Link Share: Share Your Favorite Posts with Ease

Link Share is a game-changer when it comes to sharing your favorite posts with your readers. We understand how important it is for you to connect directly with your audience and make it as convenient as possible for them to access your content. With Link Share, your readers can now send links of their favorite posts directly to their inbox with just a few clicks.

No more copy-pasting URLs and composing separate emails – Link Share streamlines the process and makes it incredibly easy for your readers to share your content. By enabling this new subscribe form, you’ll empower your readers to become advocates for your blog and effortlessly spread the word about your latest posts.

Most Valuable Content: Grow Your Subscriber Lists

Do you want to maximize your subscriber list and ensure that your most valuable content receives the attention it deserves? Then our Most Valuable Content feature is perfect for you. This feature allows you to display a subscribe form on your site, strategically placed near your most valuable content.

We understand that certain posts or pieces of content hold more importance to you and your readers. With Most Valuable Content, you can ensure that your subscribe form is prominently displayed. This increased visibility will help attract more subscribers and ensure that your audience doesn’t miss out on the content that matters most. 

Don’t have a recipe or how-to-card on your site? No worries, use the Most Valuable Content Selector to designate a custom placement for your subscribe form.  

How To Get Started

Implementing these new features is a breeze. Simply log into your Grow Publisher Portal account and navigate to your Subscribe settings. From there, you can easily enable both Link Share and Most Valuable Content.

We have also prepared detailed step-by-step guides to help you make the most of these features. Whether you’re a seasoned user or new to Grow, we are confident that you’ll find our instructions easy to follow.

What is Link Share

How to Set Up Link Share

How to Enable Most Valuable Content

What’s Next?

At Mediavine, we are committed to continuously improving our products and providing our publishers with the tools they need to succeed. Link Share and Most Valuable Content are just two examples of our dedication to innovation and enhancing your publisher experience while future-proofing your business. 

Try out these new features today to help your readers become more engaged and connected to your site than ever before. We can’t wait to see how you utilize these features to take your content to new heights!

The post Identify Your Readers with Grow’s Latest Subscribe Features appeared first on Grow.

Sounds too good to be true, right? It’s not!

We’re excited to introduce Automailer, the newest feature from Grow designed to revolutionize the way you share your latest and greatest content with your subscribers.

What is Automailer?

Automailer is a groundbreaking feature in the Grow Publisher Portal that empowers content creators to send emails to their subscribers via an RSS feed — but in newsletter format. With Automailer, your readers will receive weekly emails with content from your site they’re most likely to click on, automatically. 

Why did we create Automailer?

We created Automailer to address a significant problem for content creators: the need for a simple way to send newsletters and interact with audiences without the hassles of setting up an Email Service Provider (ESP). 

Automailer automatically curates and shares your content with your subscribers in weekly email newsletters without you lifting a finger! This feature is a game-changer for publishers aiming to build lasting connections and optimize engagement — or who currently don’t have an email marketing strategy.

Instead of manually crafting and sending each email, Automailer handles the process for you! You can say goodbye to the days of paying exorbitant fees and setting up extensive workflows with ESPs. Automailer is designed to allow content creators to focus on what they do best: creating remarkable content.

Automailer Is For Everyone

Content creators who don’t have an email marketing strategy and don’t have an ESP set up will find Automailer most useful.

With Automailer, your email workflow will be streamlined as soon as you enable the feature, so you can start engaging with your audience and bringing them back to your content. 

But what if you already have an email marketing strategy or are already working with an ESP to send newsletters to your readers? You can still benefit from Automailer! Consider Automailer emails to be a supplement to your existing newsletters. 

Not only will readers get your newsletters, they’ll also get weekly Automailer emails with posts from your site they’re likely to click on. You can even import your existing subscriber list into Automailer so all your readers will start receiving Automailer emails.

Automailer Insights

Sending emails is great, but how do you track performance? This nifty tool gives you all the information you need on how your Automailer emails perform.

While this feature is still in its early stages, Automailer Insights is the place to view your emails sent, subscribers gained, opening rates, click-to-open rates and your audience’s most clicked links. It’s here to help you gauge the impact of your emails.

Stay tuned for more updates to Automailer Insights!

