Larger publishers typically have a network of websites; take Gawker, Ziff Davis or NBC as examples. There is often cross property promotion occurring throughout the network and the 'flagship' property is frequently responsible for driving traffic to some of the less prominent brands.
If we look at a section of Gawker's homepage, as illustrated below, they have a number of stories pointing to Jezebel (outlined in green):
And looking at PCMag they have individual stories pointing out to other sites within their network:
These article promotions are super important for the other brands within the network as it's their opportunity to get great articles in front of another audience and expose their brand. For the publisher it's of huge benefit as it keeps the audience within the network. The limitation we've come across for many publishers we work with though, is the ability for their editors to see exactly how these cross network articles are performing on their respective homepages.
Editors promoting a network article need to be able to determine whether they can place that article higher on the homepage, demote it or nix it entirely and request that their network colleague send them another article.
So with this I'm extremely pleased to announce the launch of our Cross network Publisher Tracking.
Editors - those articles you promote within network now have real-time data! You have ammunition for that call you get from 'John' halfway through the morning asking to have his article pushed further up the page. It's actually performing where it should do for the position you've got it in so no sense in pushing it higher and knocking out a better performing article. Or indeed the positive scenario where you can see that the story has really resonated with your audience and could in fact get more exposure!
This naturally works across your the property too, so cross network articles promoted on section front pages and article pages will also have data. How cool is that?!
The super cool part of this is that we do it automatically, you the publisher don't have to do anything on your end. There is no dual tracking script, no multiple pings from your web page, nada, just a simple clean solution that's part of what we offer to all our publishers.
So as of today, our publishers doing cross network article promotion go from this:
to this:
(The above is sample data)
You'll just see it roll in, nothing more to it than that!
As always, if your interested in learning more do get in touch and see how the above seamlessly couples with our recommendations for what content to promote where throughout your network.
Cheers,
Charlie
Charlie Holbech
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