Who is your audience? If you’re running a neighborhood bodega, that’s a pretty simple question. You see everyone that passes through your doors every day, and you ring up their purchases, so you know what to buy and when.   

But for digital publications, that question’s always been complicated — conditional on what dashboard or platform you’re getting your data from. And with the explosion of new marketing channels, it’s only getting more complex.  

“I could look at our overall newsletter list, for instance, and I could tell you how many people are on that list, or I could tell you the percentage of that list that’s engaged, or I could tell you a title analysis of that list,” says Paul Daniel, Director of Audience at Randall Reilly.  

“Or I could go to Google Analytics and I could look at email as a referral channel relative to other ones. But bringing it all together where you could actually get down almost to that user level of information was really, really tricky. So it always felt like we were giving a little bit of a conditional answer to that question, and we wanted to go to that next level.” 

In this case study, we’ll highlight how Paul and the Randall Reilly team combined Omeda’s robust audience data with Google Analytics to make its content more relevant — and increase email engagement by more than 10%. Let’s get started.  

(Prefer a video format? Learn more about Randall Reilly’s experience with Omeda here.)  

Challenge   

Randall Reilly partnered with Omeda, a leading end-to-end audience management platform, to address a few distinct but related goals:  

• As they transitioned to a fully digital model, Randall Reilly’s content team needed to shift from their traditional commodity-based content to truly differentiated insights — stuff that would resonate with their readers and highlight Randall Reilly’s subject matter expertise. To do this, they needed to go beyond broad group-level data to see how each individual was engaging with their content across every channel.  
• Their audience team needed to give content producers a more precise and holistic view of their readers — including demographics, interests and knowledge gaps — and tell them where Randall Reilly could meet those needs.  
• Their sales team needed to give their advertising partners access to leads that were most likely to generate clicks, conversions and revenue. 

Sounds like separate goals, but there’s a common denominator: a need for data. They needed to see how people were interacting with all of their digital properties, rather than just email, website, or ads. They needed this information on a highly granular, targeted level — and they needed an easy way to make it available across teams.  

Process / The Omeda Solution   

Randall Reilly used Omeda’s CDP to take in subscriber data from every marketing touchpoint — from email and website tracking to offline events and ads — and compile it in one place. This gave everyone at Randall Reilly a single view of every person that interacted with their brand.  

They could see each person’s title, their job function, their previous purchase history, tenure, etc. And with Olytics, Omeda’s website tracking solution, they could see exactly who was visiting each webpage, how long they spent on site, what links they clicked, what devices and IP addresses they were coming from, and much more. Taken together, this helped Randall Reilly identify key opportunities in their content strategy.  

To enhance the insights even further, the Randall Reilly team uploaded all that Omeda data to Google Analytics, and vice versa. This allowed them to combine the best of both platforms: They could marry GA’s traditional performance metrics – page views, users, traffic, source breakdown, landing page performance, etc. — with Omeda’s rich, 360-degree customer data to get the most specific, granular view of their audience.  

This produced two highly powerful dashboards that informed their content strategy moving forward. 

In one dashboard, the team has article-based performance down to the URL. This tells their content team what pieces and topics resonate most — and they can organize these findings by topic tag, URL, or editor. This gives them a starting point to evaluate whether their value-based content strategy is really working – and what factors are making it work.   

In another dashboard, they have the exact company breakdown of each reader for each article. That includes all of the roles and titles associated with those companies, exactly how much time they’ve spent on each page of the site, etc. Randall Reilly’s content producers can actually see exactly who’s reading, how much time they’re spending, and to go a step further, they can cross-reference the first dashboard to review readership by individual article, etc. 

Results 

Randall Reilly’s editorial team is using this more detailed performance-level data to make their content more refined and tailored. That’s yielded significant results so far: Randall Reilly has seen double digit growth in its unique email audience across all of its brands, as well as for its major audience segments.  

This targeted strategy isn’t just giving them more clicks and opens. It’s positioning them to build a more sustainable audience base that’ll stay engaged for the long haul, Daniel says.  

“We all know you constantly need to fill the top of the funnel. We know that on average you’re turning over 30% of your newsletter list a year to some form of atrophy or disengagement…” Daniel says. “… If you can identify these are companies that we really care about and we are not seeing readership activity there, or we are not seeing the types of titles that you care about, you can compliment your acquisition strategy, whether that’s on page first party or third party, to try to shore that up. So that you’re continually tilling that soil with the kind of audience quality that you’re hoping for.”