How to Enable Automailer

Configuring Automailer is a breeze! Whether you’re a seasoned content creator or new to the game, our Automailer set up guide ensures you can start reaping the benefits of Automailer in just a few steps. 

Not a Grow Publisher Yet?

Grow is Mediavine’s user engagement suite, designed to empower independent publishers and content creators with a plethora of benefits. Our goal with Grow is to continually enhance and expand our features to help our publishers build authenticated traffic and first-party data and strengthen their businesses through audience engagement.

Want in? Create a free Grow account to access our latest features in the Grow Publisher Portal and start taking your business to the next level. 

The post Automailer: Your Ultimate Solution for Hassle-Free Email Newsletters appeared first on Grow.

There’s a new Grow feature that could help: introducing Inview Effect! Based on Grow Labs testing of over 800 sites, those with Inview Effect saw an over 40% increase* in subscriber rate compared to those without Inview Effect. Nope, you’re not seeing things. Over 40% from just one feature. 

*While we’re excited about the results from our testing, please note we cannot guarantee your site will see the same results.

What’s Inview Effect?

Why Does Subscribe Rate Matter?

How Do I Enable Inview Effect?

What’s Inview Effect?

The name “Inview” might sound familiar to you if you’re a Mediavine publisher because it’s the same name as our ad unit Inview. Nope, that wasn’t an accident. We named it the same because they’re pretty much the same visually, only instead of the effect applying to an ad unit, it applies to your Grow Spotlight Subscribe form.

Inview Effect increases the likelihood that new readers will subscribe to your newsletter by displaying your Spotlight Subscribe form longer on your page as readers scroll. With this new Grow feature, the Subscribe form will stick to the top of a reader’s screen while they’re scrolling on your site, increasing visibility and the likelihood of subscribing. Increased subscribers can mean more opportunities for return readers, authenticated traffic, and overall sessions. And this can help lead to more revenue as a result.

Why Does Subscribe Rate Matter?

If you’re a publisher running ads on your site, you make money when a reader sees these ads. Essentially, the more eyeballs and traffic on your page, the more revenue you make from ads. When a reader subscribes to your site, that means they want to see more of your content and are voluntarily giving you their information. This is an opportunity to give your subscribers what they’re looking for: more content!

You can send these super fans emails when you have new content and updates to share, which keeps them engaged and gets them back onto your site. 

TLDR: Inview Effect can lead to a higher subscribe rate, which can mean more subscribers for your email list and more revenue for you. All with one feature.

How Do I Enable Inview Effect?

Here’s what you need to do:

1 – Log in to your Grow Publisher Portal

2 – Set up a Spotlight Subscribe form by going to Subscribe Settings > Your Grow Forms List > Add New Form

3 – Toggle on Inview Effect under Subscribe Settings > Inview Effect

That’s it! After taking these steps, Inview Effect should be enabled on your site. For more details on setting up Inview Effect, reference the help docs.

As always, we’re continuously building out Grow features like Inview Effect to make it easier for you to engage with your readers. We’re constantly looking for beta testers for our latest features in development, including the much-anticipated Automailer, and would love your input through our Grow Labs beta program. 

What are you waiting for? 

Enable Inview Effect

The post Increase Subscribe Rate With Inview Effect From Grow! appeared first on Grow.

Get ready for an all new way for your audience to search and manage their saved content with Grow.

Now, they can see your most popular content, dive into your archives, and when they find what they’re looking for, easily add it to their Bookmarks with just one click.

Bridging the gap between you and your readers

As a content creator, one of your top goals is to create an amazing experience for your site visitors. But your readers are currently lost in the shuffle of all your amazing content and getting frustrated when trying to find something.

We’re here to help!

Grow’s enhanced Search will:

✓ Bring you more traffic, pageviews and time on site with relevant searches at the top of your results

✓ Make it easier for readers to discover what they’re looking for by bundling related topics and showing them in the context of your content

✓ Encourage Bookmarks by making it easy for readers to save a post in one place and find it later on any device they choose to use

✓ Increase CTR — Grow is optimized to work with the latest technology on the web, which will make sure your article loads fast anywhere your readers are coming from

Our newly enhanced search experience is lightning fast and incorporates modern features with improved accuracy so you can more easily find what you’re looking for across all your posts and pages, even on sites with thousands of posts.

Ready for next steps? Let’s keep going.

