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.

Third-party cookies are going away, and taking with them most of our industry’s ability to personalize ads and measure performance.

The million dollar question: What do we do about it?

In preparation for a world without third-party cookies, Google and other industry players are working on a two-pronged solution involving their Privacy Sandbox and first-party data.

The Privacy Sandbox offers a series of tools to provide advertisers with some of the targeting they need such as interest group targeting via FLoC.

But it won’t be the same. The Privacy Sandbox won’t allow retargeting and advertising based on the user, with information like demographics, as is the case right now.

Also, the Privacy Sandbox has only been adopted by Chrome thus far, which doesn’t help with audiences using Firefox, Safari or other browsers.

And the Privacy Sandbox is only part of the solution, as Google and Mediavine are well aware. In order to boost revenue on non-Chrome browsers and deliver advertisers the potential value they need, we need to go deeper. Case in point:

In every blog post regarding the end of third-party cookies and the future of programmatic advertising, Google talks about first-party relationships.

These relationships (also referred to as first-party data) are the key to emerging from such a seismic, industry-wide shift with more revenue, not less.

Below, we’ll explore what first-party data is, how to build it, why authenticated traffic is crucial and perhaps most importantly, how there’s power in numbers.

What is First-Party Data?

First-party data is information the publisher (your website) provides to advertisers about a reader, rather than the advertiser relying on third-party data via cookies.

A publisher can collect this data in a number of ways, such as requiring readers to log in and create a profile, gathering information via surveys or even providing information simply based on contextual signals such as the pages a reader has been browsing.

First-party data can be a lot of things, but the key point is that the publisher is collecting and providing targeting signals to buyers, rather than the buyers bringing their own.

When third-party cookies are gone, advertisers lose their ability to bring their own data. But first-party data will still exist, making it monumentally important in 2022 and beyond.

What is Authenticated Traffic?

We’ve talked about first-party data in the past and also about authenticated traffic. Are they one and the same? Is authenticated traffic first-party data?

Authenticated traffic is traffic that you’ve verified. When a reader logs in, you’ve verified who that reader is, therefore the traffic is authenticated.

This by itself is not first-party data, however it can be the start of first-party data.

Once you get a reader to log in, you can encourage them to create a profile or fill out a survey; assign them to interest groups based on articles they read; ask them to share or bookmark; have them subscribe to your newsletter; and more.

This information you build becomes valuable first-party data over time.

However, even before you start collecting first-party data, there is still a very valuable way to monetize authenticated traffic.

Email-Hash Based Identifiers: LiveRamp ATS and Unified ID 2.0

One way for publishers to step up their first-party data game significantly right away is to outsource the collection of first-party data.

With solutions like LiveRamp ATS and Unified ID 2.0, typically referred to as email-hash based identifiers, you’re able to link logged-in readers to advertisers’ first-party data.

This is a great stopgap that allows advertisers to bring their own data, and it’s something that Mediavine is using to jumpstart the first-party data revolution.

But it’s just that: a stopgap.

As publishers, we still need to be building our own data — for both authenticated readers and non-authenticated ones — which will be the bulk of traffic.

The Identity API vs Grow

Right now, we support two solutions. You can go it alone with the Identity API or join forces with other Mediavine publishers to build first-party data together through Grow.

Let’s break down how these two solutions differ in terms of authenticated traffic, first-party data and what the heck happens with anonymous readers.

Authenticated Traffic: Grow Gets You More

With either solution, Grow or Identity API, you can begin using email-based hashes for authenticated traffic and start increasing earnings right now.

Both will accomplish the same goal and help you make nearly 60% more revenue from authenticated users. Again, you can do this right now. Today.

We don’t have to tell you that authenticated traffic is not easy to come by.

Most Mediavine publishers’ traffic is heavily reliant on Google Search, Pinterest, Facebook or other referral sources. While these are all great sources of traffic, those readers typically come to your website, consume one article and leave.

In other words, most readers do not create logins for every site they visit once.

Unfortunately, this means most publishers going on their own and using Identity API or products such as Slickstream will see less than 1% of readers authenticate.

Our goal with Grow is 5-10% of authenticated traffic, a significant difference.

