From Clicks to Connections: Mastering Traffic for Publishers

3:00PM Aug 24, 2023

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automation

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facebook

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Good? Evening okay, can everyone hear me okay?

When she hear all of the prompts I like for you to stand up and go stand next to the number or the question that most aligns with your thought process. So your philosophy about journalism. So I'm just going to read these aloud really quickly and then I'll give you the next step for what to do. Number one, there are a lot of problems in the world. And our job is to make sure people know about them, what they choose to do with that knowledge is up to them. Consider what you think about that

that's on this side, you'll see that there's this on this side of the wall.

Number two, there are a lot of problems in the world. And our job is to make sure people know about them. But we should make sure to share good news when we can.

And that's on this corner number two.

Number three, there are a lot of problems in the world. But there are a lot of people in institutions addressing those problems, our job is to make sure that people know about both,

that's at the back of the room number three.

And number four, there are a lot of problems in the world. But there are also a lot of people in institutions addressing those problems. If we report on the responses to problems, we can better engage our audience in addressing those problems.

That's over here, number four, a little bit closer to the speaker. And we will do our best not to blast your ears.

So I want you to think about how you align with these questions and stand up and go stand next to the page that most aligns with your belief system about the role of journalism.

Okay, now that we're getting getting ourselves together, what I would like for you to do and there's a really big group around number four, so you might want to decide how you want to arrange your discussion. But I just like for you for a couple of minutes to discuss how you arrived at your thought process to align yourself with the page that you're standing at. Okay, so take take two minutes discuss amongst yourselves. And the goal here is to come up with a summary. See if you come up with some consensus or highlights or where you just felt the heat in that particular response. once and then we're going to have the report out in a few minutes. Okay? Go

Okay, so we can talk about that in a second. So yeah.

I mean, have a conversation if y'all are in the middle, we have a conversation about what why did you not choose one? Where What is your thought? Yeah.

So thank you. Okay.

Actually, all of the other social networks are on this chart. But they are so marginal in terms of traffic, that you can't even see them. I should also mention, all of this data is available on our website as well for for downloading if anyone would like to investigate a little bit more. So what's happened over the last 12 months is social traffic has fallen from approximately 15%. to about half of that. And the main driver of that has been Facebook's decision to deprioritize news content. We're going to talk a little bit more about that in a minute. If we look at the same chart over a longer period of time, you can see that there have been several ups and downs. I'd say it's very important not to write off social. As you can see, there are cycles, this will go through various iterations. And we don't know what changes are going to be made going forward by the social networks. The other key thing to note is that although traffic has been declining more recently, engagement hasn't been declining at the same rate. Facebook have a history of upsetting publishers, I'm sure many of you have experienced this in the past. And there are lots of examples of where this has happened. I'm not going to go through all of them be very happy to talk about them later, if anyone's interested. I'll just pick up on a couple of them. Instant Articles were launched in approximately 2015. And the idea was to provide a way to rapidly load content within the platform. The reality was that they didn't really deliver on their promise. They were quite strict guidelines around how you could use the Instant Articles around advertising subscription, and various other things. So the main use of Instant Articles was where there was slower internet connections, people had to worry about using Instant Articles as a way to optimize their workflow. And then in 2023, so earlier this year, Facebook decided that they're going to close down Instant Articles. And that left the publishers who were using it completely stranded, and scrambling to find a new opportunity. The other one I want to mention is usability. So I mentioned this earlier, there has been a lot of confrontation between publishers and Facebook around paying for news and Facebook are looking to reduce their dependence on publishers. We've seen some really good examples of this in Australia and Canada more recently, as well. It's also been a bumpy year for Twitter, everyone's favorite billionaire has been making some very drastic changes quite aggressively, and often without very little warning. So there were changes to the API, where there was a sudden removal of access for many organizations, there was the introduction of posting limits to say that you can only post this much content per minutes per day per period of time. I'm really proud of the fact that Attica box, we managed to find a solution for our customers to continue sharing their content to put work into a weekend to optimize that. They've also been lots of changes in terms of personnel on Twitter, a lot of people were let go really good people. And that's meant that it's very difficult to get support from Twitter, because the people who knew all of the platform have gone. And this week, we've also seen an example where Elon has been saying that they're going to remove headlines from Twitter cards, which again, is just a very big change to make on the web, you really should be thinking about it a little bit. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the impact of that Twitter turmoil on traffic. So this analysis is from a renowned publisher. I can't say their name, but our data science team went through and analyze the entire situation. So this pinkish area that you can see on the left hand side represents what they used to do in old tourism. So before or the API restrictions, they were sharing approximately 160 tweets per day. And then the green section to the right to the far right, is the new situation. So once the the restrictions been put in place, and you can see here, the volume of content that they're sharing per day is approximately 50 tweets per day. But what's incredibly interesting about this is that their traffic hasn't actually fallen significantly. And the reason for that is, if you are choosing the right content, and sharing it at the right time, you can still get traffic from Twitter, there are still a lot of opportunities there if it's done in the right way. So don't lose faith in Twitter. Alright. So how can play using lots of publishers data in order to be able to do the analysis, making sure that we're thinking about things over the right period of time to avoid biases in the news cycle or issues because Facebook have changed their algorithm, etc. So the questions that publishers have asked very frequently in the past, how much content should I share? Should I use interest types? And does mixing post types improve traffic? So taking the first question, how much content should I share? This is fundamentally asking, Will I get penalized if I share too much content? So the way we did this analysis, was we looked at various publishers individually, and took posts that was shared within one minute of each other, then post shared within two minutes of each other three minutes, all the way up to 60 minutes. And then we analyze the impact on traffic of those individual pairs of posts. And we're left with something that looks a bit like this. So this is for to lifestyle magazines. If you do the same analysis, you will see the same trend for every publisher, the first publisher, the blue line here, you can see that up until approximately 30 minutes, they have been penalized. The amount of traffic that has been generated is not as high as if they waited for a 30 minute period. For the second publisher, that time is a bit shorter. It's 20 minutes. And if we had a news publisher, I think the content, the penalisation, time would be even shorter. But the key point here is that every publisher will have a different horizon within which they might get penalized.