A refreshed Search Experience

You’ve asked and we’ve delivered NEW Search Experience enhancements just in time for the holidays. We’ve added some additional features to make searching for the perfect gift, recipe or project a little easier. But the absolute best part (quite frankly my favorite) of our enhancements? Well, let’s just say we will get to that fairly soon.

The new Search user interface gives you and your readers one-stop access to:

• Bookmark from the Search homepage and search results (a double whammy!)
• Explore content from the Search homepage that breaks out your posts into most popular, latest and recommended as well as highlights their Bookmarks and recently viewed pages.
• Include the reader’s Bookmarks in search results

And the best part?

Publishers can also have a featured category pinned on their homepage!

I’d say its a win-win for everyone — as the publisher you have full control to display your top rated category (e.g. highlight your seasonal content) to increase engagement on your site while your readers can discover new content from their favorite publishers and save it to a list for easy access later.

And that’s just the start!

Ready to get started?

For anyone who knows me, they know I love a good recap, so let’s get into it!

We’re kicking off the holiday season with a major HIGH: an enhanced Search experience for you and your readers. Your readers now have the ability to locate their favorite articles within your site more quickly, and they’ll have even more fun exploring new articles on your site.

Plus, we’ve made it easier to search, save, and review all of your Bookmarks in one fell swoop, without ever leaving their browser tab. Just another way we are working to always improve your Grow experience.

Our team’s mission for Grow has always been to make audience engagement easier for our content creators, and that starts with you! Head to your Grow Publisher Portal to check out these new capabilities, and as always, let us know what you think so we can continue to make them even better. One day at a time, 365 days a year!

If you’re looking for a bit more guidance before you get started, I have just the thing for you. Our amazing Support team never misses a beat when it comes to guiding our publishers. Use the Help Center links below to explore more details on how to enable the enhanced search experience for your site(s).

What is the New Search Experience

New Search Results Display Settings

If you’re new here and are interested in learning more about how Grow is reimagining audience engagement for content creators, feel free to drop by one of our earlier articles   Getting Started with Grow: A Resource Guide for more details.

Thanks for stopping by and happy holidays from the Grow Team at Mediavine. Until next time — your friendly neighborhood Product Marketing Manager

The post Grow’s New and Improved Search Experience appeared first on Grow.

But, before I jump in to deliver some exciting news, I just have one thing to say: If you haven’t taken Grow for a spin — what are you waiting for?! While you’re contemplating the answer to this question, we’re continuing to make Grow even better!

A little over a month ago, we raved about our integration with ConvertKit. However, many of you were also curious to see if any additional email service providers (ESPs) were on our future roadmap. We get it. One size doesn’t always fit all.

Thanks to your feedback, we’ve added not one, but TWO additional ESP integrations to our Grow library: MailerLite and Mailchimp. I hope you’re sitting down because I can’t contain my excitement much longer. Let’s get into it.

Let’s break this down…

If we’re keeping score, I mean track, Grow has a total of THREE direct integrations with top requested ESP’s.

Grow’s MailerLite and Mailchimp integrations allow you to do more than just chat with your audience. With our MailerLite integration, you can add subscribers to your list and optionally add that same subscriber to a specific group. On the flip side with Mailchimp, you can add subscribers to an audience and also set subscribers to be added to a specific tag.

By supporting multiple actions per each individual Subscribe and Exclusive Content widget, the possibilities with your email list are endless. Ready for next steps? Let’s keep going.

Enabling your ESP Integration

Now that I’ve gotten all of the juicy details out of the way, let’s jump to the moment you’ve been waiting for, enabling your ESP integration.

I’ve provided links to our Help Center below that’s packed with more details on how to enable the MailerLite and Mailchimp integrations.

Mailchimp Integration Basics

How Do I Connect My Mailchimp Account

MailerLite Integration Basics

Where Can I Find My MailerLite Integration Key

As third party cookies are scheduled to disappear, it is becoming more and more imperative to collect first party data to improve personalization of your email campaigns with your audience. Integrating your ESP with Grow is a great way to kick start this process. So, what’s next?

I’ll tell you! Use Grow’s power packed features such as Spotlight Subscribe, Exclusive Content, and Pop Ups to drive your engagement and collect first party data. These three options are not only fantastic to have active on your site but they are even more useful when you’re creating content that your audience craves. Don’t rent, own your audience!

