Author authority audit & optimizationsFranchise program publishing systemsConsent ManagementEmail CaptureAudience infrastrucutre
- Add missing data to author pages. A full audit of the database showed basic elements like a bio and social media attributions were missing from top authors. This was a quick fix the editorial team could start to solve for immediately. We organized a shared spreadsheet in order of authors who had posted most recently, to help them visualize priority in who they might want to update first.
- Update missing author schemas Following clear guidance from Google, some could be made at the article level and the author page level structured data to bring us more in line with best practices.
- Author URL structure During the audit, it was more easily surfaced that authors were being created in multiple ways, and URLS were inconsistent. Also, from an editorial brand perspective, the request was made to look in discovery for changing “user” in the URL to “author.”
For example, my URL could have been: user/klenz
- user/kristin-lenz
- user/kristinlenz
- The problem traced itself back to how new users were being onboarded to WordPress. Depending on the type of user (FTE, contributor, freelance writer, editor, etc.) one of three teams could be setting users up in the system. Internally, there was no clear documentation on how to establish a new user or the permissions they required.
- An additional problem that surfaced was the inability (or understanding of capabilities) to change the name of the author, including in the URL when that person experienced a life change.
- The final audit suggested, as part of the upcoming CMS migration, a full review of the WordPress VIP author tooling to better understand user types, roles, and permissions, refine or redefine field mapping to the frontend, and provide definitive onboarding requirements and clear documentation to the operations, editorial and marketing teams.
Inc. 5000
Inc. 5000 Regionals
Inc. Founder-Friendly Investors
Fast Company Most Creative People in Business
Fast Company World Changing Ideas
Fast Company list marketing page
*In-exhaustive list of projects using these integrations.
To support the update and continue to serve ads effectively in the EEA and UK, I took the following steps to help teams prepare:
- Worked with existing CDP vendor to understand their current consent management offerings and if they would become Google-certified.
After a review of their capabilities, a full understanding of Google’s requirements, and conversations with our adops and legal team about future privacy implications, the recommendation to onboard an official CMP platform to the tech stack was made to the product and operations lead.
- In the interim, it was decided to use Google tooling to establish privacy messaging for the EEA and UK regions and send that consent back to the CDP. I directed legal, adops, and design teams through the process of aligning user-facing privacy language and inputs to configure consent opt-in and opt-out choices that aligned with our privacy policy. Collaborating with adops and engineering, we implemented the required TCF string to effectively collect, store, and change users’ data.
When the project came my way, two things were already known:
- The current email capture units, pop-up and end-of-article units, were increasingly unsuccessful. Data showed drop-offs in both.
- Qualitative user research told us users strongly disliked the number of pop-ups on the site. We heard it in almost every test we ran.
External consultants also confirmed that intrusive pop-up units could be a possible factor in the site’s inability to rank higher in Google search, something the company was keen on increasing as well.
As I began my research to get up to speed, it showed that the pop-up units were only being served on desktop, greatly limiting the ability to target 80% of users. A mobile-first solution quickly became a top priority.
At the time, there was no scroll-depth data available to understand if users were getting to the current, end-of-article units. Internal conversations also focused on how many decisions the user was being asked to make at the end of an article added to the need to find additional position opportunities. The final goals of the project were:
- increase email sign-ups
- enhance user experience, putting the user first
- champion responsive reusable component(s), with mobile-first approach
Working with the design team, we developed a mobile-first approach to an email capture unit. Opting for a less-is-more approach, it was stripped down to core brand iconography and focused on quick, clear brand language to promote a newsletter. This solution also began to solve a long-discussed problem of time-to-deploy. The editorial or marketing teams could now spin up a quick email capture unit without the need to go back to the design team for branding and to engineering for building.
The final implementation of the project was passed back to the audience infrastructure lead when they returned from leave. When the new units officially launched, they were happy to share the below metrics. A great team effort that had clear user (and business) benefits.
Compass Newsletter: 126% increase in email sign-ups
CoDesign Newsletter: 38% increase in email sign-ups
30-day window, before and after launch
Visualizing existing revenue-impacting units helped us align stakeholders on moving forward with an in-article unit as opposed to something that slid up from the bottom. We agreed to keep a slide-up unit in the discovery backlog, as we liked the idea but would need to work through the logic conflicts with existing units.
- Managed requests for ad exclusions in the CDP and paywall platform, Piano
- managed updates to article metering across subscription flows and led meetings between vendor and design teams during module updates
- guided marketing teams and helped troubleshoot campaign implementation in Piano
- configured new newsletter requirements in Marketo in collaboration with the newsletter lead and engineering teams for the implementation of on-site units
- ongoing optimizations and audit of user subscription flow