How publishers can use zero party data

…To generate more revenue (and better content)

What’s the difference between ZPD & FPD?

Zero Party Data (ZPD) is information that people voluntarily give you. It can be subject to bias, but what someone reveals about how they see themselves can be more relevant than what they do - which is First Party Data (FPD).

In the digital world, FPD is which source / medium a visitor came from, which pages they visit, how long they spend, where they go next, do they convert, and do they provide you with ZPD?

ZPD related to surveys, forms and quizzes that a visitor to your website fills in answering specific questions.

This data works together to give a detailed picture of site visitors, but ZPD has the potential to unlock significant additional revenue and content opportunities in a way that FPD cannot. From the FPD you get broad statistics relating to site engagement, you can see the number of visitors to a page and how long they spend there, but ZPD allows you to dig into what specific users might have preferred. What were they looking for that they couldn’t find? Did the article or content achieve what they needed?

The 2 main benefits of ZPD

The first advantage is that ZPD gives you far more detail about your visitors, you can understand where they first heard about you, or where they hang out online; not just where they came from today.

You might question how useful that data will be given its granularity - but that’s where the second advantage comes in, anyone interacting with you via ZPD is signalling a higher level of engagement with your content. If they are prepared to provide detailed information (even with an incentive) then they tend to be more valuable to your brand.

It is unlikely that anyone filling in ZPD is “bouncing” off your site, so they are already part of the minority who stick around. Depending on the type of ZPD capture you may have their email address, or perhaps they are just answering a quiz or survey.

Putting this into a commercial context

Imagine you are a design magazine with a high volume of monthly website visits and a large social media following. You already have a content machine at your fingertips publishing an endless stream of articles both purely editorial and in partnership with companies. Your FPD is going to show you basic analytics like website visitors, what people are searching for and the referring sources. You’ll be able to see how long people spend reading an article, and if something works well then you can commission more content on the perceived theme.

However, ZPD from your visitors would enable you to understand specific interests, where they hangout online and what design themes most interest them. This gives you far more scope for commissioning new types of content that could further engage your most committed audiences. You might unlock data relating to the types of content they share, what they’d like more of and specific demographic data.

A good visitor question to elicit more detailed information could be:

“which kind of design most interests you?

• Product

• Architecture

• Technology”

Depending on the answer you can then drill down further into types of product, architecture or technlogy. With that information you can start to segment your audience, understand them better, and deliver content that’s most in tune with their interests.

Furthermore, the publisher can collaborate with commercial partners on a far more targeted basis. You may find out that a large percentage of your audience are into watch design - giving you the opportunity to directly approach brands in a new vertical with a specifically targeted audience. Matching interest and content will significantly enhance results allowing the publisher to segment audiences and offer them to different collaborators in a much more granular way.

Other opportunities

There are clear benefits in expanding the verticals for commercial relationships and more tailored content just from collecting visitor data, but the collection of ZPD also seeds the opportunity for transformational commercial success.

As a publisher you are likely to have a large social media following, and whilst you may understand the impact of a post on website traffic, and how different types of posts and content result in different levels of engagement, you have almost no understanding of your followers.

Using a simple technology implementation you can build an email subscriber database directly from Instagram which enables you to organise publicly available information about these subscribers and build automations based on this information. It is best practice to dovetail this subscription process with the collection of some ZPD so that you end up with information about their interests, and also their follower count. This helps you to identify visitors who are engaging with your content and have a large follower-base, therefore you can build a community of ambassadors based on a particular platform.

This community becomes immensely valuable if you were to develop a marketplace as part of your digital offer. Here you could showcase products (and services) that you know are of interest to your visitors, and you can leverage the community of ambassadors to generate traffic through their networks.

Final thoughts

As a publisher, you are in an increasingly powerful position and product-focused brands who have been reliant on Meta and Google are actively looking for way to access engaged audiences. It’s vital to start collecting the right information from your visitors so that you can easily engage with commercial partners and show them genuine results quickly.

Products and content are getting closer than they ever have been in the past, and as a trusted authorities within the content space, all you need to do is ask and you will receive incredibly valuable data from your current visitors.

The cost of collection is inconsequential, but the benefits are enormous. It’s time to start.

We’ll be releasing more resources on this topic , but if you can’t wait, contact us to arrange a chat.