply knowing that X amount of people clicked on a link to your content from Facebook is not enough.

You need to be able to see how each specific strand of your campaign performs, right down to every little factor and differentiator. That includes the channel they found you through, where in the world they’re based, and what kind of device they’re reading your content on. It can also mean the time of day you’re putting out your content, the title and creative you used – basically, anything that will help you precisely distinguish one campaign from another.

Finding a platform that connects these two parts – how much money you’re paying to distribute content, and how much revenue you earn per reader – is critical.

Get it In Real Time

It’s no use figuring out what went wrong (or right) in a few hours, when the campaign has already run away with you.

When you’re putting your content out on multiple channels at once, you need to know in real time which campaigns are performing the best, so that you can pull the plug on the duds and redirect your resources to the ones that actually bring in the readers (and the money).

This means that your technology platform must be able to work with real time data – and analyze this to extract insights in seconds.

The most impressive platforms on the market can go even further, harnessing the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence to identify these trends even when you’re not there to assess the situation for yourself (hey, we all need to sleep sometimes). For example, you can set a ‘minimum ROI’ parameter on a select piece of content, and if one campaign dips too low, the system will automatically stop bidding on your behalf; switching to ones that actually work.

That means you eradicate the risk of blowing your entire budget on a loss-making campaign because you’re simply out for lunch!

The Bottom Line

To make your business successful, profitable and sustainable, you need to be more than efficient: you need a method to determine your revenue in real time, to figure out precisely what shapes your results, and to make the changes you need to perform better and better.

What’s more, you need a single location where you can map out all your information about all your campaigns, and take action immediately, without having to leave the interface at all.

Only then will you have the confidence and capacity to scale up your content distribution campaigns – with minimum risk and with maximum results.