Join our Grow community

Let’s recap! Grow now has THREE major ESP integrations with ConvertKit, MailerLite and Mailchimp. If we haven’t gotten to your flavor of ESP yet, we’ve got Zapier! What’s even more exciting is that we’ve consistently seen growth since our platform launched and it’s all thanks to our phenomenal Grow super fans!

I don’t know about you, but I’m always amazed by the work our Product and Engineering teams roll out each month. It literally has me on the edge of my seat with my hands over my mouth so that I don’t spill the details too soon. If you’re anything like me and share the same sentiments around new feature releases for Grow, stay tuned!

We have a few more major releases heading out the door before the end of the year. So, stick around, continue to share your feedback and let us know what you want to see next from Grow.

Thanks for stopping by! Until next time — your friendly neighborhood Product Marketing Manager

The post New from Grow: MailerLite & Mailchimp Integration appeared first on Grow.

Imagine this: Your business has picked up, and suddenly you realize you don’t have a system in place to collect emails from your readers. You immediately scramble to set up a lead capture form and turn to the internet for help.

You come across terms like ESP, workflows, CRM and automation. You spend days and maybe weeks researching ways to simplify and organize the process but instead get overwhelmed by the many options.

Dropping the ball in building a verified email list can have dire consequences not only for your business but also your readers. Here is where Grow makes a big impact.

As we’ve mentioned countless times, we are passionate about supporting you, the publisher, at every stage of your journey. With our continuous roll out of Subscribe features, Grow provides the perfect avenue for you to stay connected with your audience at every turn.

What’s New?

First up, Subscribe has a new location! The Subscribe homepage is now located below the Grow Settings in the left navigation bar of the Grow Dashboard. With this move we are able to take advantage of the full width of your settings page to allow you more space to focus on building your form.

The latest user experience provides a new way to edit, clone and view individual subscribe forms. You can also disable seasonal forms — instead of deleting them — to save for later use.

Subscribe Wizard

During the form creation process, you’ll also notice our newly enhanced Subscribe Wizard.

Don’t know where to kick-start the form creation process? Our Subscribe Wizard will guide you step by step through setting up each form. Please note: Your wizard experience will change based on your form selection.

And tossing in a little extra goodness, we’ve included an area for you to preview the form as you complete changes before it goes live on your site.

Pop Ups

Next up, calling all pro Pop Up users. We heard you loud and clear about optional pop-ups to grow your list and … WISH GRANTED.

Our Google-friendly Pop Ups go hand in hand with the next feature I will introduce. But before I get ahead of myself, let’s spend more time talking about the advantages of using Pop Ups and what “Google-friendly” truly means.

Pop Ups offer a few distinct advantages that explain why they’re associated with a higher conversion rate:

• They’re highly visible.
• Their design usually captures the visitor’s attention and prolongs the time spent on your website (thus increasing your conversion rate).

In order for a pop-up to be classified as Google-friendly, it cannot display on mobile if the reader is coming from Google on the first pageview.

Grow handles this mobile-specific Google policy for you! If a reader comes to your site from Google search, the mobile pop-up will not display to the reader on their first pageview. If they happen to visit a second page on mobile, Grow is allowed to serve the pop-up at that time and will take care of that too.

Interested in getting started with Pop Ups? Click the link here and head to the Help Center.

Category Targeting

This next feature packs a big punch. Introducing, Category Targeting!

Category Targeting allows content creators to set subscribe forms to specific categories on their site. Choose your next adventure with a total of four subscribe forms: Pop Ups, Manual Placement, Click to Subscribe and Spotlight Subscribe.

Note: Click to Subscribe and Manual Placement form types are not available with Category Targeting as they can be placed anywhere on a publisher’s website.

As a Grow user, you can configure as many widgets with the same form types as you want and target the same categories. In return, Grow will auto select one of the forms to render using AI.

In order to effectively run Category Targeting, your site needs to be on WordPress and running Grow Social to pull your site categories.

And before you ask, YES, our Google-friendly Pop Ups and Category Targeting features go hand in hand. Think of them as your two new best friends for Grow!

What’s Next for Grow?

Our Grow team has been teasing a few features across conferences, and as always, I’m ready to unload. Here’s a sneak peek of a few of my favorite features coming down the pipeline before the close of 2022.

