In the post-traffic era, you can’t rely on passing buzz to build your media business. Now, you need need to put your audience first, personalize content to their individual needs, and keep them coming back for more. Or as Brian Morrissey put it in The Rebooting, “Be somewhere people go rather than wind up.”
But how can you deliver the 1:1 personalized experiences your audience expects — and scale it to thousands or even millions of audience members?
Enter Content recommendations.
Content recommendations use your first-party data to recommend articles to each individual audience member, based on their past interests, behaviors and purchases, as well as content engagement data from similar audience members. Turn your one-time readers into repeat visitors and subscribers, all while driving useful insights and revenue for your advertisers.
With our integrated audience data platform, you can create recommendations, target custom audiences, unify your audience data, and view analytics, all in one platform.
Want to see content recommendations in action? Check out this quick walkthrough from our product team. Otherwise, read below to see how content recommendations
What are content recommendations?
Content recommendations are links to recommended articles that appear on your web pages or within your email newsletter.
On the website, recommendations can appear inline in the side rail, in a pop up modal, or as a bottom sticky bar. In email, widgets appear within content blocks in the email designer. Insert merge variables corresponding to each recommended link to generate recommendations.
These links are automatically generated for each individual user based on the site they’re looking at, as well as their individual browsing and purchase history. (For first-time visitors, our Content Recommendations algorithm uses a collaborative filtering model to compare that person to similar visitors and give them recommended links.)
This way, you can serve different content recommendations to different users, even if they’re in the same behavioral or demographic segments. Say that Kendall and Roman are two C-suite media executives in their 40s working in the same verticals.
At first glance, you might see these two people in the same broad marketing segment and serve them with the same content. But Kendall’s more interested in operations whereas Roman is more interested in creative development. Our Content Recommendations algorithm would “notice” what each of them have been reading and serve them with related articles in each of those areas.
So you can go one step beyond segmentation — and create more personalized, relevant and successful experiences for everyone in your audience.
What are the benefits of using content recommendations?
Content recommendations help you give everyone in your audience what they want — without sending them too many emails or doing excessive manual labor/segmentation.
Engage your audience and keep them on site longer
So far, 18% of website visitors who click a content recommendations module on an Omeda website end up clicking two or more links. That’s especially important because 8-10% of all paid subscribers to news media cancel their subscription after reading one article. Serving these first-time viewers with additional relevant content keeps them on site longer and drives the repeat visits you need to secure sustainable engagement and revenue.
Generate more precise first party data
The more traffic you get on your site, the more you learn about your audience. That includes:
- Evaluate your most and least successful content topics, writers, etc.
- Identify differences in engagement across demographics and shift your strategy accordingly
- Spot opportunities to cross-promote between brands
- See what CTA messages drive the most conversions
With that information, you can prioritize your creative and marketing efforts in the right places — without needing to survey your audience or resort to guesswork. This creates an invaluable feedback loop in which increased engagement gives you more data, which helps you get even more engagement, etc.
Attract more sponsorships and revenue
Unless you’re a legacy organization, advertisers are taking a chance on you at first. Sure, you can show them your average traffic numbers, your media kit, etc. But they don’t really know how many impressions and conversions their ads will get until it’s live. With Content Recommendations, though, you can reassure them that their ads will run for the best-fit audience — without manual intervention. Think of Content Recommendations as a content-based ad targeting tool, one that can update and revise itself in real time based on each user’s response.
How can I use content recommendations?
Want to see how you can connect with your audience with content recommendations? Here are a few places to start:
- Recommend related articles on each of your pages. Pair recommended articles with on-page pop-ups and personalization messages to increase impressions and time on site.
- Convert unknown website visitors to known leads through more targeted content and products
- Maximize conversions by offering tailored recommendations for each viewer based on their previous purchases, viewing history, etc.
- Increase upsell and cross-sell opportunities by automatically matching offers with the visitors who are most likely to convert.
- Display sponsored content to your audience on your website. Choose between on-page HTML, exit intent or scroll trigger pop-ups to minimize impact on the user experience.
- Improve newsletter engagement by providing individualized content to each subscriber — without needing to create additional marketing segments
- Deliver the customized communications and offers your audience expects without needing to buy another personalization tool
How can I evaluate and track content recommendations links? What kind of analytics are available?
For website recommendations: Consult the Personalization Summary report to see how many clicks each recommended article links generates. You can also add UTM codes to each of these links so that you can measure them alongside your broader website performance in Google Analytics.
For email recommendations: Use your URL Click Report to see how many clicks each of your recommended links generates.
How can I set up content recommendations?
Want to set up content recommendations on your website or email? Start by contacting to your Omeda Client Success Manager to enable content recommendations on your account. Once it’s enabled, set up content recommendations following these steps. (Note: You must be a Customer Data Platform customer and have access to Olytics to use Content Recommendations on your website and an Email Builder customer to use it in email.)
