“Content recommendation” is a term you hear quite often when discussing marketing and promotion of contents online. Done right, recommended content can help you increase website traffic, get more leads, and drive sales, and these are great reasons to integrate them into your promotion strategy.
In this brief guide, we’ll look at all the details of content recommendations, including methods for recommendation placements, why content recommendation is a valuable tactic, and platforms for content recommendation. We’ll also share sample content recommendations so you can see how they can help grow your website or business.
What is content recommendation?
In a simple way, content recommendation is a system to suggest content to visitors who view your site based on what they are already interested in. It’s similar to Netflix, but for internet content. It’s a way of native advertising where content recommendations integrate seamlessly with other content on a site.
You’ll often see content recommendations in the form of a related content widget (titled “recommended content” or “you might like it too”) encouraging visitors to see more content from your site or other sites with similar content.
However, as you’ll see, that’s not the only purpose of content-based recommendations.
Content recommendation works in a variety of ways through website plug-ins and software platforms. Some content-based recommendation tools use keywords and tags to make their suggestions, while others pay attention to how people are engaging with the content they’re seeing now, and use that as a guide for recommendations. You might also have hybrid recommendation tools that use these two approaches.
An example of content recommendations in action is the Europa Press, which saw clickthrough rate increase 46% and revenue increase 78% using content recommendation widgets.
On-page recommendations vs. off page
There are two main types of content recommendation: on-page and off-page. On-page recommendations entice visitors to delve deeper into your site, recommending more of your own content for them to refer to.
On-page content-based recommendations help lower your site’s bounce rate and increase the time people spend on your page and site. This in turn increases engagement with your content and can result in more action, creating even more awareness of your brand and content.
If you publish a lot of content, then it’s worth exploring content recommendations on the page to ensure more people see more of that content. For example, the Newshub increased revenue by 168% and got 14 million views for video recommendations using Taboola’s content recommendation platform.
On the other hand, if your site is new and you don’t have much content yet, you may not get the full benefit of on-page content recommendation.
Off-page recommendations lead your visitors to other people’s sites recommending related external content that they will find interesting. This type of content-based recommendation is useful for sites that rely on referrals or affiliate income, which can increase your income over time. It’s also useful for sites that are part of a larger publishers network, as you can use recommendations to drive traffic to other sites in the group.
When using off-page recommendations, it’s important to ensure that the content you’re recommending is of high quality. If not, it can damage visitors’ perception of your brand. And it’s essential to avoid driving traffic to competitor sites so you don’t lose customers. However, this is simple to address when defining the rules for content recommendations.
Here is an example of off-page recommendations in action. Socio-Pal used off-page recommendations to drive traffic to your APP’s download page, increasing downloads by 30%.
Content recommendation formats
A crucial factor in achieving your content recommendation goals is the recommendation format: where you effectively place your recommendations for your visitors to see and act on.
A common format for article or video recommendations is at the end of a piece of content, so visitors have somewhere to go after they’ve finished reading a blog post or article. For example, the Blinkist obtained more than 60,000 applications in six months, with their recommendations.
Placing recommendations under content is not the only option. You can also make content recommendations via on-site widgets that slide into place when people are near the bottom of the page or have stayed on the page for a few seconds. And you can also display content recommendations via pop-ups. The key to these last two posts is timing, as you don’t want to inconvenience visitors by interrupting their reading experience.
Why is content recommendation important?
Content recommendation is important because it provides an easy way to customize your visitor’s experience so they see the content that is most relevant to them at any time. This, in turn, helps to improve brand awareness and uptime on your site, and drive the user engagement.
Content recommendation works well for both advertisers and marketers. publishers. You publishers they can acquire new readers and subscribers, and understand which content is most popular. Advertisers can use content recommendations to place their sponsored content on high quality sites without worrying about being blocked by ad blockers.
What is a content recommendation platform?
A content recommendation platform, also known as a content discovery platform, is software that does the job of recommending content. It uses algorithms to automatically identify and recommend relevant content to website visitors based on pre-defined criteria. For example, you can choose to recommend content on a specific topic to visitors to a particular page.
An example of a content recommendation platform is Taboola. Taboola’s content discovery feature enables marketers and publishers reach new audiences, generate leads, increase brand awareness and drive engagement with high-performance formats and well-targeted recommendations.
The Power of Content Recommendations
As you’ve seen, content recommendations have the potential to increase reader and visitor engagement, resulting in greater brand awareness as well as more leads and sales. Now that you understand more about how content-based recommendations work and how they can help your brand, seek out companies for more information and start your first campaigns.
Fernando Tassinari is Taboola’s vice president for Latin America.
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