• Downloadables – offers a more cohesive way to add your opt-in incentives and digital downloads to your subscribe forms.
• Auto Mailer – Don’t have a newsletter? That’s okay – this new feature allows you to build your subscriber list without the hassle of managing an email service provider. Automailer allows you to utilize Recommended Content as a path to get your readers funneled directly to your site – similar to an RSS feed.

Get Started With Grow Today!

Let’s recap! There are tons of new features coming your way before the close of 2022. If you’re like me and need a quick visual to recap all the great features we discussed today, no worries! I’ve provided links to our Help Center below that are packed with additional details on where to go and how to enable the various subscribe form types.

• Subscribe Homepage Overview
• Subscribe Form Types
• How to Edit an Existing Subscribe Form

If you’ve gotten this far and are amazed by the awesome work our Product team continues to roll out with Grow but haven’t created your FREE account, what are you waiting for? Click the link here to sign up today.

We’re shaping the content creation industry one feature at a time, and we hope you stick around for the journey.

Thanks for stopping by! Until next time — your friendly neighborhood Product Marketing Manager

The post Subscribe Enhancements for Grow: Category Targeting and Pop Ups appeared first on Grow.

Please let me introduce you to the Subscribe Action Pack, a new way for you to collect subscribers using Grow.

The Subscribe Action Pack is a collection of calls to action that prompt a user to subscribe to your newsletter list. These prompts display when a reader on your site performs a specific action that creates a natural opportunity to invite them to subscribe.

Each action has slightly different messaging, depending on the reader’s activity, with a suggestion that the reader subscribe to get new content sent straight to their inbox.

Whether you’re new to Grow or one of our regulars, Subscribe Action Pack is enabled by default once you enable Spotlight Subscribe on your site. If you do not enable Spotlight Subscribe, the feature is automatically disabled.

How’s that for an easy button!

Here are the various Subscribe calls-to-action that readers will see as they interact with Grow on your site:

Favoriting a Post

When a logged-in reader clicks the heart button on the main Grow widget, they will be prompted to subscribe to that site’s newsletter.

There are three ways to generate this Subscribe call to action (CTA) to display while a reader is logged into Grow.

• The heart button on the main Grow Widget.
• The Save button in your Recipe Card (we support Create, WPRM, and Tasty).
• The Save button in Grow Social (available in all Social Share Toolkits).

Logging Into Grow

A reader will see a subscribe CTA after a reader logs into Grow from your site.

Signing Up For Grow

This CTA displays when a logged-out reader or new user signs up for Grow on your site via the Grow widget.

Does it work with Zapier or Direct ESP Integrations?

Of course, it does! You’re able to connect the Subscribe Action Pack by source and select your application of choice to be the action. Check out this help article for all the how-to goodness.

Once we launch our first direct integration — spoiler alert: if you haven’t heard already, ConvertKit is coming and will be our first ESP integration! — you’ll also be able to add a subscriber directly into your tags, forms, and sequences.

Turn it on today!

If you’ve been using Grow for a while and you want to get more subscribers, head to your Grow Publisher Portal to turn Subscribe Action Pack on and continue to build your email list!

The post Subscribe Action Pack for Grow appeared first on Grow.

I’m your host, Product Manager Sam Seeley, here with some awesome news.

Today we’re launching our Exclusive Content feature for Grow!

Exclusive Content is an exciting addition because we’re paving the way for the latest internet experience, one that we’re already seeing quite a bit of in online publications.

How Does Exclusive Content Work?

As a creator, you want your most valuable content to work for you!

With Exclusive Content, you can set a section of your post’s content — e.g., a Gutenberg block, a Create card or specific paragraphs of text — as “locked” behind a call-to-action that prompts a reader to sign up for a free Grow account, along with their permission to add them to your email subscriber list.

How Should I Use Exclusive Content?

I personally have used it to lock a full resource library on my site. Once a reader signs up and consents to being added to my email list, they get access to a handful of PDFs that I’ve created for members.

During testing, we’ve seen creators use Exclusive Content to lock full recipes, printables, digital downloads and how-to instructions! Anything that is your “Most Valuable Content” can be locked to encourage users to sign into Grow.

What About Email Subscribers?

