Nicolas Hinternesch, director of solutions engineering EMEA, Piano
When someone in an organization uncovers an insightful data point, what’s their next move? Too often, teams miss out on attributing a clear ROI to their analytics investments because they lack a clear, strategic path from data to action. The real competitive advantage doesn’t come from collecting more data — it’s from the ability to act swiftly and intelligently with data.
When publishers fail to activate data properly, they leave money on the table and hand it to competitors. To surpass this challenge, publishers need to lay the groundwork. Through data activation, publishers are building deeper relationships with audiences across touchpoints and generating revenue opportunities.
How data activation generates value for publishers
Data activation is the bridge between insights and measurable value from actions taken. A successful activation strategy needs to balance driving revenue with cost-cutting and operational efficiency.
On the revenue side, data-informed action can yield higher conversion rates, improve customer retention and lifetime value, as well as support upsell and cross-sell campaigns. On the cost side, a well-implemented activation flow optimizes budget allocation across targeting channels, while keeping total cost of ownership and maintenance on the operational side in check, significantly impacting publishers’ bottom line.
Mapping consumer touchpoints unlocks the full potential of data activation
Many data activation scenarios are indirect and qualitative by nature, meaning they don’t target individual users but instead inform broader decisions. Analytics can be used to inform product design, marketing tactics or editorial content.
However, activation can also be direct, focusing on highly personalized communication with customers and thus building a sustainable relationship. According to McKinsey, personalization directly influences buying behavior across the customer lifecycle. More than 75% of consumers are more likely to purchase from and recommend companies that personalize. Furthermore, 71% of consumers even expect personalization from brands and 76% are frustrated when they don’t find it.
It is vital for publishers to be aware of the environments in which they want to activate. This means meeting customers where they are with an omnichannel approach. Most user journeys will include both on-site and off-site interactions, spanning various platforms.
These touchpoints may also extend into the physical world. Publishers should map out these touchpoints clearly in advance and ensure that data pipelines and activation stacks support every step of the anticipated customer relationship. A needs analysis with a defined user journey is essential for finding the right solutions that publishers need in their stack.
Unified analytics and CDPs allow publishers to power omnichannel audience activations
The flow generally boils down to three components. First is unified analytics and insights. Last year’s State of the Industry report from Digiday and Piano highlights how data unification directly connects to revenue.
Ideally, publishers connect three layers in analysis: an event-layer of behavioral data, a user-layer of customer data and a contextual layer of business-relevant external data. With the right tools across each layer, cross-functional teams can mine, analyze and democratize data, identifying actionable insights and user-segments.
Next is incorporating a customer data platform (CDP) or audience activation technology. While analytics helps teams understand data, a CDP ties it into all-encompassing user profiles. A CDP is a real-time data availability layer that ingests user data from multiple sources and creates a persistent, unified customer database, accessible to other systems for activation.
Some publishers have implemented homegrown solutions, building data architectures that resolve user identity and return segments in a timely and scalable manner to desired endpoints. Others opt for specialized CDP software. Standalone CDPs exist, but many tools now build functionality into their analytics, SSO and DMP solutions, reducing friction through simplification, while increasing productivity and data accuracy.
For the final execution stage, it’s critical that publishers ensure that tactics align with objectives. This starts with publishers defining the metrics they aim to move. For instance, maximizing total revenue across subscriptions, advertisements and affiliates will need tailored actions towards each goal: personalized messages and offers, driving engagement to maximize ad inventory or incentivizing registrations and progressive profiling.
An omnichannel strategy requires flexible technical tools to execute such actions across web, app, push, email, social, search, display and other touchpoints. While there are specialized vendors for specific channels as well as omnichannel solutions, there is also strong movement towards holistic platforms. These vertically integrate the execution directly into the analytics and CDP functionalities, giving publishers a direct bridge between insights and user activation.
Equipped with data insights, leading publishers are driving engagement and revenue
Publishers should empower decision makers to turn actions around quickly without having to rely on data science or technical teams. Ideally, business owners can take advantage of user-friendly tools to go from analytics to segmentation, testing and execution in minutes.
There is also nuance when finding the balance between manual execution and efficient automation. It is one thing to pre-define user-cohorts and their respective activation journeys, it is another to deploy a system that is AI-driven and auto-optimizing each individual activation scenario toward a goal metric, such as the total revenue generated by each editorial piece.
There are numerous examples to learn from and inspire how to put data activation into practice. Take Piano customer El Mundo, the first Spanish media outlet to pioneer paid content. By leveraging user data, El Mundo informed its pricing strategy, optimized content recommendations and personalized the entire user journey from acquisition to retention. This resulted in more than 90,000 subscriptions, with 70% committed to annual plans, showcasing the measurable value of turning insights into action.
Another effective approach to automated data-to-activation comes from dmgMedia’s iNews, which deployed a fully dynamic paywall that integrates content propensity, user propensity and advertising data into a single model. This strategy led to impressive results, including a 9% increase in paywall revenue, 21% increase in ad revenue per page and an 28% increase in paywall efficiency.
By implementing the right strategy, tools and processes, there is enormous potential for publishers to achieve measurable outcomes through data activation.
Sponsored by Piano
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