Second question is should I use interest tags. So an interest tag is a label on your post, it's a way of telling Facebook, this content is about this particular topic. Therefore it might resonate with this particular audience. And Facebook have recommended doing it. It allows them to match content with audience more easily. It takes a lot of time to find those interest tags and add them to your posts. So the question is, is it worth it? And our analysis here, we partnered with a number of publishers who were really interested in finding out the answer to that question. And as you can see from the three examples here, posts with and without tags performed effectively the same, if anything, click through rates actually fell when they started using interest tags. And the third question here is around mixing post types. Facebook have said this number of times over the years saying mixing the post types that you have will be better for your performance. Before we go into this, I want to just be I want to give an example of what I mean by different post types here. This is a link post. I'm sure you've all seen one before. The article here is shared as the card that you can see in the low off. So you have an image you have a title, all of that will be clickable and it will take you through to the website. Some publishers thought well, what if we share photo posts and add a link to that photo post in the share message could be an alternative way of still having a link in the post driving traffic to your website. And Facebook might like it. So that would look something like this. And you can see there, it's been blurred out but the the URL is in the actual share message. So we ran this analysis in several phases. The first phase, took all of those posts and shared them as links link posts. In the second phase, we did 80% as link post and 20% were randomly selected to be shared as photo posts with a link. And then in the third phase, we did exactly the same thing with the 6040 split. It's really important to normalize the different publishers been using this data, because some of them will have millions of followers and some of them will have a few 1000. But you can clearly see the trend in what happens as you start to introduce other types of posts, traffic starts falling down. So quick summary, how can you beat the Facebook algorithm? Well, in order to maximize traffic, don't overshare find out your penalisation period and don't share with them. Avoid interest tax, they take a lot of time, they don't necessarily have a positive return. And thirdly, focus on link posts instead of other types. Now, it's all well and good me saying these things. And they are true for the majority of publishers. But there's a lot more nuanced than that. It's not always going to be true for every publisher in every situation. Because everyone is different. Everyone has different content, everyone has a different audience. And also, Facebook keep on changing their algorithm multiple times a day. So these things shift over time. So in order to do this optimally, at scale, you need to be thinking about tools like artificial intelligence. So that will help you to answer questions like how much content should I be sharing? Which content should I be sharing? When should I share it? How should it look? And what should the messaging be? And artificial intelligence can help you with all of those questions. So I'd like to give a quick example of a very large UK publisher who shared a piece of content around Prince Harry. They shared that article in the middle of the day, and it performed well. But then artificial intelligence reshard that article in the middle of the night. Now, if a human had been in the loop, they probably would have said that's a terrible idea. Don't do that. But in fact, that post shared in the middle of the night, performed three times better than the post shed in the middle of the day. And the reason for that was that the artificial intelligence identified that this content resonated very well with an international audience. So the performance was incredibly high. In terms of finding more social traffic, I mentioned at the beginning, you could optimize the channels you already have. But you can also consider more social channels. There are loads of new social networks popping up all over the place. In our survey run last year, 20% of publishers said that tick tock will be important for that strategy. That same question asked in 2023 Tick Tock is now 59%. And as well as different networks, there are different post types on the same networks, taking just Instagram as an example. You've got reels, you've got stories, you've got feed posts, you even used to have IG TV, which they've now closed down to how can you handle the needs of all of these different social networks and social post types? Retention really hits all the different levels. So we're going to talk a little bit about how can you build successful email channels. And we're going to do this by looking at a funnel. So it's the top of the funnel is gaining as many subscribers as you can. Then you need to make sure that those emails are actually getting delivered to them,

