Initial Situation
David is 27 years old and works as a Junior Product Manager at "News Digital". He was asked by his superior Laura, 32 years old and the Head of Digital, to evaluate tools to increase website engagement on newsdigital.de. And if such tools could generate subscriptions for paid content, that would be great, since top management has set the goal of winning 150,000 new subscribers by 2023.
Laura is having a hard time with this target, especially since competition is doing pretty well:
New York Times - Digital Revenue Exceeds Print for 1st Time
David is happy: Sweet! I can play around with new tools for some weeks and also get a budget of EUR 20K to do so.
But once he hears about the additional requirements from Laura, his heart beat jumps and he begins to sweat:
- The tool must comply to GDPR (of course).
- Cookies must be managed by the rules of TCF 2.0 via CMP (a lot of time, money and energy was invested in this topic over the last couple of months).
- ROI must be high, the tool adds to profit from the beginning, at best.
- It would be great to show ads in the tool (subscriptions need to be generated, after all).
- The tool needs to support integration with the existing DMP (since Google is going to stop supporting third-party cookies by 2023).
- The more engagement layouts a tool offers, the better.
And as if that wasn't enough, Tom, the 38-year-old CTO at "News Digital", adds his two cents via MS Teams. Tom is currently getting rid of numerous slow widgets on newsdigital.de and the only thing that matters to him is performance. Few server requests, fast response times, "lazy loading" and no "tag-in-tag" - these are his knockout criteria.
David hasn't even heard of some terms before - until now, he gasps for breath ...
After a quick coffee break, he calms down a little and starts to google. He quickly stumbles upon a tool provider called “Pinpoll”, located in Austria. Austria, a country he associates with mountains, cows and his last skiing holidays - but technology from a small country located in the Alps? He continues to read and to his great pleasure, discovers a recent comparison of several tool providers for more website engagement, published in the “Pinpoll Magazine” - the Austrians just saved a lot of David's precious time 😉
Battle Sheet
And now: Ready to rumble! Here are five hand-picked tool providers that help to increase website engagement, conveniently wrapped up as a little “battle sheet” for David to print and present to Laura.
By the way, lazy loading shouldn't only be relevant to Tom, but also to Laura, who is responsible for the budget: If elements are loaded but not seen by anyone, no billing should take place. However, this is not done by all tool providers.
Bonus: Performance Benchmarking
Speaking of Tom, we have prepared a little bonus for him: A quick performance benchmarking of Civey, Opinary and Pinpoll using Lighthouse provides the following results.
Civey scores best with 92 points for performance. However, no image was used in widget we tested. Also, Civey cannot score green results in all areas:
Pinpoll scores second best in terms of performance with 89 points for widgets with an image and 90 points for widgets without an image:
For widgets without an image, Pinpoll scores green in all areas and even full points for SEO:
Opinary scores worst with 85 points in terms of performance for widgets without an image. Moreover, Opinary cannot score green results in any area:
Conclusion
You don't always have to buy tools from Israel and the US. Each of the providers compared has strengths and weaknesses. If data protection, performance, personal support (“with a face”) and a fair price are important to you, you will also find what you are looking for in Europe. And, yes, especially in Austria. If market research is more what you're looking for, we recommend the solutions from our colleagues at Civey.
That in mind, we're looking forward to hearing from you soon, David 😉