Developing better advertising metrics

Client Story for Successful Farming at Agriculture.com

The Successful Farming and Agriculture.com brands have been realigned. Working with Four Kitchens, they built a faster site and are heading in a new direction in how they deliver content — and advertisements — to their readers.

Audience-first design

Without an audience, there’s nothing to sell. As a premium publisher, it’s imperative that Successful Farming respects the value of their audience by protecting the user experience. Their rich first-party data and exceptional user experience is the value they bring to advertising partners.

By teaming up with Four Kitchens, Meredith Agrimedia has been able to create a fully responsive, mobile-first website with a first-class desktop experience. With an integrated modern look and feel that complements their print magazine, Successful Farming at Agriculture.com now provides a unified brand experience for audiences that is faster, better, and more reliable than ever before.

Multichannel presence

The digital presence for Successful Farming Magazine had been split. Meredith Agrimedia needed to unify their brands to leverage the recognition and reputation of Successful Farming, and cater to the cross-device world in which we now live. Four Kitchens helped unify the brands with over 60,000 pieces of content and over 25GB of assets, including articles, slideshows, videos, podcasts, and more, and provided a transition strategy to integrate the two identities as Successful Farming at Agriculture.com. Their audience can now easily recognize the brand across all platforms— TV, radio, digital, social, and print.

The metrics that matter

The new Agriculture.com site isn’t just an improvement for the audience— a faster site means greater impact for advertisers as well.

Viewability is the foundation for ad metrics—if ad content is not seen, it can’t be measured. Likewise, page load time is the foundation for user experience—users must see what they expect, and quickly, no matter the source by which they came to the site. The redesign of the site accommodates both of these foundational metrics.

By getting back to the heart of Successful Farming, visitors to the site had to be considered first. The focus on user experience enables Meredith Agrimedia to maintain and grow their qualified audience, allowing advertisers certainty that the ads they’re buying are being seen by the right people.

New methods for measurement

There’s no longer a need to rely solely on impression-based online advertising methods. If the desired outcome for an advertiser is brand recognition, then counting clicks is not always the most useful measurement—that isn’t necessarily how people engage with content in online spaces. Instead, things like viewability, engagement, and interactivity should also be considered.

By thinking in terms of an exposure-based approach, Agriculture.com can now go beyond the click, measuring exactly how—and for how long— an advertisement will be seen. For example, in this time-based advertising approach, view-time is only measured if the ad is in view in an active window. Meredith Agrimedia can also measure advertisement interaction and scroll rates, tracking that the content is actually being read by the audience.

Strong partnerships

Meredith Agrimedia and Four Kitchens have developed a true partnership. As Courtney Yuskis, Digital Engagement Director at Meredith Agrimedia, explains,

Four Kitchens already had a strong background in working with media companies, but their willingness to understand the agricultural industry and what a farmer coming to our site would expect has been fantastic.

This strong partnership on the backend of a site leads to even stronger partnerships with advertisers on the frontend.

What’s the desired outcome?

If an advertiser needs an allegiance or conversion campaign, selling advertisements based on the number of impressions may still make sense. But if the outcome is brand recall and brand lift, then selling based on exposure or a unit of view-time makes more sense.

With the redesign and continued iterations, Successful Farming has increased the quality of traffic, improved SEO, and enhanced ad performance metrics. Thanks to a continued partnership with Four Kitchens, Successful Farming at Agriculture.com is faster and better than ever before.

This post was written in collaboration with Courtney Yuskis, Digital Engagement Director at Meredith Agrimedia. Learn more about the partnership between Four Kitchens and Meredith Agrimedia in our portfolio.