Consumption‐based analytics: Implications for sales and promotional strategies for digital content

Abstract

The digital content market is expanding rapidly, yet how post‐purchase consumption trajectories relate to consumers’ responses to promotional incentives remains underexplored. Existing studies have offered valuable insights into digital content consumption by focusing on retention, churn, or recommendation outcomes but have paid limited attention to how these behavioral signals translate into economically consequential subsequent purchase decisions. We address this gap by investigating how completion rate and interruption frequency, two observable consumption signals, moderate the effectiveness of a price promotion in driving subsequent purchase, defined as the purchase of a different title on the same platform under renewed quality uncertainty rather than replenishment of the same product. To this end, we partnered with a major e‐book platform to develop a system for measuring real‐time consumption behavior. A field study involving over 20,000 participants examined how prior consumption patterns condition promotion‐induced subsequent purchase. Our findings reveal that consumers with lower completion rates and more fragmented consumption due to frequent interruptions exhibited significantly higher rates of promotion‐induced subsequent purchase. Importantly, these consumption signals were only weakly associated with subsequent purchase in the absence of promotion, whereas the causal effect of the randomized coupon was substantially stronger among consumers with lower completion and more fragmented reading. We interpret this heterogeneity as treatment‐effect variation across consumer types, pre‐treatment behavioral indicators that platforms can use for promotion targeting.