Not only does Exclusive Content encourage your readers to sign up for a Grow account, but it also obtains permission to add them to your subscriber list.

Our beta testers have seen impressive subscriber growth after implementing it on their sites.

After setting up Exclusive Content, our own internal sites began seeing over half of their subscribers come from Exclusive Content CTA’s!

What About SEO?

We’re Mediavine so you know that we make sure that all of our features follow best practices.

While building out this feature, we utilized Google’s approved schema. You can sleep soundly while locking content, knowing it can still be discovered by search engines.

Does Exclusive Content Work With Zapier?

Exclusive Content does indeed work with Zapier! Your subscribers will zap straight to the ESP of your choice.

There is tiny bit of set up but once you have that all done, you’re good to go!

To learn more about how to set up Exclusive Content with Zapier, visit our help center!

Pair It With the Co-Branded Sign-Up Page

We recently launched the Co-Branded Sign-Up feature, and during our initial tests we noticed a lift in sign-up success when our testers paired their co-branded logo on the sign-up page with marking pieces of their content as exclusive.

For more details on how to set up the Co-Branded Sign-Up feature, navigate to our help center!

What’s Next for Exclusive Content?

This launch opens the door for other really amazing Grow features to come, such as setting an entire category as Exclusive Content and adding article limits that you see on popular sites.

These article limits tease that the reader is only able to view one more article on that specific site. The calls-to-action encourage a reader to sign in for the best experience possible while browsing the site.

We’re excited to release this new feature to help you leverage your excellent content into more Grow members and email subscribers. Learn more about Exclusive Content in our help center.

The post Introducing Exclusive Content with Grow appeared first on Grow.

One of our most popular Recommended Content features, the Mobile Carousel, is getting a facelift – and a performance boost along with it.

I hope you’re sitting down for this, because we’re about to blow your mind with What’s Next.

Introducing What’s Next

What’s Next is Grow’s latest content recommendation widget, and does what its name implies, suggesting to readers what content they should check out next.

Using the same machine learning that powers our other content recommendation widgets, What’s Next presents articles that readers are most likely to click on.

Better recommendations mean audiences engaging with more of your content per session, earning you valuable additional pageviews and extra ad impressions.

What’s Next differs from the carousel, sidebar and inline units in that it presents a clean, single recommendation rather than offering a selection to choose from.

You might think that presenting fewer choices would hurt the performance of this widget, but it actually does the opposite (which is why we’re rolling this out).

By presenting a single post, and doing so at the bottom of the screen where readers are looking for more content, we’ve seen a dramatic increase in clicks.

How dramatic? On average, readers were 70% more likely to click on articles from What’s Next compared to the multiple options presented in the Mobile Carousel.

Incredibly, What’s Next does all this by taking up 70% fewer pixels on screen, making for a streamlined, less cluttered user experience to boot.

Moreover, it’s optimized to run perfectly alongside Mediavine’s new Universal Player, creating an experience that’s both optimized and unobtrusive:

But, if you’re still running the Mediavine Video Player, we still love you too! Here’s a preview of What’s Next running in compact mode next to the Video Player:

When is This Coming? What Do I Need to Do?

Given its significantly better performance, not to mention improved look and feel, What’s Next will officially replace the Mobile Carousel on September 29, 2021.

If you’re currently running the carousel on mobile, we will enable What’s Next automatically for you.

If you don’t wish to run What’s Next, you should opt out of the carousel.

Please keep in mind that this is why Grow is in beta. You’re watching the evolution of Grow in real time as we strive to optimize it and help you … well, grow.

On a side note, stay tuned for Grow Labs (coming soon!) where publishers can participate in even more tests to help us improve Grow and your websites.

What About Desktop?

The carousel still performs well on desktop traffic, given the larger screen real estate available, so the carousel will remain for desktop users at this time.

What’s Next is a mobile solution only for now.

That said, we strongly encourage you to enable the inline widget for Recommended Content. This produces the highest CTR by a wide margin, and will have the largest impact on your traffic.

If you haven’t enabled the inline widget for Recommended Content, switch tabs to your Grow Publisher Portal immediately and do so. We’ll wait. When you come back, you can read about:

What’s Next for the Mobile Carousel

See what we did there? Pretty proud of that one. Anyway, as you probably guessed, this is the end of the Mobile Carousel as you know it right now.

