While publishers in today’s competitive media environment need to use data to optimize their content promotion efforts, it is perhaps just as important for them to keep in mind that no audience is a monolith.
A personalized user experience is no longer a luxury for companies, but something that consumers now expect wherever they go. Reports from McKinsey & Co have found that personalized recommendations are responsible for 35% of purchases made on Amazon and a staggering 75% of the videos viewed on Netflix.
Fortunately for online publishers, this personalization mandate is a major opportunity that can accomplish a variety of business goals.
In Part 2 of our three-part series on how online publishers grow their businesses with Taboola, we’ll look at the ways that personalization can improve your on-site engagement and drive users to high-value types of content.
Increase Reader Engagement: Matching People With the Right Content at the Right Time
While it’s great to have someone on your site reading a story they love, there’s only so much value they can bring to your company if they leave immediately after finishing the article. The question for publishers is how to encourage those visitors to stick around and discover another piece of content they might be interested in.
Rather than presenting your entire audience with the same list of popular or “trending” stories, predictive algorithms can deliver personalized recommendations for each user, guaranteeing a higher level of engagement (e.g. click-through-rate).
Each person has a unique set of preferences when it comes to their preferred topics or content formats (e.g. text vs, video), and one-size-fits-all solutions fail to cater to that reality.
Additionally, data from Taboola’s network have found that people exhibit different preferences at different times throughout the day. A sports fan may read in-depth written articles while enjoying her coffee in the morning, but prefer videos while relaxing on the couch in the evening.
Predictive algorithms can detect such subtle trends and serve these shifting audiences in real-time, unlocking maximum value and engagement from your readership.
Content consumption patterns also often defy conventional logic. Taboola’s research shows that someone watching a video about President Obama is actually less likely to want to see another piece of political content. Data-based insights can uncover winning combinations. For instance, someone reading an article about nutrition is more likely to be interested in seeing a fitness story next.
Parenting advice website Bundoo saw huge gains after improving its on-site user experience to better match people with the right content at the right time.
Since the mindset of its audience varies significantly based on the age or pregnancy stage of their babies, Bundoo saw immediate and significant boosts around engagement after implementing Taboola’s personalized content recommendations, lifting pages-per-visit by an impressive 45% and increasing time-on-site by more than 70%.
When publishers do a great job of curating stories that readers want to see, there’s little reason for them to go anywhere else.
Boost Strategic Revenues: Drive People to High-Value Pages by Managing Your Audience in Real-Time
Of course, not all content is created equal, and some clicks will be more valuable to your company than others. Some publishers have ramped up efforts to monetize online video, while others are heavily invested in making sure that people visit the sponsored content stories they’ve created on behalf of their advertising clients.
Taboola’s Audience Exchange architecture, which started as a way for publisher networks to share readers across their sites, has since grown into a platform for empowering editorial and business teams to drive users to their most valuable pages.
This platform can support cross-network opportunities — such as American Media Inc. using Taboola to drive Muscle & Fitness readers to a special sponsored series on Men’s Fitness — as well as efforts to more strategically re-circulate on-site traffic.
With thousands of recipes and cooking videos in its library, Food Network UK partnered with Taboola to drive a 160% increase in its site’s monthly video views, which can fetch CPMs that are more than 10 times higher than those for display ads.
Following in the steps of BuzzFeed and Vice, the Daily Mail has begun to create sponsored content for its advertisers, and the UK-based publisher uses Taboola to drive on-site visitors to those special branded articles.
Regardless of your company’s individual goals, personalized content recommendations can be extremely useful in helping direct users wherever you need them to go. The best part?
Even when driving advertising revenues, personalization is a win-win that improves the user experience by matching people with the stories they are most likely to be interested in.
The internet is quickly moving toward what Taboola founder and CEO Adam Singolda calls a “web of one,” and there are plenty of ways for publishers to offer readers a more personalized experience beyond content recommendations.
In the final installment of our three-part series around how online publishers grow their businesses with Taboola, we’ll discuss a lucrative new method of personalizing the user experience: segmented monetization.
Interested in learning more about how Taboola can help grow your business? Check out our resources page and contact one of our account strategists today.