that they then open them, and that they then engage with them. And finally, opportunities for monetizing. It's really important to maximize the conversion between each of these stages.

So I'm going to take each one individually, we'll start with maximizing subscriptions. Being contextual, will allow you to maximize the number of people coming in at the top of the funnel, and also help you with conversion at later stages of the funnel. You want to be thinking about all of the different channels avoid sending spammy subject lines. But just sticking with open rates for a minute, if you really want to maximize this, you've got to personalize it. Every subscriber is going to have a different daily routine. There's no point knowing that say Maria likes to read her email in the morning with her coffee. And Lawrence likes to read it on his computer, and then sending to both of them at exactly the same time, you're going to end up far down their inbox and you're not going to get the same potential. You can also personalize subject line and preview text, you could include add an extreme their names in that. Or you could even go to the go from the perspective of customizing the content that you're showing to them. So the subject line can talk about the content that's relevant to them, as opposed to a generic title. Our research has shown that sending at the right time can increase open rates by 52%. The next stage in the funnel is about maximizing engagement or click through. In order to optimize this, you can think about content selection. So what content is best for this audience. And you can also think about content order. The first article, which is included in a newsletter, will often get perhaps with them, you want to include more adverts, and move some of the sort of call to actions away. So just in conclusion, talking about email channels, it's all about optimizing the funnel. You want to automate,

where every interview, two questions I asked in every interview, who's doing it better. And the other thing is, what is not being covered in your community that you would like to see. Often I get great stories and ideas, not every time, but it's never a wasted thing. And it definitely helps report four pillars of solutions journalism, reminding you, we're looking at responses, not necessarily that they fixed everything, but somebody is trying to make it better. And is there evidence that it's working, we need at least an initial sense that something is working, something is right about it, looking into that insights, really figuring out what lessons we're learning from this, and the limitations looking at it from all directions. And then the other thing I'm going to ask you is please, we want to base this in, and we want to interact with communities, speaking with people, and not about people.

And I can give the next please. So now we would want you to talk to each other again, at your respective tables. And we want you to answer the question what key takeaways were you began to apply on Monday. So we would want you to discuss with your table based on our super brief conversation, and engaging with the rubric and engaging with this questions. What do you think you can do?

I hope you're gonna say that you're using echo box to do that. Sure.

So this room, we are

brilliant. If not, we can have a conversation.