Most mobile users look to the top of the screen for website navigation, but not for the next piece of content they might be interested in.

That’s why What’s Next lives at the bottom right.

That top-of-screen real estate remains important and valuable, but content recommendation on mobile devices performs better elsewhere. Simple as that.

We’re exploring better ways to optimize that section, whether it’s with Grow or Trellis or both. We promise something good is coming!

In an ideal world, future innovations along these lines will come to desktop users, as well, for a better carousel experience all around.

It’s not goodbye; it’s just see you later, Mobile Carousel.

The post What’s Next for Grow: New Look, High Performance Mobile Recommendations appeared first on Grow.

Offering readers links to additional content they’ll love is a great way to keep them on our websites (being served ads and making us money), but how do we determine what to show them? Are we just offering posts that are similar to the one they’re currently reading or can we dig deeper with machine learning and really serve them recommendations that entice them to stick around?

That’s the difference between Recommended Content and Related Content, in a nutshell, and today we’re here to discuss this in more detail.

Recommended Content is vastly superior in terms of performance. Let’s break down why.

What is Recommended Content?

Grow uses machine learning to populate its Recommended Content widgets with items the user is most likely to click on based on the page they’re browsing.

If a user is logged in, Recommended Content encourages readers to view personalized recommendations; the intelligence powering those recommendations is based on what they have interacted with before (items they’ve favorited, shared and clicked on) from the recommendation widgets.

If a user isn’t logged in (and most won’t be), the Recommended Content widgets will show content that users will most likely want to see based on the behavior of other users who read the same article.

Basically, the Recommended Content engine has to “test” different content to see what users are most likely to click on. Over time and the recommendations will get better and better as it learns what your users prefer and how to optimize for better click-through rates (CTRs).

How is That Different Than Related Content?

Related content, by contrast, is content related to the post that the reader is currently viewing.

It’s not content recommended for that user.

This may sound like a minor difference, but it’s quite significant.

Sometimes, posts that show up in the Recommended Content widgets can be of a “related” nature to tags or categories but more often than not, it is much smarter.

Due to the nature of machine learning, the Grow Recommended Content widgets will ultimately generate many more clicks based on logged in users’ preferences or general audience behavior.

Even if the recommendations may feel less relevant to the posts you’re seeing them on at first glance, that doesn’t mean it won’t be much more effective.

Recommended Content is Better Than Related Content

I said what I said, and I’m sticking to it.

Again, Recommended Content relies on information about what your users have consumed in order to carefully recommend articles that the reader might be inclined to click on.

Related content, which is found on most blogs, does not.

With Related Content, you’re simply seeing material related to what’s on that page. (If you’re perusing a cake recipe, it will show other cake recipes, and that’s pretty much it.)

Put another way, Recommended Content goes beyond the scope of any one page; the widgets’ suggestions are solely based on what readers have interacted with in the past.

It’s a broader, smarter and more effective approach.

How We’ve Improved Recommended Content

Among our recent improvements to Recommended Content is removing the caching of recommendations. This vastly improved the click-through rate on inline content recommendations.

We saw a 47-75% (!) increase in CTRs after making this change. Of course, this is only good news for you if you are running the inline content widget.

Are You Running Inline Content Recommendations Yet?

If the answer is no, next question:

Did you see those numbers above?

The inline content widget for Recommendations is by far the most well-optimized placement of the three options (in the sidebar, or the header carousel). With results like a 47-75% increase, we’re here to urge you to give the inline content widget a try if you haven’t already.

The best way to make sure you’re recommending the right things to the right readers is to give the Recommended Content engine more time to get to know your site.

A reader looking for a specific post for gluten-free brownies might be interested in gluten-free baking tips, but they might also be interested in a completely unrelated recipe.

Machine learning will figure this out, but it can take awhile to fire on all cylinders. Over time, the recommendations will be better and better as it learns your audience!

Enable and Optimize Grow’s Recommended Content Abilities Today

At the risk of repeating ourselves, what are you waiting for? Please consider enabling the inline content widget.

While we’re really excited about the inline content widget, don’t forget that the header carousel — with the Always On feature that increases clicks by 30% — is available in your Dashboard now!

The post Recommended Content is Not Related Content. It’s Vastly Better. appeared first on Grow.