RIABiz : UI/UX overhaul to increase ad revenue by over 34% with zero marketing spend.
Services: Fullstack rewrite and migration / Timeline: 6 months / Location: San Francisco
Overview
RIABiz is the daily, must-read publication for the world’s most influential money managers - the top 20% of advisors, who manage over 80% of all global assets.
SSG has managed their entire tech stack since 2011.
The Challenge
RIABiz is entirely free for readers. It has always made a conscious choice to avoid using paywalls, instead opting for display ads to support its operations. As the industry’s leading publisher, despite commanding a premium in CPM, RIABiz consistently sells out of all ad inventory months in advance.
A big reason for this is because Google ranks the consistently well-written, long-form content on RIABiz very highly. At the end of the day, content is still king when it comes to SEO.
With its extremely niche audience, further user growth was limited, since the majority of advisors already consumed RIABiz content daily.
How did we increase pageviews, ad impressions, and ultimately, ad revenue by over 34%?
Our Process
There are only 3 ways to increase ad revenue.
Increase CPM
Increase the number of users.
Increase the number of pageviews.
#1: Increasing CPM was not an option as RIABiz already commands the highest CPM’s in the industry.
A deep dive into the analytics data revealed that a user-acquisition campaign would have quickly diminishing returns because RIABiz had already penetrated the majority of its target audience globally. This removed option #2: “Buying users” via marketing and hoping to make a higher multiple on ad revenue vs what we spent on CPA (cost per acquisition) was out of the question.
But how do you increase pageviews when the number of users is capped on a site that already largely dominates the Google search rankings for its industry? You have to increase engagement among users already visiting the site - making users spend more time and visit more pages.
To do this, we analyzed the analytics data to determine what users were already doing, and how best to mould the new UI around them.
The Outcome
Through a 6 month overhaul of the tech stack, we converted the static web application to a React.js Single-Page App that enabled us to increase the average pages per session by over 26%, and ultimately, ad revenue by over 34%.
During this migration, preserving RIABiz’s SEO dominance was of the utmost importance because residual traffic to previous hit articles constitutes a notable proportion of traffic. Therefore, server-side rendering was a priority at the time this migration was performed. We leaned into this finding, and later added infinite scrolling to article pages, prioritizing related articles weighted by content, rather than recency of publication. Through several iterations, this increased average session duration by over 22%, further bolstering ad revenue.
As of the time of this update, we’ve played a part in helping increasing ad revenue by over 320% over the course of a decade with this client.