Ipsos iris, the UKOM endorsed industry currency for understanding online audiences, measures 50m UK adults online every month and is a key tool to help grow consumer revenue and provide the depth and breadth of audience insight you need to improve business planning and decisions across your digital organisation.

James Torr, senior director of audience measurement at Ipsos iris, looks at four ways Ipsos iris can help to unlock commercial value.

1. Ipsos iris provides the audience insight you need to create the best products and scale audiences

Ipsos iris’ coverage of online audiences is unparalleled, measuring over 230 magazine brands across B2C and B2B, 18 content categories including lifestyle, education, and news, and more than one hundred sub-content categories such as fashion, beauty, and style.

The online magazine sector reaches 37.1m people in the UK every month; that’s more people than Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat with respective audiences of 35.9m, 21.4m, and 11.4m.  

Across more than 500 profiling points, Ipsos iris helps you to understand more about the audiences your brands reach, including everything from demographics to attitudes to online behaviour.

Ipsos iris provides you with all the insight you need to inform your audience and product development strategy. Whether that’s through leveraging existing content, creating new content, or launching new products.

2. Ipsos iris informs content planning and development to help you drive engagement and achieve standout in market

Knowing where people spend their time online, and what content they visit, is essential to inform content planning and development. Ipsos iris allows you to pinpoint key consumer and content trends. 

Simply plotting average time spent with key content verticals across the last 12 months provides actionable data to inform content planning and development. This is illustrated in the graph below, where we can see consumption peaks for sport in August with the return of the Premier League. In January everyone starts the year with good intentions, and consumption is high for health-based content, while seasonal travel trends see corresponding peaks around summer and the New Year as holidays are top of mind. 

Understanding content consumption spikes at a monthly, weekly, daily, and daypart level across brand and sectors presents you with new opportunities for audience monetisation and growth. It can also inform wider strategic decisions around search, social, and commerce.

3. Ipsos iris helps you to build value across all your digital platforms.

Over the past few years, digital has presented us with multiple ways in which we can build out our audiences to reach more people with our content. Examples include aggregators such as Apple News, social platforms like YouTube, Facebook Instant Articles, new technologies such as Google AMP – and there are other formats which distribute and streamline video content too.

Ipsos iris plays a central role in informing your content distribution strategy. We can do this by looking at your incremental audience and the impact your distribution strategies have on metrics such as page views and time spent. In the figure below, Publisher C has a larger audience consuming content via distributed content than on its own sites and apps (native). We see distributed content driving a greater share of page views, but lower share of time spent.

We can also understand the role and impact of different formats of content – let’s take video to understand the role and impact at a market and brand level.

Audiences vary across different publishers and platforms. Comparing total audience to video audience we can understand differences in demographics and identify unique audiences reached, amplifying the opportunity for content delivery.

4. Ipsos iris contributes insight that unlocks advertising opportunities to help you to make more money.

Proving why a magazine or newspaper deserves a share of campaign budgets, and identification of new potential advertising revenue streams is key to survival.  

Ipsos iris allows you to prove category and brand synergy across display, video, or marketing partnerships. Let’s take Grazia as an example; we can show that Grazia users are 29% more likely to visit travel sites, and 75% more likely to be visiting Expedia. That’s hard evidence for an advertiser to argue with.

Ipsos iris can also quantify the incremental reach our wider portfolio of brands bring – helping publishers achieve a bigger slice of the ad budget and profit. In the case of Grazia, and Bauer, the audience reach increases by 115% and 111% on the two core target markets.

Ipsos iris’ unparalleled insight into digital audiences empowers your strategic decision making, helping you in every area of your business: from audience growth and monetisation, to content, and distribution strategy to advertising.

For more information about how Ipsos iris can answer your key business questions please contact james.torr@ipsos.com or tracy.allnutt@ipsos.com