Why do we think we can help you authenticate that much?

• Grow is a Single Sign On. It’s much simpler to convince readers to log in once, with an existing account they have for thousands of Mediavine websites, than it is to get them to register and log in with a new account every time. As Grow continues to, well, grow and becomes ubiquitous, readers will recognize it and happily log in.
• Grow provides a lot of tools. Grow isn’t just a Single Sign On but also an entire engagement suite of tools like Favorites and Subscribe — and that’s just the beginning! We’re working on many more ideas that will natively integrate with your site to enhance readers’ experiences and drive them to sign up and log in.
• Grow makes your site the destination. Building off of point #2, Grow tools are designed to help you build a relationship with readers. We’re working on solutions that will drive your readers back to your site, time and again. This is already the case with Favorites and Subscribe, with more on the way.

First-Party Data: Grow Exclusive

To go beyond email hashes to build and package your own first-party data, you’ll need to join the group and get on board with Grow.

Why? Because programmatic advertising requires scale.

This is what we learned with Mediavine Ad Management itself. Without hundreds of millions of impressions, we could not even join some of the ad exchanges. Without billions more, we couldn’t reach the scale needed for direct advertiser relationships.

Even if your site is wildly popular and has millions of readers, when it comes to authenticated traffic, you’re looking at reaching maybe 1% of that number. If you start dividing them into segments, you’re talking about hundreds of readers down from millions.

Again, achieving optimal revenue from programmatic advertising requires scale in the millions and billions. Going at it on your own just isn’t plausible.

Once we have millions of users logged in across Mediavine sites consenting to personalized ads, collecting first-party data at the scale that advertisers need becomes viable.

Non-authenticated Traffic: Neither…yet.

Even if you’re running Grow and hitting our lofty goals, that still leaves us with the issue of how to handle the remaining 90% of your readers.

How to do that is the multi-billion dollar question in our industry.

One big part of the solution we mentioned before is the Privacy Sandbox, which will work whether you run Grow or not but is limited to Chrome.

That still leaves the majority of our traffic. While we don’t have all the answers just yet, we can assure you, as with everything else, Mediavine has big plans.

We’re exploring solutions using Grow’s recommendation engine, our contextual analysis and more to build first-party data even for anonymous users.

It won’t be an easy path, but we’re confident that our multi-faceted approach will ultimately usher in a more sustainable, privacy-centric, open web.

The post Grow and First-Party Data: Everything You Need to Know appeared first on Grow.

Soon, third-party cookies are going away.

Chrome, the last remaining browser to support them, is phasing out third-party cookies entirely starting later in 2023.

We’ve discussed at length the various measures taken by the industry to confront this new reality, most notably Google’s Privacy Sandbox, but every announcement carries one major caveat.

What matters most are first-party relationships. That means you — the publisher — and the relationship with your readers.

In anticipation of the sea of change coming to the programmatic advertising ecosystem, Mediavine launched Grow, our end-to-end audience engagement solution, loaded with dynamic features designed to streamline the process of connecting, engaging and nurturing your audience relationships in one place.

Much like Mediavine revolutionized ad management for independent publishers by banding us all together to bring quality inventory to the marketplace at scale, we’re doing the same with first-party data.

Think of it this way: As all of us build relationships with readers, we can join forces by giving them a single sign-in across all of our sites, sharing data as audiences move between different sites.

Banding together for the collective good is integral to everyone’s success in this process, but at the same time, we recognize that each publisher should own the relationship with their audience.

That’s what today’s announcement is all about.

Mediavine is excited to announce the launch of Subscribe in Grow.

With Subscribe, publishers have the best of both worlds — build first-party data as part of a larger, collectively influential group while simultaneously building and maintaining their own relationship with readers.

What is Subscribe?

Subscribe marks the dawn of a new era of Grow features designed to help publishers build and own lasting relationships with readers.

With its initial launch, Subscribe lets publishers simultaneously build an email list while also encouraging their readers to sign up for Grow and consent to personalized ads.

As a publisher, you will “own” the relationship in this scenario.

You’ll have full access to the subscribing readers’ email addresses with their explicit consent.

Want to know more about how that actually works and what it looks like?