We have used very much automation in terms of posting, we we work pretty hard to have all of our social channels, you know, actually stopped. But we do use tools to like see when's the best time to post? And so that kind of helps diversify across channels.

Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's a great question of automation can be a bit of a barrier to jump over initially. So how could you start using it? If it's the appropriate thing for you, it may not be for everybody. But there are sort of smaller ways, as we discussed earlier, starting on maybe new pages, smaller pages, trying it out, seeing if it's working for you, and how you can configure it and really personalized to your audience and content. Brilliant. Anything else? Anyone else wanted to add? Yeah.

That's definitely a challenge. Did everyone hear that? Yeah. So absolutely. It's a challenge. And I think the advent of some of the newer technologies mean that you really can maintain your voice. It doesn't need to be that you're taking that away. It can also be that you don't have to use automation to change the way in which you're communicating. A lot of organizations will actually pre write their social messages and say, this is the way we want it to come on our social channel. When it gets posted. That's something we can automate, which article gets posted. That's something we can automate. So it doesn't have to Be everything all at once it can be tailored to what your needs are and how you would like to use. The data that you can base that automation on based on real time data, or just sorry, I missed the real time data or, or historical data. It's a combination of both. So we we use both datasets, because they both provide you with different things. The real time data will tell you what's happening here. And now what's trending, where's there an opportunity to go and double down on something? The historical data gives you larger trends and patterns, and you can look at a larger sample to make more accurate predictions.

And then, I'll go with the final one here. What's stopping you from from doing more automation?

Can ask the question? Maybe I missed this piece, because I missed the first few minutes of your presentation. But when you're talking about present personalization, and how to automate that, is Echo box offer a way to automate personalization within your products? Or are you analyzing how other email marketing platforms personalize for you AV testing?

So all of the above? Yeah, absolutely, you know, come by booth later, and we can have a more detailed conversation. Brilliant. Yes.

workflow for general storage.

Absolutely, you know, that safety thing is, again, it's a really important thing to consider. And, as I mentioned earlier, there are different modes of doing automation, you don't have to go, I'm just gonna let the machine do everything. And you don't have to do that. A lot of publishers who work with us and other tools as well will take on an approach where the automation and artificial intelligence is almost advising them saying, hey, actually, this piece of content, maybe you want to do this, or actually, this is more relevant to distribute now. So it's up to you, again, to find what works for you. And in terms of what responsibility, and hopefully, with the newer technologies that are available, you can actually make that responsibility very small. Because I think the concern is that people say there's a lot of work to do here. And if you can minimize that, then it becomes a much easier conversation. Brilliant, any other thoughts on this? Brilliant. I had a couple more, but we'll skip on to questions. If anyone has any questions, I'd be very happy to answer. Yes.

Basically, increasing twice. I would say a lot of folks with an organization's job. And you think that doesn't really count as propaganda. And Twitter makes me feel like that's probably probably a reason why.

I think it depends on what your goals are. So if your primary goal is to, to offer those job opportunities, then they should be higher up in email. But at the same time, what you'll probably find is that the people who make it further down the email are more engaged. And perhaps those are the people that you would actually want to be looking at this content anyway. So I think it can play both ways. And my recommendation would be tested, try and run that over a statistical sample, see what happens. And if you can get that data and analyze it in the right way, you can deliver some really strong conclusions. At the back. Hey,

I have two questions. One, we have users who have limited resources. Do you think that it's worth spending time on social or just automating because and really spend your time on newsletters because there's more there? Because with social media, it just feels like things keep changing. And then part two, how does Google Search fit into all of this especially with all the agencies

so To start with the first one, I think it's up to you, it depends on your content, it depends on your audience, it depends on how you approach those channels. There are certain things which are going to be very time consuming, and low value, those are great candidates to automate, then there's gonna be a category of things, which are higher value. And you know, the time spent is still quite high. Again, good candidates to consider, but maybe not right away, there may be a second category of things to think about. So you really need to tailor it for your audience and content. And how also your strategy, how do you want to approach it? The Financial Times in the UK invested a lot of time on how they were presenting information on Instagram. And that paid massive dividends for them, because it allowed them to reach a smaller audience, sorry, a younger audience, which they weren't able to achieve previously. If they've automated that, I don't think they would have been able to achieve the same success. So it's very much about you tailoring to what you think is the right choice. In terms of search, so search is absolutely it's another traffic source that people would have. And I think there are lots of unknowns when it comes to how is AI going to change? Change that? I don't know. If we take for example, the content that will be shown within an AI driven search result, where's that content coming from? And if it's coming from a website, or publication, then it needs to be referenced. So there needs to be a click through anyway. So it's still a little bit uncertain. And I think where we are now is going to change a lot over the next few months and years.

