Audience Insights

To put it simply, audience insight is the identification of audience perceptions, motivations and preferences relevant to behaviour, products, and/or services.

Companies will gather information to understand what motivates a particular audience in order to support their business needs. Audiences are most often split in relation to their geographical location, age, interest, and habits.

We at Publisher Collective gather our insights from our owned sites and partner sites in the form of surveys. This helps us to gain a broader understanding of the audience’s interests and preferences.

For example, we recently ran a survey around purchase intent over the next 12 months. From this, we know that 17% of our UK audience are planning on purchasing a new graphics card in the next year. Having this sort of information can help inform our team to create content and reviews around graphics cards to support those wanting to compare certain brands before purchasing.

How we collect insights

We gather this information in the form of a widget tool, and this tool can help us to find out useful information about the audience for all sorts of helpful purposes.

If you’ve been in the business of running and/or setting up a website, then chances are you’ve probably heard of widgets. If you haven’t, here’s a quick refresher. A widget is a type of software application that injects a small engageable user interface on another application, such as a screen or website. Think of your smartphone’s clock or weather features – these are widgets that you probably use every day.

We inject a widget into a defined space on a website, allowing us to run different polls, carousel quizzes, and standard surveys to gather all of that helpful information about the audience’s preferences on a specific topic.

Why do we use it?

As mentioned, we at Publisher Collective use this primarily as a survey tool to allow us to easily ask specific, tailored questions to our owned and partner audiences.

The data we collect from this tool allows us to gather deeper insights and establish trends around general interests and demographics. This helps inform the decisions we make across all areas of our network.

For example, we may notice that MMOs are a huge interest at the moment in France, particularly around ages 18-24. We can then tailor our content and ads around MMOs, to encourage reader engagement, satisfying that apparent itch for MMOs. It can also support click-through rates on advertising campaigns that are featured on our partner sites.

What does it look like on a site?

We try to make the tool as unobtrusive as possible, keeping the branding simple and clean.

The widget will usually sit at the bottom of your page under an article or post, meaning it doesn’t distract from why a user has visited that page or article.

We also use a capping feature to make sure that there isn’t any unwanted repetition. Once it has been interacted with or seen, the widget won’t feature again on the page for that user for up to seven days.

What we’ve found out so far

Out of the 30+ surveys we’ve run so far this year across our owned and operated and partner sites, we can see that our audience is predominantly male and within the 18-24 age group, followed very closely by under 18. This tells us that we have a huge Gen Z following.

We’ve also noticed that 41% of our audience game regularly on their smartphones and 37% of our audience consider themselves to be “core gamers”, meaning that they play often and are willing to spend regularly on hardware and games.

Having access to this kind of information means that we can work with our sites and partners to help tailor our content to these audiences, hopefully improving the overall relevance of our output.

For more information on this tool and to find out how we can support you in reaching your target audience, get in touch here.