In 2022, XPON became the Google Marketing Platform (GMP) reseller and support partner for the Audience Growth team for Nine Publishing, a dedicated team within Nine Entertainment, that focus on driving engagement and revenue for Australia’s leading Mastheads:

• The Sydney Morning Herald
• The Age
• Australian Financial Review
• Brisbane Times
• WA Today

The Challenge

The Digital Performance team for Nine Publishing had inherited complex account structures that lacked the analytics integrity to confidently remarket within GMP, hindering the ability to achieve the primary business objective of growing Nine Publishing’s subscription base across the Mastheads.

The team were also restricted in accurately measuring campaign effectiveness across their advertising activity based on behavioural attributes and could not confidently make data-driven decisions for campaign optimisations, based on the data they were currently collecting.

In brief, confidence was limited in:

• Nine’s Publishing advertising campaign performance
• Google’s advertising remarketing capability
• Marketing budget allocations and decision-making.

The Solution

Building AdTech Confidence and Maturity

XPON conducted thorough audits of Nine Publishings analytics, Google Tag Manager (GTM), and floodlight ecosystems, identifying inconsistencies caused by outdated tagging and excessive GTM containers. The GTM ecosystem was convoluted, consisting of 4 GTM containers for one domain.

To rectify these issues, we:

• Revised floodlight tags and built a new parameter structure that captured subscriber status, engagement level, specific articles and content themes for each session.
• Provided the data team a blueprint on how to best structure their GTM accounts going forward, proposed to have a single GTM per Masthead.

With the new floodlight tags, the Digital Performance team had increased confidence in the Google Marketing Platform, enabling the team to access granular user segmentation data and personalise their remarketing strategies to help grow the business subscription base.

Unlocking new Analytics, Segmentation, and Revenue Growth opportunities with GA4360 and CAPI

Building on our previous success, XPON assisted Nine in transitioning from Universal Analytics 360 to Google Analytics 4 360, migrating data collection parameters and reports.

XPON completed a full migration for all mastheads over 6 months, including migration of the conversion tracking, data collection parameters, and reports XPON had revised in 2022 around their GMP advertising ecosystem.

A key value-add was the implementation of Conversion API (CAPI) across Meta, LinkedIn, Reddit, and X (formerly Twitter) advertising platforms. XPON implemented server-side GTM and CAPI for each platform, resolving conversion measurement challenges that were starting to become apparent within these advertising platforms.

The Results

With XPON’s support and expertise in adtech and measurement, Nine Publishing were able to gain confidence in their advertising strategies, including their performance data and investments within the Google Marketing Platform and the following social channels: Meta, Linkedin, Reddit and X.

This engagement has delivered the following impact: