An Outsell Scout Analytics study found a common theme across a group of B2B and B2C audiences: a minority percentage of the audience creates a majority percentage of the impressions.

Important Details: Outsell Scout Analytics conducted a study of multiple groups of audiences in B2B and B2C media and found a common theme: a minority percentage of the audience creates a majority percentage of the impressions. The study stands out since it is routine for sites to track monthly unique visitors and page views separately, but rare to find analytics that combine the two statistics and break down page views by individual audience member.

The Outsell Scout study addressed three key questions:

1. What is the distribution of page views in a typical audience?
2. Why is engagement important?
3. How does that impact advertising performance and revenue?

Audience members were rated by their frequency of visits and assigned to one of four levels of engagement:

• Fans - individuals that visit more than twice a week (green bar in chart):
• Regulars - visit 1-2 times per week (yellow);
• Occasionals - visit 2-3 times per month (orange);
• Fly-Bys - visit only once (red) .

Fans make up 5% or less of the audience, but deliver 50% or more of the page views.

This figure shows one of the common B2C distributions in the study. The upper chart shows the percentage of the audience by category, while the lower chart shows the percentage of page views by category. 80% of the page views were delivered by 25% of the audience. Generally, the study across multiple groups of audiences found the B2B percentages had slightly less concentration, with 66% of page views delivered by 30% of the audience. Outsell Scout attributes this difference in the distributions to the specialized, niched nature of the B2B publications in the study.

Implications: This study provides hard-to-find hard data on the importance of engagement. When monthly uniques remain separated from page views, a distorted view of engagement is created that hurts both advertisers and publishers. Publishers can fall into the trap of operating as if page views were evenly distributed across the demographic targeting variables for the audience and suffer from that mistake.

Other studies have confirmed the common sense expectation that the more a user is engaged with content, the better the brand recall and conversion rates for the included advertising. This makes total sense, as the chance to make a lasting impression on a Fly-By visitor is much less than for a Fan who reads a whole article. For publishers, being able to gauge the level of engagement of individual audience members gives them the power to price and package their inventory of impressions with much higher yield since they can deliver a better product to advertisers.

In the study, the mean was that 75% of the audience were Fly-Bys producing only 20% of impressions. Take, for example, a site whose content attracts Fans who are 21 and over and is of little interest to Fly-Bys who are mostly under 21 years of age. If an advertiser selects this site on the basis of the aggregate demographic of all site visitors, he sees a mostly 21 and under audience. But the data shows that 80% of the impressions the advertiser is purchasing are delivered to the 21 and over Fans audience that actually sees 80% of the impressions! In this scenario, the ad campaign under-performs, the advertiser may not renew, and the publisher loses an opportunity to build and add on a loyal under-21 customer base by also targeting content and features for them. Both performance and revenue are negatively impacted.

Similarly, advertisers and publishers often agree to frequency caps on impressions delivered to the audience. In this case, Fans will quickly be capped once they are served the maximum number of pages and the Fly-Bys will be responsible for generating the remainder of the impressions. Consequently, the campaign would last longer to deliver the number of purchased impressions and have reduced performance because the engagement with Fly-Bys seeing those impressions is low.

This data and these examples emphasize why understanding engagement by individual audience members is so important to advertisers and publishers. As audience buying and selling evolves and grows at the expense of buying media or online real esate, engagement at the individual user level will become a critical factor.

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