Yep. So we're assuming from paper, but I mean, just kind of like looking ahead. What are some good tools to like, kind of try out some of these automation stuff, whether it be social media or newsletter, and also we have a newsletter system, but it's really kind of outdated list it's there's over is a chance that we went and rebuilt that last quarter.

So in terms of tools, aquabox Obviously, that would be my number one recommendation. I'm not sure there is anything else? No. Obviously there are other players in the market as well. And by all means, I'm not going to list them all out for you, but you can find them if you do search for them. I'd be really careful about especially now people saying we offer AI Because what's happening, and this is happening, it's not just within publishing or social, it's happening everywhere. Organizations are just jumping on the bandwagon. And if you look at how they're using AI, it's not really integrated into their workflows. It's not a core component of what they're doing. It's just like, here's a way to generate a share message using old English, which that's fun, but it's not really practical. It's not really going to help you with what you're trying to achieve. So just be really careful looking at how integrated into the workflow is, and also can they actually deliver the results? Now is this an organization which is started last week and has started playing with some stuff there? have no track record or is it someone who has spent time working with organizations at scale to be able to deliver those will be monitored Two

questions one of my kind of putting together who's 13 Try to find a good balance slash hybrid Oh People that are like people that are actively working on it and finding ways to audiences you mentioned personalization stuff like that but what are the metrics that Do you track to find those personalized

say The personalization can take many approaches it could be sending out The right time it could be the subject lines that you're sending it could be the content you're including could be the order of the content they're also even more beyond that that you can think about So it's free Your test and learn approach starts from We'll try it leveraging the right tools and then you can See what works for you and what doesn't The race is next

And based on that within the email experience what specifically is The balance between authorization and and personalization with his team most effective various specifically tactically How do you bring that to life in a very successful

So I think you need to start with what metrics what goals are important to you And if you start at the top this is The goal that we'd like to achieve you can then say here are the KPIs that I would like to move in order To deliver on that goal and that will Any shape what you're looking at personalized nation manually is practically impossible personalization through a tool that will help For you to match the right content with the right People possible so it's not really and either all for me it's really About if you want to maximize you need to be Thinking about personalization now there are practical reasons why that's harder but it needs to be something you're considering And if you can go that way you should at the same time there are elements that you don't want To personalize if you have a say an email that you Sending out you may not want to personalize the entire email it may be that you have the first few articles are kind of select Did and kind of written about in a way that you're Adding a lot of value just based on what you're Writing you need everyone to know these things It doesn't matter who you are I don't want to have a if you have an email campaign with somebody is just getting the content that fits the A worldview that's obviously going to lead to a very kind of siloed approach Okay so there might be things where you say when Need to talk about this it's not about personalizing this but then maybe there's a second Think category of things where you say yes I want to personalize this because it will optimize and it will improve my opinions

as well I mentioned metrics a whole lot I think one barrier that I've seen is Oftentimes the analyzing of satellite jokes are done by a journalist and smaller situation it's the fifth of the 30 anything that has to do that day booking Get those metrics is sometimes difficult or time consuming etc And certainly the echovox club We're going to solve this but I'm just curious how how user friendly for those who spend time in like the Google analytics world it's easy to get lost it's easily consumed so yeah that's a

so I think it's a very valid concern I was told specifically not to turn this into a sales pitch so I will say come and have a look at the booth we can show you some stuff there's absolutely ways of solving that And it's important to be able to track the right metrics in the right way accurately as easily as possible but who So to understand how Does that look against my peers For example my click through rate is four thing is that because I've done something wrong or is it because holistically something has changed So there are really important questions to think About and they're quite difficult to to kind of navigate just use got Google Analytics or something like that But absolutely happy to talk about that in a bit more detail yes

