CaseStudy

FashionRefinery29 Boosts Homepage Story CTR
By Up To 200% With Taboola’s Newsroom“Taboola has empowered us to take a very scientific approach to keeping our audience engaged
as much as possible, and Newsroom is now an integral part of our overall content strategy.”- Jessica Novak, Content Strategist, Refinery29

COMPANY

Refinery29 is an American-based website
focusing on fashion, style, and beauty
reaching 225 million people across platforms.

CHALLENGE

Identify when and where to publish content toincrease engagement with their audience.

SOLUTION

Utilize Taboola’s Newsroom for A/B testing todetermine which strategy would generate themost engagement with their content.

RESULTS

Increase in engagement both in desktop andin mobile homepages and higher traffic acrosstheir social platforms.

45%
Increase
Homepage CTR

CaseStudy

FashionIntroduction

Editorial strategies at leading women’s media brands
used to revolve almost exclusively around matters oftaste and intuition. But as digital media channels havegone mainstream, new analytics tools and data feeds
are changing how these teams craft effective content
strategies. Refinery29, the largest independent fashionand style website in the US, is at the forefront of thisshift, garnering over 22 million monthly visitors and apassionate fanbase that discovers its content throughnumerous social channels across the web.

Taboola Newsroom A/B Test

This fragmented and fast-paced ecosystem presents
a new challenge for online publishers, whose editorial
teams have very little time to make important decisions
about how, when, and where to publish and promote
their content. Leveraging Taboola’s Newsroom,
Refinery29 was able to solve this content “equation”
and figure out what strategies generate the mostengagement with their audience.

CaseStudy

FashionA/B Testing Increases CTR By 45% Per Story, On Average

Newsroom, part of the Taboola discovery platform andoffered at no cost to publisher partners, empowers
editorial teams to intelligently optimize engagement
across both desktop and mobile homepages. Theplatform supports multi-variant A/B testing of different
creative elements (e.g. thumbnails, headlines),
benchmarking each combination against a “baselineclick-through-rate” (CTR) generated by Taboola’s
advanced mathematical algorithms. Winningcombinations are then automatically moved into new
optimal story placements based on performance.

Refinery29’s editorial team tested up to five different
creative elements for each of their stories, including
a “wildcard” idea that could provide fresh insight
into new successful combinations. This scientificapproach to driving engagement, combined with theeditorial expertise of Refinery29’s editorial team, led torecord performance improvements. With Newsroom,
homepage CTR increased 45 percent per test onaverage, with increases as high as 200 percent, sinceusing Taboola’s Newsroom.

Informing Refinery29’s Broader Social Strategy

Social media represents an increasingly importantsource of traffic for Refinery29, as their audience
discovers and consumes content through various
channels including Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Refinery29 used Newsroom’s analytics as a testing
incubator to inform its strategies across each of thesesocial platforms, leveraging data regarding creative

element combinations, best times of day to publish, andmore. As their team pushes to maintain its leadership ina fast-paced and competitive online media environment,
Newsroom has become an integral part of Refinery29’s
overall content strategy, helping them maximize theimpact of their popular lifestyle content both on-site andacross the web.