Introducing Spotlight

The first feature of Subscribe is our Spotlight widget, a mailing list sign-up call to action that appears within your content.

When a user scrolls into view, it darkens the rest of the page, highlighting — or casting a spotlight — on the signup.

The user experience with Spotlight is a tremendous upgrade over the obnoxious pop-ups usually associated with this sort of tool, and so far we’re seeing strong conversion rates as well.

While not quite at pop-up levels, they’re still pretty impressive — much higher than traditional inline sign-ups — with many publishers reporting nearly three times the engagement from their old sign-up tools.

The reader experience

If a user is already logged in to Grow on your website, the Spotlight Subscribe widget is a dream come true from a publisher standpoint.

The user is simply presented with a checkbox to consent to personalized ads as well as providing your site with their email address and one button — Subscribe.

If they’re already logged in, there’s no need to even type out their address.

If a user isn’t logged in, the initial Spotlight Subscribe widget provides an email field in addition to the Subscribe button.

Once the reader types in their email address and consents to receiving emails, you own the relationship and can add them to your mailing list with no further action required.

Then, we provide them with a second option — to sign up for Grow. We already have their email address, which makes the process incredibly simple.

So far we’re seeing amazing conversions — over 22% of readers who sign up for the mailing list go on to sign up for Grow and consent to personalized ads. That’s a very promising number, especially since it’s early days for Subscribe and we haven’t even started optimizing the feature.

Great, but how do publishers see those email addresses?

We’re glad you asked!  We provide two options for managing your new subscribers:

Manual list download: Once readers subscribe to your newsletter, their email addresses are immediately available for download in your Grow Publisher Portal.

Once you download the email addresses in CSV form, you’ll be able to upload them to your favorite ESP (Email Service Provider). Once you download the email addresses in CSV form, you’ll be able to upload them to your favorite ESP (Email Service Provider). If you’ve connected with your ESP via Zapier and/or in the Grow Publisher Portal, your list will automatically be uploaded to your email service provider.

Whether that’s ConvertKit, Mailchimp, Mad Mimi or something we’ve never even heard of, the list is in your hands.

Then, the next time you download email addresses from your Grow Publisher Portal, it’ll provide you with a complete view of the amount of subscribers you have for your site. This will make it incredibly easy to keep up with your list as it grows.

Zapier integration: Zapier is a useful tool that allows two applications to connect and exchange information. Zapier works smoothly with the most popular ESPs, and we’ve created integrations that you can tap into to automate adding new emails directly to your subscriber list.

Best of all, it’s incredibly easy to use and set up (and we provide some shortcuts). Learn more about our Grow and Zapier integration here.

Click here for more information on how to download subscribers’ email addresses and the Subscribe and Spotlight widget in general in our comprehensive help doc.

How do you opt in?

It’s very simple to opt-in. With pre-filled defaults, simply enable the widget in your Grow Publisher Portal and that’s it!

Immediately, you’ll begin collecting email addresses and all-important authenticated traffic.

The Spotlight widget automatically places itself in an optimized location on the page and it’s easy to customize the language as well. You can even include an image to better catch your readers’ eyes.

Is it fast?

Do you have to ask?

Since the Spotlight unit is automatically placed in your content, we make sure everything is lazy loaded.

Leave it to Mediavine to build the first opt-in form that has little to no impact on your Core Web Vitals.

How much does it cost?

It’s 100% free for Mediavine publishers.

As a co-registration form built to encourage readers to sign up for Grow, provide authenticated traffic and receive personalized ads, we believe it will more than pay for itself over time.

It will help you stay years ahead of the competition in this regard, so we’re happy to provide the Spotlight widget for free to Mediavine publishers.

What else is coming?

Based on your initial feedback, we have a lot more cool stuff in the works:

• New integrations to allow publishers to automatically add users to ESPs without the need for downloading and uploading a list.
• The ability to customize and tag multiple widgets appropriately to better integrate with your email automations.
• Potentially expanding Subscribe to publishers without existing newsletters.
• Adding integrations into our other products like Create.
• Entirely new products and experiences inside Grow that will further encourage subscriptions.
• And even more that we probably don’t know yet! As always, we build things based on your feedback, so tell us what you want by emailing grow.me@mediavine.com!

