Fortune 100 media co. increases value of digital viewers

The challenges

A Fortune 100 media company came to Mixpanel with two main challenges: adapt to drastic changes in the way people consume content–spurred by industry newcomers–and do so without serving ads that drive viewers away.

MediaCo’s primary analytics tool was strong at reporting top-line KPIs like overall viewership and digital ad revenue. However, the product teams managing the streaming platforms (mobile, web, and OTT devices like Roku and AppleTV) were lacking product analytics for depth of insight and speed to improve the customer experience on a daily basis.

The solution: product analytics

MediaCo’s product teams turned to Mixpanel for a better understanding of viewer retention and engagement. They also wanted to move more quickly in adjusting tracking, analyzing viewership patterns, and taking action to engage users.

With deeper insights into user behaviors and the ability to stay agile, MediaCo could build stickier experiences, ultimately increasing content consumption and ad revenue.

The business KPIs

Driving digital ad revenue starts with a happy and loyal user base. Mixpanel helps MediaCo track a set of KPIs on content consumption and engagement that are leading indicators of lifetime viewer value. These include:

– Drop off based on ad frequency

– Overall engagement with each content category

– Retention (are viewers maintaining or increasing their consumption?)

– Full episode plays (FEPs)

– Videos watched per session

The results: How product analytics makes it all possible

Improve content placement and engagement by understanding how deep into each TV series viewers typically go, and where common drop-off points are.

Increase ad revenue by learning which episodes and videos are the most addictive and drive return viewership.

Improve the user experience by optimizing on-boarding and registration flows with flexible funnels. Segmenting them by audience characteristics on the fly helps identify over or underperforming groups.

Increase overall ad viewership by running A/B tests to optimize ad timing and frequency.

Increase content consumption and user retention by targeting users with new content based on their viewing preferences. For example, sending a push notification to action fans about a new action series.

Maintaining an agile work style and data-driven culture

MediaCo’s digital teams are leaders within the company in their approach to agile product development. Thanks to Mixpanel’s ease of use, the barriers to moving quickly are gone.

Developers can onboard in less time and coordinate more easily across distributed teams with Mixpanel’s common-language tagging system.

This simplifies the process of measuring and iterating on their customer experience.

Analytics teams can also ensure the accuracy of reporting through proper governance. On other tools, it’s difficult to ensure every event fires in the same way across all platforms, but Mixpanel’s data model and live event feed make this simple.

Product managers and other business users can pull reports themselves rather than relying on others. This includes advanced analysis to answer questions about viewer retention, onboarding speed, and content consumption by category, region, platform, or any other segmentation.

Fitting into the analytics stack

MediaCo was already using Adobe Analytics within the central marketing team and brought in Mixpanel to help improve their customer experience on their digital entertainment platforms.

Digital product teams rely on Mixpanel to measure user-level behaviors and optimize the value of each viewer.

By cross-referencing data between both systems, MediaCo gets the full picture of viewer behavior, from macro trends to user and platform-level insights.