Recommender Use Case: Leveraging Cross-site Recommendations to Increase Audience

[xavi.beumala]

Goal

Encourage users to explore content from sister publications or related sites, increasing cross-site traffic.

Scenario Description

Your organization manages multiple websites or publications, each with its own unique focus—such as news, sports, lifestyle, technology, or entertainment. While each site attracts its own audience, there’s a valuable opportunity to enhance user engagement by recommending relevant content from your sister sites or partner publications.

By implementing cross-site recommendations, you can:

• Expose Users to a Broader Range of Content: Introduce readers to topics or articles they might find interesting but wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.
• Increase Cross-site Traffic: Drive users from one site to another within your network, boosting overall page views and user engagement.
• Strengthen Brand Ecosystem: Reinforce the interconnectedness of your publications, encouraging brand loyalty and recognition across your media properties.

By leveraging cross-site recommendations, you enrich the user experience with a wider array of content and capitalize on the synergy between your publications. This strategy not only increases user engagement and time spent across your network but also strengthens your brand presence and loyalty among your audience.

How to Set it Up

We’ll detail how to create a sports module in a general newspaper’s homepage, featuring the most read article during last hour from a sibling sports site, which uses a different Marfeel account. We will assume that the user has access to both accounts. In case they don’t, users with experience creation access on both accounts would need to coordinate to achieve the same result.

1. Log into the Sports account and create a new recommender experience, rename it, and set its format to API.
2. In Content tab, click on the feed to edit it. Set the Engine to Most Read, Time Window to Last Hour, and the number of articles to 1. Remove the Host=Same restriction.
   
   
3. Save and Publish. Now in Format tab, click on Shareable Feed ID to copy it.
   
   
4. Switch to the General Newspaper account, create a new recommender experience, and rename it.
5. Set its format to Inline and strategy to Replace. Use the URL dropdown in the preview to navigate to the homepage.
6. Use the target icon to highlight the article to be replaced, and select Generate both. Tweak selector and layout until it looks as expected. You can also select a preconfigured layout instead, in Content tab.
   
   
7. In Content tab, remove the existing feed by using its three-dot options. Add a new Remote Feed and paste the ID you previously copied.
   
   
8. In Targeting tab, set a URL={homepage} filter. Experience is ready t be published.