The post Grow: Introducing Subscribe and the Spotlight Widget appeared first on Grow.

What we don’t talk about enough — and publishers may not even realize — is that in addition to building up your first-party data, Grow can help you increase your earnings today.

We know this because we’ve seen it on Mediavine’s owned and operated site, The Hollywood Gossip, where Grow is driving more traffic and making THG more revenue right here in the third-party cookie era.

Below, we’ll tell you how we did it and how you can do it, too.

What is Grow?

Grow is Mediavine’s end-to-end audience engagement solution, loaded with dynamic features designed to streamline the process of connecting, engaging and nurturing your audience relationships in one place.

Mediavine sees the collection of first-party data — and the ability to serve personalized ads in a cookie-less world — as the path forward for our industry which is why we created Grow.

Here’s the thing though: The same features which provide a superior experience and encourage audiences to log in also drive traffic and revenue. Today, tomorrow, next month and next year.

We’ve seen it happen with The Hollywood Gossip, thanks to an aspect of Grow that might seem familiar to internet — and Netflix — users.

Recommended Content

One of the coolest features of Grow is its content recommendation feature, powered by artificial intelligence algorithms.

On a basic level, it’s not unlike the algorithms all your beloved streaming apps use when curating “Recommended For Eric” content.

If a user logs in, they’ll receive personal recommendations based on things they’ve read, shared and favorited on your website.

Meanwhile, logged-out users will receive recommendations based on what other users have clicked on and the content they’re browsing.

Again, think Netflix.

As a celebrity gossip site in an era where there are more actors, singers and reality stars than an individual reader could possibly know, manual content recommendation just doesn’t work.

Machine learning, however, is working freakishly well.

Whether you’re reading about Tom Hanks, Kim Kardashian or a Z-list celebrity in air quotes, Grow instantly finds and recommends related content on THG that other users are clicking on.

We’re seeing a 2-4% CTR (click-through rate) whenever an inline content recommendation is shown. What’s more impressive is The Hollywood Gossip uses infinite scroll and auto-loads the next post, which means (currently) only the first page gets content recommendations.

These numbers are only going to improve as we continue to roll out new features for Grow. Even with those limitations, what does a 2-4% CTR actually mean for a publisher’s traffic?

The Hollywood Gossip Results

Combined with carousel and sidebar recommendations, social, search and bookmarks, Grow has already provided an additional 5.1% pageviews to The Hollywood Gossip since enabling Grow.

Although that is a lot of pageviews at THG’s size — and a big improvement over other recommended content options — the most amazing part of Grow’s impact is the value of those views.

The increase in time on site, or session duration from Grow traffic, is how we’re defining value in this case.

The average user on The Hollywood Gossip spends 1:45 on site, according to Google Analytics. Not bad, but users who interacted with any Grow widgets spend an average of 4:38!

That’s an astonishing 164.25% more time on site! Either 90 Day Fiance is really that compelling or machine learning knows what it’s doing.

But seriously, folks: Whatever your content is about, longer sessions from readers browsing that content means — you guessed it — more ads viewed and increased RPM per session as a result.

When you’re talking about a site earning millions per year in THG’s case, that means hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra views.

But no matter the size of your audience, such robust increases in session duration and CTR can make a material difference immediately.

Get Started With Grow!

We’re not going to beg or guilt you but seriously — just do it okay? Please? You’re all out of excuses NOT to grow your site with Grow.

Did we mention Grow is free for Mediavine publishers, including the content recommendation feature we just described in all its glory?

Not only will you get a head start in collecting first-party data, which will be incredibly important in the coming year(s), but it can also lead to more pageviews, user engagement and revenue immediately.

It will be worth your while now and down the road.

As always, please reach out to us anytime with questions or if you need assistance.

The post How Grow Helped The Hollywood Gossip Make $100,000. Already. appeared first on Grow.

Actually, don’t stop us. It bears repeating, since the health of our entire ecosystem depends on solving for the end of third-party cookies.

Mediavine’s solution is twofold:

• Helping our publishers garner and utilize first-party data.
• Implementing Privacy Sandbox proposals.

