Refinery29
Refinery29 Boosts Homepage Story CTR By Up To 200% With Taboola’s Newsroom
Company
Refinery29 is an American-based website focusing on fashion, style, and beauty reaching 225 million people across platforms.
Challenge
Identify when and where to publish content to increase engagement with their audience.
Solution
Utilize Taboola’s Newsroom for A/B testing to determine which strategy would generate the most engagement with their content.
Results
Increase in engagement both in desktop and in mobile homepages and higher traffic across their social platforms.
Introduction
Editorial strategies at leading women’s media brands used to revolve almost exclusively around matters of taste and intuition. But as digital media channels have gone mainstream, new analytics tools and data feeds are changing how these teams craft effective content strategies. Refinery29, the largest independent fashion and style website in the US, is at the forefront of this shift, garnering over 22 million monthly visitors and a passionate fanbase that discovers its content through numerous social channels across the web. This fragmented and fast-paced ecosystem presents a new challenge for online publishers, whose editorial teams have very little time to make important decisions about how, when, and where to publish and promote their content. Leveraging Taboola’s Newsroom, Refinery29 was able to solve this content “equation” and figure out what strategies generate the most engagement with their audience.
A/B Testing Increases CTR By 45% Per Story, On Average
Newsroom, part of the Taboola discovery platform and offered at no cost to publisher partners, empowers editorial teams to intelligently optimize engagement across both desktop and mobile homepages. The platform supports multi-variant A/B testing of different creative elements (e.g. thumbnails, headlines), benchmarking each combination against a “baseline click-through-rate” (CTR) generated by Taboola’s advanced mathematical algorithms. Winning combinations are then automatically moved into new optimal story placements based on performance.
Refinery29’s editorial team tested up to five different creative elements for each of their stories, including a “wildcard” idea that could provide fresh insight into new successful combinations. This scientific approach to driving engagement, combined with the editorial expertise of Refinery29’s editorial team, led to record performance improvements. With Newsroom, homepage CTR increased 45 percent per test on average, with increases as high as 200 percent, since using Taboola’s Newsroom.
Taboola has empowered us to take a very scientific approach to keeping our audience engaged as much as possible, and Newsroom is now an integral part of our overall content strategy.
- Jessica Novak, Content Strategist, Refinery29