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Why The Guardian employs a frequency-based audience strategy

Last updated: September 19, 2024

Publishers can’t depend on traffic to sustain themselves anymore. And The Guardian’s shifting its audience strategy in response. Instead of chasing one-time website visitors, they’re pursuing a frequency-based audience strategy.  

The goal is simple, but the work of reaching it certainly isn’t. 25% of media professionals said they do not track engagement and just 20% of the survey respondents reported having an audience with more than 75% of their audience as engaged, according to our recent State of Audience Report.

So our CEO James Capo and Brian Morrissey, founder of The Rebooting, talked to Emilie Harkin, SVP of Growth of The Guardian, and Thomas Johnson, VP of Audience and Strategy of The Guardian US, about how they’re doing it. 

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We’re diving into The Guardian’s shift to a frequency-based audience strategy as their North Star metric and how it’s impacted their audience experience, product design and revenue model. But we covered a lot more ground than that. So for the full session, watch the webinar recording. 

Why The Guardian employs a frequency-based audience strategy

Brian Morrissey: There are some nuances to The Guardian’s business model as a global news publisher. Can you give us a concise overview of those nuances? 

“The Guardian was founded in the United Kingdom about 200+ years ago now. And it’s had an operation in the US for about two decades. So much newer here, but it is a global news organization,” Harkin says.

But The Guardian’s biggest differentiator is its business model. The publication is 100 percent free — and supported by reader revenue and advertising.  

“So we are proudly free – beholden to no one,” Harkin says. “There’s no paywall and all of our reader revenue is elective. It’s made up of people who are moved by the mission and the journalism, people who believe in The Guardian’s cause who make up the revenue that we do earn from our audience.” 

They complement their donation program with monthly and annual contribution options, as well as one-time contributions. 

“Another really special thing about The Guardian is that we have what we call one-time options. That refers to people who just are moved to support us in a particular moment. And so we give people a few different ways to contribute in order to help us grow our reader revenue.” 

How does that translate for the US operation? Because where the Guardian sits within a US news context, it’s different than in the UK. 

Open access has helped The Guardian develop a significant American presence, Johnson says. So they have volume. Now the challenge is driving repeat visits and reader revenue. 

“I think part of the challenge for us, but that is also not unique to The Guardian, is really creating that sort of intentionality with our audience — creating that frequent, recurring audience over time,” Johnson says. “So that’s a big part of our focus more recently. It’s really thinking about, ‘How do we translate those high interest moments, that really large scale interest, into something that is more sustainable and something that leads to habit forming intentionality?’”

How do you think about aligning around a North Star goal? Can you share how you think about aligning around a North Star goal and then why engagement is not it? 

North Star metrics need to be simple, durable and flexible, Harkin says. Multiple people around the organization need to understand what the metric is — and how they can improve it. 

For The Guardian, that metric is frequency, measured by the amount of unique browsers across a 31 day period.

“So for us that frequency metric is the number of unique browsers across a 31 day period, and we have a bunch of people who are working around different ways that we can influence this. So Tom, as the head of audience for The Guardian US is really effective at moving the top funnel kinds of initiatives,” Harkin says. 

“The area that I play in more, where it comes to growth and reader revenue, is deepening things with app downloads and newsletter signups and so forth. But we have this ability to have a centralized objective for the entire company that people can use the tools and expertise that they have to run at and try and effect. “ 

Organizing their strategy around a single clear metric has made it easier for their teams to understand and work toward the goal, she adds. 

“It’s a fairly new initiative that we’ve launched, but so far it’s been really embraced by people who are just happy to have that clarity — where it’s not some sort of black box engagement score that people don’t really understand. They’re not asking, ‘How do I get an engagement score to go from 2.5 to 3.5?’ They’re saying, ‘We know we want to get people to 10 visits or a frequency score of 10 in a 31 day period.’ It’s very clear. And I think that’s essential.” 

Let’s talk about what gets people to convert and how it relates back to this frequency banding metric. Is it as simple as more frequency correlates to more propensity to make a voluntary donation? 

It’s more interesting and complex than that, Harkin says. While frequent readers also tend to donate frequently, they also drive a significant amount of reader revenue from first-time visitors who are moved by a particular story or topic. 

“And like I said, it is one of those both/and situations where more frequency does increase someone’s likelihood to support The Guardian financially and it increases someone’s likelihood to continue to do that, whether it’s through repeat one-time donations or in an official recurring contribution model,” Harkin says. 

“But then we also see that people who find us through our channels, through external channels like search, all of the different ways that people can discover us. And they can be really moved by an individual story or the point of view that a journalist is taking, or the topic of the piece that is being written about, and stand up in those moments and offer a spontaneous contribution.” 

“That’s really great because it means that we do have some flexibility in how we can talk to the different people who are at different frequency levels with us.”

And as they begin to understand and rework their frequency-based audience strategy, they anticipate using it to create more customized experiences on their site. 

Are you able to disentangle the impact of the specific content topic from the frequency? 

“We do see that for politics and the news generally, the topics that are top of mind for people in the news cycle are the ones that generate a lot of interest,” Harkin says. “But there are also topics that make people realize that The Guardian is providing a service that’s, I think, a pretty essential public service — really high quality journalism that’s available broadly to anyone regardless of their ability to pay for it. I think that element of our mission is also a really important factor in what motivates people to support us. When there are confusing news moments or high stakes news moments, then that in and of itself contributes to the motivation that people have.” 

How does the Guardian approach segmentation? And how does it serve your goal of increasing frequency? 

Right now, Johnson and his team are trying to match different products with different frequency segments. 

“One thing we’re looking at is really thinking about is: at what point in a user journey does an app download or a newsletter signup come in?” Johnson says. “And we’re really looking at those patterns and saying, ‘Based on our existing data, what’s the best product newsletter product that would serve an audience that’s new to us?’ Maybe it’s a popup newsletter or an asynchronous course that only lasts for a week, but that’s a lower barrier to entry than a daily recurring product.” 

From there, they need to figure out how to put the right products in front of the right audiences and decrease friction.

“What we’ve done particularly in the last year is take a really close look at our US-facing newsletters. Are we offering those really sensible next steps that align with the coverage that we see really resonate with those newer audiences and more frequent audiences as well?” 

“So we’ve done a lot of expansion in trying to really round out our newsletter offerings in that space to make sure that we’re covering our bases and knowing that when there is a really big story, a really big political story.” 

“We had a lot of interest in the Trump trials the last few months. Do we have a dedicated newsletter that’s specifically serving that audience that’s looking for maybe just those high interest Trump moments? And then maybe that’s the starting point for someone’s journey that eventually becomes more of a broader news consumption experience.”

For publishers who are just starting down this journey and saying, ‘Hey, it sounds great to align around some kind of North Star audience focused metric.’ how should they think about it? 

Everyone in the business — from C-suite on down — needs to invest in their audience, Capo says.

“Media companies at the core have two things, content and audience,” Capo says. “That is what we do and is what we have. You can argue that they’re 1A and 1B here, but there needs to be a mindset shift where the audience is what they do that’s at the center of the organization. It’s driving the business, obviously with the content as the product as well. But that’s driving the business. And frankly, it starts at the top.”

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