On the first-party data front, Mediavine recently introduced Grow, our in-house framework designed to help websites get more traffic, improve user experiences, build email lists and most importantly, encourage readers to log in and consent to personalized ads.

Today, however, we’re here to talk about a new tool we designed for those publishers who already have — or who wish to build — their own first-party data solution independent of Grow: The Mediavine Identity API.

While the Identity API is not for the faint of heart, and in many respects falls short of what we believe Grow will ultimately achieve, we’ve created a viable solution for publishers wishing to go this route.

Below, we’ll explain how the Identity API works and why, when it’s worth the time to implement it and how it differs from Grow.

Introducing the Mediavine Identity API

The Mediavine Identity API is a lightweight, JavaScript API in our Script Wrapper that will allow publishers to provide their own authenticated traffic to be used in the bid stream.

In other words, if a user logs in or provides their email address and consents to personalized ads, you can now tell our Script Wrapper and we will use this data in ad auctions.

When a user logs into your website, or you collect their email address in another way, and you have obtained consent to use that address for the purpose of personalized ads, you will make a call to our Identity API using a simple function and pass on that email address.

It works via a simple single JavaScript function that serves as a user opt-in for personalized ads and a single function allowing you to opt them out.

Behind the scenes, this functionality is integrated with multiple Identity partners, such as LiveRamp. From that point on, we automatically pass along the publisher’s first-party data to ad exchanges.

Once you’ve done this, you can begin making more money from users on all major browsers today, even while third-party cookies still exist.

And when third-party cookies are gone? As we’ve discussed at length, we anticipate that first-party data will be even more valuable and critically important.

How Do You Obtain Consent?

With Grow, Mediavine handles the process of obtaining consent for you when a user creates an account at Grow.

We obtain explicit consent to show a user personalized ads (in other words, they click a checkbox with plain text next to it) when they agree to our Terms of Service, which covers all of this.

With the Mediavine Identity API, it’s the publisher’s responsibility to obtain consent. This is necessary to remain in compliance with privacy laws such as GDPR and to maintain a sustainable ecosystem.

What About Privacy? Is This Secure?

In order to keep your data secure, we automatically create what’s called a “hash” of each email address, which is essentially a random hex string (letters and numbers) that ensures the user’s email remains private.

That hash — not the email address itself — is then passed to our identity partners, such as LiveRamp, and converted to an even more secure “envelope.” That envelope is then passed to partners in the auction.

Only partners with the right “key” can open the envelope, and even then, they can only access the hashed identifier, not the original email.

This is similar to how it works with Grow, except in that case, the email address never even enters the browser; everything happens server-side for an even more secure transaction.

Unfortunately, due to the nature of a JavaScript API, this needs to happen client-side if you plan to collect your own email addresses using the Mediavine Identity API.

NOTE: Grow will allow you to collect email addresses also; we will be releasing the Grow subscribe functionality early this year.

Why Is There an Opt Out?

We’re trying to build a more privacy-centric web, and that means we need to provide users with transparency and choices. With Grow, a user can opt out easily simply by logging out on any page.

If you’re collecting first-party data on your own, we recommend you do something similar; make it as clear as possible that users may opt out of personalized ads and tell them how to do so.

Remember that the cornerstone of any first-party data solution, whether that’s Grow or API-based, is to respect and protect your users.

Do I Need to Use Authentication or Verification?

Grow is a privacy-first solution, which means we require users to log in, consent to personalized ads and verify their email address before we integrate with partners such as The Trade Desk with Unified ID 2.0.

Why all the steps? Because it’s about trust — not just between publisher and reader but also between publisher and advertiser.

By verifying the email address and authenticating the user before sharing it with advertisers, the data gathered in the process is more reliable — and Mediavine and your brand remain trusted partners.

What Kind of Opt-in Rates Can You Expect?

With Grow, there is a “community” effect; if a reader creates an account, then with a single sign-on they will easily login to thousands of sites.

This makes it much simpler to encourage users to log in to your website with less friction. We’re already at work on a number of features and tools for Grow that will help you accomplish this.

