What if publishers could leverage the same level of data-driven personalization as the world’s biggest social media giants — and do it at scale? This is a direct solution to one of the main problems publishers face today: winning coveted user attention and directing it wisely to build loyalty and grow their businesses.
Taboola is on a mission to help you do just that.
We’re excited to introduce “Homepage For You” as part of Taboola Newsroom, a homepage personalization tool that will aid publishers in customizing and personalizing hand-selected sections of their homepage to increase readership and engagement by powering homepage with Taboola’s artificial intelligence (AI).
With Homepage For You, editors can continue to focus on the must-know stories of the day in prominent placements, while unleashing designated sections to be personalized for site visitors based on interests. This ensures that those visitors find content on their most-loved publisher sites as engaging as their social feeds.
And it’s all powered by Taboola’s proven tech and comprehensive database. We’re enabling a different user experience — our AI will leverage insights collected from 500 million daily active users across the globe.
Global enterprise publishers are already seeing impressive results
Five Taboola publishers are currently running Homepage For You on specific sections of their homepages. Results show with Homepage For You, you can:
- Improve the bounce rate by around -5% for the homepage
- Outperform curation by 30-50% in terms of click-through rate (CTR)
- Increase page views generated by the homepage by an average of +10%
Case Study: The Independent
UK publisher The Independent has seen positive growth with Homepage For You so far. Christian Broughton, Managing Director of The Independent, gave a glowing review:
“Taboola has been a true strategic partner in helping us grow. There’s no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to audience engagement, and Taboola’s ability to power key areas of our homepage and other sections of our site, their huge amounts of readership data that provide actionable insights, and their valued partnership in working side-by-side with our own editorial team are the unique building blocks in our shared success.”
Check out a clip from our interview with Christian:
User attention has reached a tipping point.
User attention is hard to find and harder to keep. It needs to be spread across more KPIs than ever, and publishers have to compete fiercely with social media giants and other walled gardens. These big players are swallowing up more user time than ever, and collecting more data than ever from all that engagement and market share.
If a user isn’t interested in sports and fitness, they’ll likely never see an Instagram ad on athletic equipment. Instead, these giants are creating incredibly personalized shopping and video experiences that pull users in, hold their attention, and generate significant revenue. Personalization is becoming the standard, and users have grown accustomed to fresh and relevant content every single visit. This is especially true of super users, where fighting user fatigue is a key to success.
How publishers can win by bringing AI to the editorial team.
When it comes to the open web, where there’s a ton of user time and brand affinity, it’s incredibly fragmented. Most people in any given market could name 20 publishers, and each of them only sees a fraction of user attention.
Those users are used to TikTok and Instagram, where everything is a calculation-driven by in-depth personal information on their likes and interests. This is social’s advantage in the digital era: it uses sophisticated AI-based tech to build and keep relationships with users.
In order for publishers to offset the walled garden giants, they must continue to pursue greater technical innovation and personalization to develop, maintain, and evolve.They need the data and scale to compete with the technology walled gardens leverage to personalize the way they do, creating the foundation to transform that data into a personalized offering that creates the experience users expect.
Taboola is set to level the gap between the open web, journalism and the social networks. We have exactly what’s needed to help publishers meet these key challenges of the next decade — the data, the scale, and technology built from the start to make recommendations based on what people are reading.
Previously, we’ve transformed this into an actionable analytics platform, Taboola Newsroom, that enables editors to leverage our data to learn about readers across the open web, and move fast toward their mission. Now, we want to expand Newsroom’s product suite to enable editors to use an evolution of our algorithm as the ultimate personalization sidekick.
Here’s how Homepage For You works
Taboola is bringing our AI capabilities to help premium publishers personalize their sites, improve overall engagement, and build lasting loyalty through homepages and section fronts.
This will enable our publishers to maximize the value of this critical real estate — where they reach their super users and those with the highest potential of becoming super users — all while:
- Maintaining strict control with highly customizable tools. Publishers run their pages and editorial strategy; we provide a co-pilot that executes to their exact specifications.
- Matching their design with a flexible and dynamic integration.
- Saving editorial time.
- Generating incremental revenue from increased site engagement, new subscriptions, and premium ad placements.
- All with no extra lift required for day-to-day changes or site redesigns. We swap out item-by-item to ensure each Taboola-generated recommendation fits seamlessly into the page.
We’re balancing what’s important to the reader and what’s interesting to them broadly, following the editorial voice. With Homepage For You personalization capabilities, we still acknowledge and celebrate the critical role of a curator and the editor’s voice on the homepage. Any homepage placement can still be manually curated if a publisher chooses.
It’s not about over-personalizing the experience. It’s about helping publishers find the right mix of what they want to promote and what the user wants to see. That’s why the publisher has control over their homepage. They can control how, when, and where the personalization happens and doesn’t happen.
Take your homepage to the next level with Homepage For You
Are you ready to elevate your homepage’s performance with the same level of data-driven tech as today’s social media giants? Contact us today to see if Homepage For You is a fit for your business. We can help you serve your readers the most informative, enriching, and engaging content — all while building brand loyalty and growing your revenue.