Digital Publishing
2 mins read

How Vox Media’s latest initiative drives more pageviews

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Getting someone to click over to an article on your website is one thing. Getting them to click on another story once they get there? That’s harder.

As social media has grown more dominant as a content discovery tool, news sites’ bounce rates — one lonely pageview, then right back to Facebook or Twitter or wherever — have remained stubbornly high. And as publishers shift their audience models toward loyalty and away from fly-by traffic, getting that second (and third, and fourth) click has grown even more important.

Vox Media’s product team has built a new template they think will help connect readers to related stories. And they’re seeing positive signs, including increased pageviews on story packages built with it.

Mandy Brown, Vox Media’s new head of Chorus (their CMS), who previously focused on publishing-side tools within the product team says, “The packages oriented around moving users through different stories — and knowing if you’re interested in one of these pieces, you’re going to be interested in the other one, and trying to drive users through that and give them a breadth of content on a topic that they were really interested in.”

A package is a collection of related stories. Those related stories could be articles, features, could be any sort of individual page,” explained Sanette Tanaka Sloan, a senior designer on Vox Media’s product team. “They’re united by the landing page — that’s the homepage of a package. It can have links to all the stories that are in a package. A lot of our users don’t even come through that page. They come directly to the package stories themselves. What we wanted to do with that page was provide a route for people to get to stories as quickly as possible.” The landing page also exists for SEO and for reporters to have something to share, she added.

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