For these reasons, we believe that 10-20% of users opting in is a reasonable goal — and a similar projection to what other industry players are predicting.

Again, though, that’s with Grow.

If you’re going it alone, the “results may vary” non-answer may be an understatement given how every website differs from the next.

For example, if you’re only measuring this by your newsletters sign-ups, we would guess that less than a fraction of a percent of readers opt in.

As a result, the Identity API likely isn’t worth implementing.

However, if you have a robust login system for a member-only section, or have exclusive content behind a “freewall,” you’ll likely see much higher authentication rates and this will be worth your time to implement.

How Do You Enable This API?

You can start by sending our Identity API help document to your developer or other parties you’re working with to collect first-party data.

Again, it’s important to disclose all of this to your users — how and why you’re collecting consent — as well as provide an easy opt-out.

You’ll also need to encourage your readers to sign in and explore new, creative ways of making that happen. Along these lines, Mediavine is building a number of tools for Grow, such as Recommended Content and a Save Recipe button.

Bottom line, using the Mediavine Identity API won’t be as easy as collecting first-party data with Grow. However, as with everything else, we are here to support our publishers no matter what path they choose to embark upon, either as a community or individually.

We believe the free and open web is at stake, and it is our job to help you solve for this change, either through Grow or our Identity API.

The post Identity API: Build Your Own First-Party Data appeared first on Grow.

Less than a week after we announced the Grow Save Recipe button in Create, we’re excited to share with you that WP Recipe Maker has added support with their latest version, 6.9.0.

You heard that right. Starting today, Mediavine publishers running WP Recipe Maker — Premium or Free — can easily add the ability for users to save recipes directly from their cards.

What is the Grow Save Recipe Button?

As many of you have heard us talk about at length, Grow is designed to create a value exchange between publishers and audiences.

By encouraging your readers to sign in to your website you can begin personalizing both content and ads for those logged-in readers.

Audiences receive a better on-site experience, while publishers mitigate potential revenue losses stemming from the end of third-party cookies (already extinct on iOS, and on their way out on Google).

One of the primary ways in which we currently encourage readers to log in is by favoriting your content. (Is that a word? You know what we mean.)

Now, you can add a save button directly inside your WPRM cards, giving readers a quick and easy way to save a favorite item directly from your Most Valuable Content.

How Well Does the Grow Save Recipe Function Work?

Really well, actually!

While testing this on Create, our product team saw the Save Recipe button result in three times as many favorites on pages with recipes.

WPRM uses a templating system, so individual site results may vary. But with a well-placed button at the top of your card near the print feature, where we placed the button on Create, the potential is there.

As always, feel free to experiment on your own site to find out where you have the most success. You can use Google Analytics events to track your performance in this regard.

Publishers will also be able to track these favorites separately from the widget, by looking for the favorite_from_sdk event.

How Do You Enable Save Recipe in WPRM?

WPRM makes it incredibly easy for you to add the Grow Save Recipe button in their template system.

You simply add the “Recipe Grow” block and add a few customizations to match your template, then you’re good to go!

Brecht of Bootstrapped Ventures made a video which shows a great example, including adding a heart icon and updating the text on save.

We recommend you watch this:

Warning: This button will not work unless you have Grow enabled, so make sure you first enable it in your Mediavine Dashboard.

What About Other Integrations?

We’re hoping to see other recipe cards prioritize adding a Grow Save Recipe Button now that both Create and WRPM support it.

We encourage publishers running other cards to reach out to those plugin developers and have them work with us — they can contact our team by emailing grow.me@mediavine.com.

Meanwhile, our engineers are already working on another integration inside Mediavine’s own Grow Social and Grow Social Pro. That new integration will be unveiled soon!

Grow will continue to add new features directly inside the product, as we did with Recommended Content and Search.

To truly become part of your website, however, it’s going to require these integrations that work natively with your site.

We’d like to thank Brecht of Bootstrap Ventures, the founder and developer of WPRM, as well as the Mediavine publishers who are already adopting Grow, for their roles in pioneering this effort.

Together, one important step at a time, we’re continuing to build the framework for a more open, private and secure web.

The post Grow Save Recipe Button: Available in WP Recipe Maker! appeared first on Grow.

