How a German Publisher Gave Its Readers a Choice – And Boosted Engagement of Facebook Referral Traffic
inFranken.de is one of the largest regional news and service publishers in Germany. Founded in 2008 as a subsidiary of the “Mediengruppe Oberfranken”, inFranken.de combines the stories of five print newspapers in an online presence. It also boosts its own editorial team to provide even more regional and national news and comprehensive services to users.
The team at inFranken.de noticed that while the site gained a lot of traffic from social media, such as Facebook, bounce rates were high, and there was much potential to improve engagement and monetization from these sources.
In late 2018, inFranken.de called on Outbrain to help tackle this problem. The Outbrain optimization team used a powerful two-pronged tactic to increase user interest and participation, leading to truly incredible performance marketing results for inFranken.
Read More? Yes please!
One of the many optimizations used to boost engagement and reduce bounce rate was the introduction of a “Read More” button in articles on inFranken’s site, aimed specifically at low-performing social traffic.
What was special about the Read More button was its placement. The button was positioned midway through the site’s articles, giving readers the choice to continue reading the specific article or to discover more content, which appears immediately below the button.
The content recommendations below the Read More button are based on Outbrain’s proprietary interest data that selects content recommendations, both internal (from InFranken’s own content), and external (from other publisher sites on the Outbrain network), targeted to the interests of the specific user. In this way, the user is presented with the option to either finish reading the current article, or move on to other engaging content via the Read More button.
How Outbrain technology and tactics boosted engagement
The tactic proved incredibly successful. It provided other opportunities for engagement at a critical moment – when the reader was already engaged on the inFranken site – and this resulted in almost 3x higher organic CTR, and a 76% lower bounce rate for Facebook referral traffic.
Until mid-2019, inFranken reported improved overall RPM of 62%, and mobile RPM growth of 76% (April 2018 vs. September 2018). What’s more, inFranken even managed to outperform its December 2018 RPM by 46%.
The story of inFranken is really proof that it takes two to tango! Working together, Outbrain and inFranken combined two features – the strategically placed Read More button and Outbrain’s content recommendation technology – to achieve significantly higher CTR and revenue.
Want to read more about inFranken’s success? Click here to see the full case study.
