Steve Smith of Folio writes about how Kiplinger’s is decluttering its website.
Smith writes, “But the real lesson from the Kiplinger rethink was not only that relevance matters in ad performance, but irrelevant ad content negatively impacts overall ad effectiveness.
“Kiplinger reduced the number of content network partners from five to one, settling on Dianomi, a native ad platform that specializes in financial content. The test, says Hawken, was ‘let’s see if we can feature the right links rather than even the ones that could make the most money. By putting more relevant content up and taking some of the others away, we found that more people were engaging with the content that was up there.’ They did considerable A/B testing of different formats and link content to discover, “when we put [fewer] contextual links in the right places the performance was much better than having many things vying for attention.”
“Relevance and utility are the winning combination for Kiplinger now. Widgets like mortgage comparison tools have proven especially engaging in visitors in the lead-to- sale process. By focusing on content links from a single specialized source like Dianomi, Kiplinger is seeing not only better performance from third party sponsored content but from ad performance overall. ‘We were up 10 percent in terms of the advertising side, and up 40% on the site partnership level,’ he says.”
Read more here.