Grow is integrated and live with Unified ID 2.0, the identity solution built for the community by The Trade Desk.

What do all those words mean and why should Mediavine publishers be excited about everything we said?

Please bear with the forthcoming acronyms and ad tech jargon, because this is really big news you’ll want to know about.

What is The Trade Desk?

The Trade Desk (TTD) is the largest independent Demand Side Platform (DSP) in the industry. If you don’t know what a DSP is, it’s the software advertisers use to buy inventory programmatically via ad exchanges.

We know that was a mouthful, but being the largest independent DSP is a huge deal. It means that a ton of advertisers are submitting bids to the Mediavine auction through TTD.

With the kind of demand volume The Trade Desk controls, any initiative the company involves itself with is set up for success.

That’s why we’re so excited about our integration with Unified 2.0 and the potential impact on Mediavine publishers’ bottom line.

What is Unified ID 2.0?

The Trade Desk first built the original Unified ID during our industry’s attempt to build a single, universal identifier.

This identifier made tracking user behavior — and serving personalized, higher-paying ads to that user — easier across multiple ad exchanges and with multiple buyers using a single user match.

Like much of the publishing industry, Mediavine supported and adopted TTD’s original Unified ID.

It had a great run, but as Bob Dylan famously sang about programmatic advertising, the times, they are a-changin’.

The Unified ID was built as a third-party cookie, which is soon to be a thing of the past. Google’s announcement to phase out third-party cookies sometime in 2024 tells you all you need to know.

Enter: Unified ID 2.0

We’ve talked at length about how the end of third-party cookies will alter the industry in the coming years, and like Mediavine, The Trade Desk is consistently ahead of the curve.

They developed Unified 2.0 for the new world we’re living in. It’s built around first-party data, or the idea of user consent.

As an industry, our goal is for audiences to opt in to personalized ads by choice, after being authenticated or logged in to a site.

So what makes the new, improved Unified ID 2.0 so unique and poised to be an incredibly viable solution in this regard?

• Although initially developed by The Trade Desk, it will be open sourced and handed to an independently-governed body.
• The email addresses of authenticated users are hashed, encrypted and securely transmitted using rolling decryption keys, protecting users’ personal information.
• It’s built with the privacy-first mentality that will define the ’20s, with easy user controls to opt out at any time.
• The Trade Desk is backing it. As the largest independent DSP, we can’t stress what a great head start this is in terms of adoption.

Unified ID 2.0 = Greater Security and Revenue in 2021 & Beyond

Google predicts programmatic revenue will drop up to 60% without third party cookies present. Mediavine spends countless hours solving for this, and Unified ID 2.0 is yet another piece of the puzzle.

Traffic from users who have been authenticated and synced with Unified ID 2.0 won’t see that revenue decline. If anything, that traffic will become even more valuable as there’s a decreased supply of addressable users, causing advertisers to bid and pay more to reach their same audience.

Even better is that this applies not only to Google Chrome traffic, but to Safari, Firefox and other browsers who already block third-party cookies. With Unified ID 2.0, you can begin earning more money today.

And best of all? Mediavine publishers are uniquely positioned to do so, as the first to integrate with UID2.

Mediavine is the First Publisher Live with Unified ID 2.0

Because Grow is perfectly aligned with the goals of Unified ID 2.0, The Trade Desk chose Mediavine as the first live, active integration and the potential payoff of this opportunity is exciting and worth repeating.

It’s an honor to partner with the largest independent DSP and help set a new privacy-first standard for our evolving ecosystem.

We hope you’ll join us in furthering this effort, if you haven’t already – innovative solutions are right at your fingertips.

If you’re already running Grow, you’re already among the first sites on the web to send out bid requests containing Unified ID 2.0.

If you don’t run Grow, well, time to change that! It’s free to Mediavine publishers and can be set up through the Dashboard.

Websites running Grow are already authenticating users and building the first-party data that will be so crucial in the coming years — while offering their logged-in users a better product to boot.

Now with recommended content, search and favoriting, Grow isn’t just improving your revenue but also the user experience — which is the ultimate win-win for both your audience, and your website’s future.

