NYC DPACIII – Newsletters and slideshows. It sounds “old school,” but Michael Silberman, GM of NYMag.com, said these two user and engagement tools accounted for a tripling in monthly page views and a five-fold increase in engagement respectively, over the course of just eight months.

In a session focused on audience measurement as a strategic tool for publishers, Silberman first lauded the Omniture “hotmap” as a way to observe how traffic moves through his Web site. He said knowing how readers are “flowing” is key to improving user engagement. Clearly entertainment and style are better drivers than business stories for his particular audience: “Nobody cares about what Mort Zuckerman thinks about how to save newspapers. That didn’t do very well,” Silberman quipped.

NYMag.com readers are a highly desirable audience: “They have a high socio-economic status, they buy things…so if we go from five million to 10 million uniques we don’t want to dilute that audience,” Silberman said. Getting to the “who” is more difficult than the “how many.” For the latter, Silberman recently switched to Comscore from Nielsen data. But it’s how NYMag.com used this data that may prove most useful. Silberman’s first revelation: “We think of our site as a portal, but people tend to stay pretty siloed” within the type of content they enter the site, he explained. For example, if people come into the site to look for a restaurant, they’re not that likely to consume conent. If they come into a blog, they’re not likely to find a restaurant.

The biggest driver of circulation within the site is the home page, but the home page can’t always reach people who are consuming only utility content, he added. To drive cross-utility engagement, the site bought MenuPages® to drive people from content pages to its restaurant listings, driving usage of the site beyond New York City.

Driving stickiness – time on site – was addressed with slideshows. They clearly multiply the pages per visit, which grew from 4 million last Spring to 15 million in December. Much of this tripling was driven by the decision to integrate slide shows with the site’s blogs. Some care must be given to managing how many ads are delivered while users are engaged in such immersive behavior, “We didn’t want to depress the ad clicks and anger our advertisers,” Silberman said. Here again, testing and measurement are key to getting the mix right.

Newsletters, he said, are another smart tool to get people to come back to the site more often. NYMag.com uses Datran Media’s StormPost to build its list and deliver the newsletters. One key factor in success here is to make sure the marketing for the newsletter matches the content delivered, but once someone subscribes, Silberman says subscribers are roughly five times more engaged in the site than non-subscribers. “If you can increase the number of your newsletter subscribers, it’s an opportunity to get them to come back more often and see more pages.” One successful strategy in driving newsletter subscriptions is offering a sweepstakes, such as the opportunity to win $25,000. NYMag.com also plans to experiment with search engine marketing to acquire newsletter subscribers; Silberman said he’d be willing to pay $2-$3 per subscriber, given their eventual value to driving advertising-supported traffic.

Once the traffic is generated, metrics are important to help qualify the make-up of the audience. Silberman said; “The sales rep trying to sell our entertainment vertical or our Vulture blog, needs to answer the advertiser’s question, ‘what’s the audience of that channel?’” He added, “Until pretty recently, we couldn’t answer that question with respect to our individual verticals,” but NYMag.com now uses Aperture for that sort of intelligence. Silberman appeared with Lindsay O’Neill, SVP of Datran Media Display, who plugged Aperture’s new tools to help publishers segment its audience.

There’s no substitute for good home page design, of course, and Silberman attributes NYMag.com’s success in being named this year’s National Magazine of the Year to wise design decisions, as well as being flexible. One example: NYMag.com in May of 2006 decided that it wanted to become a daily destination, so it put a truncated version of its blog right on the home page. In May 2006, page views were around 800,000/month; eight months later, page views were up 37 percent.

The problem? People were reading what they needed on that one page and not going deeper. The site had a “bounce rate” (people who viewed only the home page and nothing else) as high as 30 percent. NYMag.com moved to more useful bullets driving people deeper into the sites many other blogs and drew time on the home page from 40 seconds to 55 seconds, drove the click through rate from 75 percent to 80 percent, and drove the bounce rate down to 20 percent or less.