When you’re pitching your website to a prospective advertiser, do you trot out the BPA/ABC statement, the email list size, pageviews per month, or another traditional measure of reach or demographics?  If so, you might be missing some business from marketers looking to target prospects who are actively educating themselves on a particular topic. These readers are more than engaged, they are "activated", on a mission to learn about a specific product or service. If you can prove you have readers who are activated on a particular topic or brand, you have a compelling hook for an advertising pitch.

Measuring the "activated" reader

For advertisers who want to target prospects who are "in market" for their product or service, seeing proof of that purchase intent can be compelling. Ed Bardwell, CEO of Dallas-based agency Nimble Worldwide, says “Today, the fact that you have an audience of a particular demographic profile is less relevant than an audience a third of that size that has verifiable engagement with a brand in the last 30 days.”  It’s great that your readers are 20,000 senior engineers who specify a class of equipment that the advertiser sells.  It’s much more compelling that 500 of those have read an article or downloaded a whitepaper about that class of equipment in the past 30 days. This is pretty easy information to deliver from your web analytics package.

So, when you’re pitching a prospective advertiser who is demanding a compelling reason to choose you over your competitor, prove to them that you can deliver “activated” readers. Even for a branding campaign, getting in front of the most engaged and purchase-ready prospects is going to generate better results for an advertiser. This is a little more effort to get at than basic traffic, list size or circ data, but the potential payoff is big.  It can be as simple as looking at your analytics results and typing in a term to filter by.  I filtered our content by "iPad" in the example below:

To most marketers, being able to see this kind of information, like a 4:33 average time on page, is a lot more compelling than the usual demographic profile of your "typical" site visitor. To demonstrate engagement, highlight metrics such as time on page, pageviews per session, site visit frequency, or even volume of comments. Then work with the advertiser to be sure he has a campaign that can really leverage these activated prospects. Drew Neisser, CEO of NY digital agency Renegade, says "...sites that have highly engaged readership often have poor click through rates since the reader simply doesn’t want to leave the page. This phenomenon is not limited to online, direct response TV experts have long known that low involvement late night TV is often the easiest place to get higher response rates." So it's likely that a banner campaign won't deliver the results that an advertiser who wants your most engaged reders is looking for.

The fact is, there is no "standard" measure of an engaged or activated reader yet. That's both a challenge and an opportunity for publishers. Why not be the one defining the term in your marketplace?