User Loyalty Funnel - RFV

Invented by the Financial Times, the RFV is an engagement score that is actionable for every website. It combines information about user visits regarding Recency, Frequency, and Volume metrics:

  • Recency: when was the last time a certain user was on my website?
  • Frequency: how frequently does the user visit my website?
  • Volume: what’s the average amount of PVs this user does when they enter the website

The strength of the RFV is that it ponders reader frequency with volume. A reader coming every other day and reading 10 articles has a higher score than a reader coming every day but leaving after 1 pageview.

This score goes from 0 to 100, where 100 means the reader keeps coming back every day and reads several articles each time. Finally, the RFV varies depending on the last visit date.

Compass automatically assigns a score to each reader and aggregates it to provide an RFV score for each article of a publication.

RFV & Loyalty funnel

Compass presents the RFV score of readers as “Audience Loyalty Funnel”. The loyalty can be one of:

  • New (RFV = 1): A first time visitor in the last 30 days
  • Fly-by (RFV ≤ 10) A user that has visited more than once your site but not enough to remember your brand
  • Casual (RFV ≤ 35) Casually came to your website over the last 30 days, remembers your brand but is not loyal to it and it is unlikely to come directly to your website. Typically would enter through Social or Search. It’s a good segment to be activated because it has the potential to become loyal
  • Loyal (RFV ≤ 60). Users that come to your website often and identifies with your brand. Likely to convert.
  • Lover (RFV ≤ 100) : Your most loyal reader. Comes almost every day and reads multiple stories. Can’t live without it.
  • Private (RFV = ?): Users who did not give their consent to track their engagement level.
  • Won Back: Percentage of concurrent users who returned to your website after not visiting it in the last 30 days. (Only available on explore for analysis proposes)

RFV attribution

Every time a reader visits an article, his RFV score is attributed to that article, contributing to the article’s RFV. For example, an article with an RFV of 13/100 is read on average by casual visitors.

The same RFV attribution from the user to an article is done with Authors, Sections, Topics, Tags, Domains, etc.

Compass lets you filter articles by the audience loyalty funnel to see which ones interest new readers and which ones are preferred by your must loyal readers.

RFV formula personalization

The RFV formula is not opened to change or personalizations. Providing a closed formula makes it comparable to other publishers and can be used as a benchmark.

Usage

The RFV metric might has several different applications that might be of help for several different teams inside your organization, ranging from Editorial, Marketing, Commercial and Product

Editorial / Audience

From an editorial standpoint, by filtering through different segments of the Loyalty Funnel or just by looking at the RFV of an article, can easily visually identify which articles are ideal for acquisition and which ones are great for retention and for loyalty.

Ideal articles for acquisition tend to bring a big volume of users and page views, while loyals and lovers despite being smaller segments they are the ones that are more prone to subscribe to your paywall, newsletter, follow you on social media or entering directly in your home page without an external source.

Different segments of users are normally interested in different types of content, sections and topics, so we can replicate the success and satisfy different kinds of users with the content we write.

Finally, high RFV users are more prone to spend time on the home page, so you can also use it as a criteria to manage the post you place on your Home

Marketing / Subscription

The RFV and the audience loyalty funnel can be used as a relevant predictive variable for subscribing to your paywall or newsletter.

The higher the visitor loyalty the more prone the reader is to become your subscriber or to enter one of your membership programs. You can see this information on our Optimize model once you implement the conversions using the following documentation

Commercial / Monetization

RFV and the audience loyalty funnel gives you a fresh perspective about your audience adding a monetization view, rather than a volume approach.

With Marfeel you’re able to attribute revenue to the different user segments based on loyalty and make revenue driven decisions about what audience to target and which content to produce.

You can see with this analysis (log in into your Marfeel account) if it’s worth more for you to go for big volumes of audience or focus on the few users that come recurrently to your publication.

All together now

By segmenting your audience based on their loyalty, Marfeel can give you the different perspectives above - editorial, marketing, commercial, etc. -, allowing you to facilitate and align your strategic decisions based on which segments bring you the most value, as well as to drill it down throughout your whole organization (from board of directors to the newsroom), facilitating the implementation of a strategy.

By using historical data you can make long-term decisions (example: nurture Loyals and Lovers) and by using the real-time it allows the newsroom to monitor its content production and have a laser focus on the segments you defined as priorities.