Case · De-identified · Lead generation · Sales outreach · Go-to-market
A publishing partner: 200,000 domainsdown to the few worth a letter.
A Google Certified Publishing Partner serving independent and mid-sized publishers in Europe wanted more of the right publishers. Eightception built the machine that finds them – every candidate read and scored, the decision-maker found, a personalized letter written to each one. Igor Levi designed the solution and led the strategy the outreach would speak with: audience portraits, narratives, positioning and the go-to-market plan.
- The client
- A Google Certified Publishing Partner in Europe
- Eightception built
- Lead scoring, contact research, personalized outreach and the go-to-market behind it
- The scale
- About 200,000 publisher domains in the base
IThe situation
A huge field, and the publishers worth having do not announce themselves.
The client is a Google Certified Publishing Partner: a firm that gives independent and mid-sized publishers access to Google Ad Manager 360 and premium advertising demand under Google's Multiple Customer Management program. Its market is Europe, and the long tail of independent publishers.
Growth meant signing more of the right publishers, and finding them is the hard part. The field runs to hundreds of thousands of sites, most of them small, and the ones worth a partner's time look like everyone else from the outside. At the same time AI search was starting to take traffic from the very publishers the partner serves.
IIIgor's role
Igor designed the solution. The Eightception team built it.
Igor designed the solution and orchestrated the work: which publishers to look at, how to read and rank them, who to write to and what to say. The Eightception team built the system end to end – the scoring, the contact research and the letter writing.
Going beyond the brief, Igor led the strategy the outreach would sell with – audience portraits of publishers, narratives, positioning, messaging, offer ideas and a go-to-market plan – backed by market research on what AI search is doing to publisher traffic.
The partner's publisher-operations team reviewed the batches on technical substance.
IIIHow the machine worked
Read the ad stack, not the homepage.
- publisher domains in the base, past the first filters
- about 200,000
- domains in each analysis batch
- about 1,000
- priority groups, from two scores per publisher
- 4
- publishers judged worth a letter
- about 17 in 1,000
- personalized letters in the first two passes
- 80, then 70+
- audience portraits of publishers
- 8
Read what the site cannot hide
Each publisher's public advertising files – ads.txt and sellers.json – were read for the structure of its ad stack: who sells its inventory, directly or through resellers, how many intermediaries sit in between, whether header bidding is in place and which competitors are already there. Traffic and revenue potential were estimated by formula. Before anyone wrote a word, the partner knew where it could add value.
Two scores, four groups
Every publisher got two computed scores: how much the partner could lift it, and how much it was worth having. Crossing them sorted the base into Quick Wins, Strategic Accounts, Unpolished Gems and Low Priority. About 17 publishers in every 1,000 came out worth a letter, so sales time went only to the publishers worth having.
Distrust your own output
In the first scored batch the Eightception team flagged its own false positives before the reviewers did.
Find the person, not the inbox
A second system found the decision-maker at each publisher from public data, by email and LinkedIn, so each letter reached someone who could say yes.
Write each letter to its reader
Every contact got a personalized letter that opened on what the analysis had found on that publisher's own site, with one of three offers chosen by rule to fit its profile. A publisher read about its own site, not a template. The first pass produced about 80 letters, the next more than 70.
IVThe strategy behind the outreach
Eight portraits, three narratives, one plan.
- Eight audience portraits of publishers, built from real publisher discussions and audience research: five buyers – ad-operations leads, programmatic specialists and independent publishers – and three to nurture, bloggers losing their search traffic.
- Three narratives working as one system: resilience as the brand story, against the industry's cycle of crisis; scarcity as the opening for publishers losing traffic, against the tyranny of volume; and transparency as the argument for the skeptical expert, against the shadow economy of hidden fees and black boxes.
- Brand positioning, messaging and new offer ideas.
- A customer-journey and go-to-market plan across five stages, from first attention to loyalty.
- Market research on what AI search is doing to publisher traffic, with three strategic scenarios for a monetization partner.
VThe first test
A first test, and a closer look at the funnel.
The first test sends drew few replies. The Eightception team went into the analytics and the customer journey behind the letters, and found several serious problems further down the funnel, after the letter lands.
VIThe recommendations
Every surface a prospect sees, worked out.
Eightception handed over detailed recommendations for the sales surfaces and the website:
- What a prospect finds when they search for the company.
- Measurement on the site, so the funnel can be read.
- A LinkedIn presence that works as a channel.
- Outreach automation for the next sends.
- A rewrite of the website copy, so the site answers the question the letters raise.
Together with the portraits, narratives, positioning and go-to-market plan, the partner had its strategy worked out end to end – from the first letter to the page a prospect lands on.
The work continues.
How to start
Find the right buyersand give them somewhere worth arriving.
Answer a few short questions about where things stand. The conversation ends with the smallest useful next step – or a plain reason it is not Igor.