How SHE Media (PMC) Nearly Doubled Revenue in a Few Weeks
“As a publisher, diversifying revenue is extremely important. Adding on-page competition within our content recommendation module was a clear way to increase revenue.” Ryan Nathanson, SVP Operations at SHE Media, part of the Penske Media Corporation (PMC)
Who is SHE Media?
SHE Media (formerly SheKnows Media) is a mission-driven digital media company created by and for women with nearly 65 million unique visitors per month (comScore) and 350+ million social media fans and followers across the SHE Media Partner Network.
What did SHE want to achieve?
SHE Media aspired towards the highest possible CPM for every impression earned through their hard work and creative content. They turned to the biggest content recommendation providers that dominate the space such as Taboola, Outbrain and RevContent, to name a few.
Experts at analyzing the shifting current of the digital market, they knew that to maximize revenue, they needed to diversify their sources and maintain stable competition. But they could only work with one provider at a time.
They tried juggling between the vendors of their choice in a consecutive way, but any learnings regarding optimization were after-the-fact and not actionable. They sought a way to work with all four in parallel so they could measure results in true apples-to-apples fashion and take real action to improve performance.
Introducing competition with WhizzCo
SHE Media learned of WhizzCo’s technology that indeed enables, for the first time, true, transparent competition among content recommendation providers and decided to test the platform for a few weeks and see what would happen.
The trial included four vendors rotating in their content recommendation unit and tested several different widget sizes, positions, and styles, including recirculation units, to optimize toward an increase in traffic and revenue.
As SHE leveraged WhizzCo’s optimization algorithm, a competitive streamlining process began maximizing their earnings. And the results were clear as day on the WhizzCo unified dashboard.
A few weeks later
“Whizzco’s platform allowed us to create a competitive ecosystem, which has enabled tighter customization, competition and editorial guideline control, yielding a 75% increase in content recommendation CPM.” Ryan Nathanson,SVP Operations at SHE Media (PMC)
After just a few weeks of starting the test, Whizzco’s AI optimization algorithm started optimizing performance, and healthy competition between the four vendors eventually brought a steady 75% CPM lift.
Now that SHE Media no longer has to work exclusively with one provider for their content recommendation real estate, the team has more flexibility to increase RPMs on the page and improve the visitor experience.
Always optimizing…
If the content recommendation real estate is no longer given exclusively to a single provider, and subject to conditions on page location, demand type, and more, it opens the door to a much more productive conversation between the editorial, product and optimization teams to find the perfect balance between performance and visitor experience.
Having control over the content recommendation unit not only helped SHE Media raise CPMs for that unit, but also optimized RPMs by allowing the team to add other ad products and improve performance.
Please get in touch if you are interested in learning about working with WhizzCo!
