Build Your Audience
How engaged is your readership? Your audience size and engagement are two important factors in building and scaling a sustainable revenue model. Readers returning to your site more often grow its available inventory for digital advertising, which increases your earning potential for both direct and programmatic advertising. Increasing overall traffic has the same effect, and a strong technical foundation to ensure content distribution and discovery is essential to overall revenue optimization.
While our focus was primarily on revenue for this lab, we did expand on implementations for tactics specifically useful to hyperlocal publishers.
If you would like to understand your reader funnel more, check out News Consumer Insights.
AMP + Google News
Building and maintaining a website with great user experience is key for growing an audience. AMP is a web component framework designed to make it easy for publishers to maintain consistently performant sites over time. Because AMP pages are designed to load almost instantly, they provide a great user experience which can help publishers reach a wider audience.
Web Push Notifications
One of the fastest growing mediums of delivering timely content, Web Push Notifications have proven to be a relatively simple way to grow returning visitors to the site. Not only that, but these readers tend to be more engaged with the site’s content, making them a valuable source of traffic.
Retention Through Email
Email newsletters are key to creating a loyal reader-base that returns to the site. Over the course of this accelerator, we focused on how publishers can easily tweak their on-site messaging around newsletters, in addition to making it easier to sign up for newsletters, to increase the amount of users that convert into subscribers.
Extend Your Social Reach
News publishers that effectively leverage social media continue to see those efforts pay off with social traffic being a leading driver of traffic to their sites. For this accelerator, we focused on two ways to extend social media’s reach without putting in significant extra effort or spending additional money.