December 13, 2024
In 2022 Bloomberg Media announced a shift to an audience-first strategy, which includes every action and decision the teams make, investing time to understand our customers across every platform we operate— and to focus on building features, products and businesses that truly serve them.
The eighth post of this series explains how Bloomberg Media is creating value first metrics.
By Kevin Cheberenchick, Senior Insights Manager – Subscriptions & Revenue Strategy
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, staying connected with audiences while delivering trusted, engaging content amidst numerous distractions is critical for any media company. At Bloomberg Media, we’re committed to placing our audience at the forefront of everything we do, driven by an in-depth, data-focused strategy. By leveraging first-party data—insights from user behavior, surveys, and interviews—we continually refine our offerings to provide an experience that resonates with our readers and supports our business goals.
Using Behavioral Data to Uncover Consumer Engagement
Our strategy to grow and retain our audience is anchored in a robust understanding of user engagement and behavior. Engagement, a key metric for us, reflects our users’ willingness to subscribe and the perceived value of our content. Higher engagement has consistently been linked to reduced subscription cancellations across the media industry, so identifying precise metrics to track this has been a top priority.
Early on, we explored metrics like page views, sessions, and article reads. However, to gain a truly actionable insight, we needed a metric that cut through the noise and aligned with our long-term business objectives. After rigorous analysis, we established T30D Days Active—a trailing 30-day measure of active days—as our primary engagement indicator. This metric helps us account for variations due to weekly trends or news cycles. It also closely aligns with our core objectives: readers with nine or more active days in a month showed a 37% boost in revenue, a 24% increase in subscription duration, and a 70% higher likelihood of renewing for an annual plan. This correlation highlights the powerful role that consistent engagement plays in fostering long-term loyalty and business success.
Enhancing Experiences Through User Feedback
While usage data is invaluable, it’s only one piece of the puzzle. We’ve complemented it with direct feedback through surveys and interviews to gain a more comprehensive view of our audience’s needs and preferences. This qualitative data informs our understanding and helps us identify meaningful opportunities to enhance engagement. For example, readers expressed interest in a tighter integration between news coverage and stock data, leading us to develop features that better connect financial news and real-time market insights. Blending quantitative and qualitative insights gives us a fuller picture of what truly matters to our users.
Using Hero Metrics and Helper Metrics to Drive Impact
In our framework, T30D Days Active is a “hero metric” for driving user engagement—a high-level, strategic measure of success used across the business. However, we also rely on “helper metrics,” which are more specific indicators that can influence this overarching goal but are easier to impact on a daily basis. For example, while newsletter signups might seem like an indicator of engagement, we found that for our free subscription newsletters, page views from these emails were a better engagement predictor, indicating that click through from newsletters may be a more reliable indicator that a non-paid subscriber will repeatedly use our product, highlighting future opportunities for conversion down the line.
Similarly, our Market Watchlists, a feature allowing users to track stocks, emerged as another valuable driver of engagement from the analysis. When users create watchlists, they tend to engage consistently over time regardless of news cycle. In response, we’ve enhanced this feature, adding real-time stock data to further empower our users. Initiatives like these deepen engagement and ensure that our content serves both immediate and long-term interests.
After adding real-time data to our stock tickers, NASDAQ offered Bloomberg Media the opportunity to ring the opening bell at the exchange.
Ultimately we found that observing more immediate helper metrics, such as article reads, could result in deeper customer engagement, correlating to improved product experience and streamlining our focus across teams. For instance, pageviews correlate more strongly to engagement than sessions, therefore developing opportunities to drive users to click through the site becomes more effective in the long run. Since then, our teams have used them to set benchmarks for what good looks like when developing new product features or content.
Our data-driven approach is more than just metrics; it’s about using data to unlock insights into audience behavior and deliver exceptional value. By centering our strategy on meaningful, value-first metrics, we’re able to provide content that engages, informs, and supports our users every step of the way.