El HuffPost
El HuffPost expands Taboola partnership into personalized push notifications
El HuffPost expands Taboola partnership into personalized push notifications
- 45% higher CTR with personalized push notifications compared to manual sends
Company
El HuffPost is the Spanish edition of The Huffington Post. It operates as part of Grupo Prisa’s digital news portfolio.
Challenge
El HuffPost needed a push notification solution that could drive stronger engagement and loyalty while empowering editors to spend more time on the search and development of new content.
Solution
El HuffPost expanded its partnership with Taboola by adding Taboola Push, testing manual and personalized notifications to ensure the best reader experience.
Results
Taboola Push delivers personalized notifications at a 45% higher CTR than manual sends.
Introduction
El HuffPost is the Spanish edition of The Huffington Post. Launched in partnership with Grupo PRISA, it combines global reporting with national coverage across politics, society, lifestyle, and culture, and operates as part of Grupo Prisa’s digital news portfolio.
El HuffPost has built a strong digital presence with a large and active online readership. It stands out for its sharp political coverage and accessible commentary, while also delivering lifestyle and cultural stories that broaden its appeal. The publication reaches audiences primarily through its website and mobile platforms, making it one of PRISA’s most important digital-first properties in Spain’s highly competitive online news market.
Personalized Taboola Push notifications deliver 45% higher CTR than manual for El HuffPost
El HuffPost had previously been using another provider for browser notifications, but the team was looking for a way to improve the reader experience with a new provider. Already working with Taboola to personalize content recommendations on their homepage and article pages, HuffPost agreed to test Taboola Push, a web-based notification tool that lets publishers send real-time alerts to readers’ desktop or mobile browsers, even when they are off-site.
Taboola Push is managed inside Taboola Newsroom, Taboola’s analytics and audience-insights platform. Newsroom gives editors data on what stories are engaging readers, how they compare to competitors, and how distribution can be optimized. With Taboola Push integrated, editors can act on those insights instantly by promoting breaking news or key stories directly to opted-in readers.
Because reader experience was the priority, HuffPost journalists tested two approaches: manual notifications written and scheduled by editors, and personalized notifications automated by Taboola. The goal was to ensure automation would truly serve readers before adopting it at scale. The test proved that personalized Push not only preserved the reader experience but improved it for desktop audiences, and the team plans to extend it to their mobile apps next.
El Huffpost’s Test Reinforces The Value Of Automation
Taboola’s full product suite plays a key role in El HuffPost’s strategy, helping the publisher attract new audiences and increase on-site engagement.
The full suite of Taboola products has become central to El HuffPost’s strategy.
The newsroom’s adoption of Taboola Push added a new layer of engagement, with automated, personalized notifications delivering a 45% uplift in CTR compared to manual sends.
Taboola is a top two revenue source for El HuffPost, with Push driving new traffic and engagement.
El HuffPost has worked with Taboola since 2023, when they switched from another market leader that wasn’t meeting their needs. Today, they rely on a full suite of Taboola products to provide a seamless personalization experience across desktop and mobile.
At the center is Taboola Feed, a continuous scroll of personalized recommendations that mimics the social feed experience. The feed appears on El HuffPost’s article pages, homepage, and photo galleries. It mixes HuffPost’s own organic stories with sponsored content. Organic stories are surfaced to keep readers exploring, while branded content can be prioritized using Taboola Promote when partnerships call for it.
Through Audience Exchange, the feed also recommends articles from other Grupo PRISA publications and vice versa, creating a broader network of discovery. El HuffPost also uses Explore More, which recommends more content when a user taps a mobile back button. Instead of losing that reader to Google or social, Explore More opens a clean panel of personalized stories to keep users engaged within the brand.
On mobile, the same experience is delivered through the Taboola SDK, which integrates the feed natively into HuffPost’s iOS and Android apps.
To maximize efficiency for sponsor content, El HuffPost also relies on Taboola’s header bidding adapter, which lets Taboola bid compete transparently alongside other programmatic partners in real time, improving yield without disrupting the user experience.
Finally, they extend reach beyond their own site through Taboola News, Taboola’s content distribution channel built into smartphone lock screens and notification centers via partnerships with device makers and carriers. For El HuffPost, this creates incremental traffic and visibility by surfacing stories directly to millions of mobile users, helping grow audience reach outside the traditional search and social ecosystem.
Taboola Push has changed how our editorial team thinks about reader engagement through notifications. We don’t need to spend time sending manual notifications anymore because Taboola’s automation delivers strong results and a good reader experience. It saves our team time to focus on telling the right stories.
- Brice Fevrier, Senior Digital Marketing Executive, Grupo Prisa