Between Mediavine and The Trade Desk, you’ve partnered with two of the most forward-thinking and innovative forces in the industry to make that future more secure and lucrative.

The post Grow: The First Unified ID 2.0 Active Integration appeared first on Grow.

Using artificial intelligence, the Grow platform now has the ability to recommend personalized content to logged-in users.

For anonymous (non-logged-in) users, Grow will recommend the content most likely to be consumed based on context.

Recommended Content and the Value Exchange

As an audience engagement framework, the ultimate goal of Grow is to provide a personalized browsing experience to your readers.

A better browsing experience is the linchpin of what we call the value exchange — what we believe will encourage users to authenticate and consent to personalized content and advertisements.

As such, Mediavine developed a personalized content recommendation engine that elevates the browsing experience for Grow users.

What is Recommended Content?

As opposed to related content, which is content that’s similar to the current post’s topic (and is a common feature on many sites, often shown at the end of an article), recommended content is displayed to the reader based specifically on their browsing activity and is intended to match their interests to encourage further exploration on the site, rather than just show more content on the same subject.

Without a recommendation engine, we couldn’t deliver this personalized content and improved browsing experience that users expect before logging in and ultimately providing first-party data.

I could spend the next 30 minutes geeking out over machine learning and how our recommendation engine works, but I’ll stick to the first feature powered by this technology: Recommended Content.

Introducing the Grow Recommended Content Widgets

The initial way we’re deploying the power of this personalized content recommendation engine is via a series of three widgets that will provide recommended content to readers.

If a user is logged in, the widgets will display content from your site that a user is most likely to read based on what they’ve favorited, shared and clicked on from other recommendation widgets.

If a user is browsing anonymously, or is logged out, we’ll use an engine similar to how Netflix recommends content — showing them content that they’ll most likely want to see based on the behavior of other users who read the same article.

Where will these widgets appear? That’s up to you, via the Grow settings in your Mediavine Dashboard.

Customize Grow Settings in the Grow Publisher Portal

The Grow Publisher Portal gives you a lot of control over the Grow experience on your site. You can easily change your brand colors, adjust social networks, set minimum display counts, elect to use Grow in your native search and more.

Even more exciting? This now enables Mediavine to launch bigger features like these Recommended Content Widgets, which allow you to choose one of our three introductory placements:

1. Header Carousel

You’ve likely seen similar units, but we’re launching a Header Carousel that will allow users to flick through their recommended content anytime they scroll up on your website.

As a user scrolls back up to look for something new, the Header Carousel will slide down, revealing new content for readers to consume.

2. Inline Content

It’s no secret that one of the most engaging spots on your site is within the content itself, and so it should be no surprise that this is also the location for our best-performing content recommendation widget.

You can now opt-in to enable the Inline Widget, which automatically places itself in a desirable location within your content.

It will appear low enough within the content to make sure users have already consumed the bulk of the content — but hopefully before they leave.

We’re already seeing great conversions with this placement and strongly recommend switching it on.

3. Sidebar Widget

We definitely recommend you keep a short sidebar to ensure that your sticky sidebar ad unit sees optimal performance.

We also generally recommend running things like About Us, Search and Recommended/Top Content widgets in that space.

As of right now, Grow can help you power the latter by offering a Recommended/Top Content solution right in your sidebar.

While desktop traffic is generally a smaller percentage of your overall traffic, it’s the most valuable, and we see the sidebar widget as a good addition to the Header and Inline Content Recommendation Widgets.

More Coming Soon

It’s important to note that the Recommended Content feature is new, and like so much of Grow, relies on your feedback and testing to improve.

It will also take some time for the Recommended Content engine to learn your site, so don’t judge the initial recommendations too harshly.

While we’re seeing great initial results from these three layout options, this is mostly about implementing the framework for the Recommendation Engine powering these widgets.

With your help and based on your ongoing experiences with them, the actual widgets and placements will evolve over time.

Please consider enabling them today. The more publishers who do, the more feedback we can gather and more testing we can run.

Give Recommended Content a shot and help us learn what will help encourage your users to consume more of your content. Please send your questions and feedback to grow.me@mediavine.com.

The post Grow Recommended Content appeared first on Grow.