So we know that Social Networks are overly happy abundant information time because they want us to spend more time out there in Mandalay Bay You search for anything at all maybe the forces or circles Oh

yes we've got lots of research it's a topic that We We go into a lot both in terms of demonstrating how How automation and AI can actually improve your woman's but also to make sure All that they're on sort of pay utilization is occurring so very important thing to consider And if you look at our website you'll find a lot of research around it What I would say is I don't think the social networks are against Automation what they're against is spraying all of your content unblocking onto the platform in a way which is not going to be effective they don't really care about how much time you're spending in the tool itself It's about the value you're adding to the platform so if you're sharing good content well in the right kind of volumes that's a win for them because it means That ultimate metrics which are going to be around how many users are on the On How long are you staying on the platform those kinds of things you're actually going to be improved We've been dice

Any other questions? Brilliant. Oh, yeah.

Particularly alternative thinking about the law versus their social engagement. Any thoughts on whether or not liars are making sense to put through a situation.

So, as I mentioned earlier, I've been working in tech for a little while. And I often look at technologies like email, like RSS feeds, and I look and I go, that's not going to last, it's an old legacy technology, you know, there's going to be new things that come along that which are much better. But I think some of these technologies are kind of everlasting. And they will change and they will, they will kind of evolve, but there is always going to be a space for them. What that looks like, in 10 years time, I don't know, I don't think anyone does. But there's lots of data, which shows that actually, the younger audiences are actually engaging really well with email. And they actually really like having that within their their kind of inbox, they can subscribe to things that they care about, and have that information and not get the noise that you might find on a social network from from other areas. So it can be very, very promising and it can continue to grow. And I, it may continue to be that case for a long time. Brilliant. Well, thanks very much. Thank you for your questions and participating in the discussion. As I said, I hope you found that useful. And I will be very happy to talk about any of these topics and more in more detail. Swing by our booth for free.

It's very nice to meet you. I got him late here, obviously. But I do. I'm very impressed with what I've heard here. I've been focusing a lot on newsletters, and our we have about 22 people who work in my organization, Michigan is a nonprofit. Obviously, I'm gonna sell bikes, I do like what I'm hearing here, but like, does this integrate with MailChimp? Or is this gonna be something that would be

setting up separate? Okay, so there are mechanisms for sharing subscribers across different platforms. And but this can replace.

So we're part of news revenue hub, which is also their big magic thing, what we're paying for essentially, is they do a lot of consulting on development for nonprofits like us, but they have a magic bullet of a connection between Salesforce and MailChimp, that helps us keep updates on like, who's who's a member who's not a member who's paying who's not paying. And that way we can segment our messaging based upon that. Now, I imagine this sounds like it's gonna do the same thing here. But I'm hesitant to always just dump who's ever to help because of those connectors. Because it's been, we've been doing very, very well. But obviously, if I see something like 49%, increase, total personalization, that's like, Well, yeah. Okay.

So you need to think about what the right thing is, yes. But what I would say is, these mechanisms exist as well, obviously be some configuration that needs to happen. But fundamentally, you can do these things. So we'd have to talk more about more specific use cases, but having a connection between different platforms, that's absolutely doable. And we use web hooks by sending information and all of these platforms really simply what

they were doing social media. Did I hear that you can they can reply to comments on social media.

Now, but I, as I said, I didn't want to make this into sales pitch.

I'm interested in the sales pitch, I will be coming out there. I have lots of questions. Obviously, the price point is going to be important. But I'm very much interested in these

organizations. Yeah. So you know, that side of things isn't something that you do. I know, there are obviously tools out there that do do it. So there are definitely opportunities to look at it. At the end of the day with any of these AI nodes, especially when we're talking about generative AI, there's going to be a balance between accuracy and creativity. So you can get things which are very accurate, but then that doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to be as creative and vice versa. So a lot of the time you're going to