Written by Avi Latner, CPO, Apester
Adopting Playlist is the way to go, from occasionally using Apester on a few articles to having Apester on every page. It makes the difference between manually embedding interactive content units on your site, and automatically and contextually placing your entire interactive content suite on your site, at scale. In other words, it’s how you can harness technology to address more users with the same content.
You don’t have to install playlist in order to use Apester on your site, but we strongly recommend you to do so – it can significantly increase your KPIs – engagement rate, time one page, social share, revenue – AND make your editors’ lives easier in so many levels.
The Benefits of Apester’s Playlist
Contextual Matching: Increased relevance of the interactive unit to your readers will also increase the chances they will interact with the unit. We saw an increase for time on page, engagement rate, and social share while Playlist was on.
Automatic: You save time as Playlist automatically places units on a page for you.
Scalable: Playlist serves all your readers in real time, across all your article pages, and brings the power of content matching to a scale that increases KPIs.
Allows you to run evergreen stories, or stories that are relevant for longer periods. For instance, run Christmas-themed units during December, or units that deal with the Brexit or 2020 elections for several weeks.
Powered by Apester Story
How to make the best out of Playlist on your site?
- Tag your interactive units with keywords.
- Create as many interactive units as possible to increase the likelihood of contextual matching and to ensure coverage of interactive units across your entire site.
- Create a mix of evergreen units and actuality-focused units.
- Optimize your content with better placement, longer units, and put them in a queue.
Tag your interactive content with keywords
The playlist is based on big-data technology that scans the article page for keywords, metatags, and URL scheme, then selects the optimal interactive content for the page from the pool of units created. While the algorithm is autonomous, tagging your units can increase the chances of placing them in the optimal context.
Create as many interactive units as possible
As contextual matching happens across tens of hundreds of article pages each day, there are some cases in which pages do not match interactive content units. In that case, the Apester Playlist algorithm weighs engagement rate and other factors so it can automatically fill that in with alternatives, to make sure users keep engaging with your content while circulating them to more content on your site. Therefore, creating as many units as possible on various topics will increase chances of matching, and will give the algorithm enough flexibility to match engaging and popular units even if there isn’t a 100% chance of topic matching.
Create a mix of evergreen units and actuality-focused units
Stock up your Playlist with evergreen content that can last for a longer time, such as a Christmas Story that you can engage viewers in for the entire month of December, or an elections poll that can last for months. The majority of your Playlist feed, however, should include units that aim for the short-term and current affairs, that can be automatically embedded within every relevant article page.
Optimize your content
The more questions you add to a quiz or a poll and the more slides you add to a story format to make it more fundamental and more relevant, the more engagements you’ll get from your users. This will likely increase time on site and ad impressions. Another way to optimize is locations: place the playlist on a central location on your page to increase engagement. There’s nothing like a poll about yesterday’s game in the middle of an article that covers the game. Finally, to add engagement and more time on site, implement Apester Feed, an everlasting feed of content units which play automatically in a queue, once the first unit is completed.
Start creating your Apester interactive content here or contact us to integrate Playlist.
