How can you drive new internet traffic? By making your content ready to be shared.
A large publisher needed to improve internet traffic to their largest publication, wanted to grow advertising revenue, and wasn’t sufficiently supporting viral content sharing.
Solution
One of the most basic principles of internet traffic growth is that every piece of content should be easy to share -- easy to forward to friends. This publisher had a problem that wasn’t being addressed, namely, when you clicked the “email to a friend” button nothing happened 50% of the time. There was also no way for the customer to know when it had worked and when it hadn’t.
This means they were losing 50% of the potential new traffic stream from lack of viral sharing. Plus, they were alienating customers who liked their content enough to share it but were blocked by their faulty system.
We suggested that making this button work 100% of the time was a high priority and an easy way to drive new traffic and to grow customer satisfaction and repeat visits to the site.
To provide context, publishers can easily spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to create one piece of content, and not enabling it to be easily shared meant they would get little return value from it.
The opportunity to enable customers to send content to friends was a clear need. Customers That Click suggested that upgrading/improving this service would also give them an opportunity for more traffic (from the friends who get the emailed link) and also give them a chance to increase advertising revenue by showing ads.
In working with the publisher, a service was identified that could provide the forwarding article functionality, plus display ads during the sending process.
Result
The publisher was able to grow traffic from viral sharing and also found a whole new source of advertising revenue. In fact, ads were displayed at each step in the sending content process and in the emails. That enabled the publisher to sell ads in the most popular and best shared content, as well as display ads in their new newsletter (read the previous case study here for more information on that).
