SearchPilot and Trusted Media Brands: A Recipe for Success
Trusted Media Brands (TMB) is a media and publishing company. Its brands include Taste of Home, Readers' Digest, and Family Handyman. It serves an audience of over two hundred million people.
When TMB's product and development teams
decided to substantially update the layout of the recipe pages on Taste of Home, they recognized that this could impact their organic search performance. That's where SearchPilot came in.
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customer success story
The challenge
Much of TMB's revenue comes from ad monetization, and the proposed recipe page redesign would impact the amount of advertising on this particular template.
The team predicted that the test would positively impact search and user engagement metrics, but at the expense of monetization. TMB needed to test whether this hypothesis was correct and if the improvements would outweigh the downsides. Measuring the impact of website changes was critical.
The template redesign required developers to change the backend code, heavy involvement from the creative and studio teams, a significant editorial lift, and changes to the existing content development workflow. TMB needed to ensure that implementing the change would be valuable enough to the user experience (UX) to justify these investments. The change needed to be performant and responsive, and testing in the production environment was necessary to assess those metrics. The team needed to understand how changes to each element would affect other components, so running tests one at a time or using before-and-after tests would not be sufficient.
TMB needed to balance four primary considerations: SEO, UX, website performance, and monetization.
The solution
SearchPilot's Request Modification testing feature enabled TMB to test the effectiveness of complicated UX redesigns. By using a feature flag to show some visitors the new page version, the team could measure the impact of the design changes on users and search engines.
SearchPilot is designed so customers can run feature-flag server-side conversion rate optimization (CRO) experiments without bypassing their Content Delivery Network (CDN). This enabled TMB to preserve the cost and performance benefits of caching their website via a CDN while still benefiting from accurate user bucketing, which is usually negatively impacted by server-side CRO experimentation.
Without SearchPilot's advanced testing capabilities, TMB would likely have attributed changes in organic traffic to macro-level search results changes (such as algorithm updates or seasonality). Instead, TMB could see that the first version of the new design would have hurt its search engine rankings.
SearchPilot's Professional Services team could roll back the first version, improve the design, and develop the second version based on what was learned from the first test, all without requiring additional codebase changes or time from TMB's development team. This step-by-step approach ensured TMB's investment in the changes was as valuable as possible while minimizing risk.
With SearchPilot, TMB could further limit the risk of a significant change by testing URLs outside their seasonal peak or during periods of peak traffic.
Once TMB confirmed the variation it wanted to roll out, SearchPilot implemented the changes in stages, as and when content was ready. This meant TMB could take advantage of peak traffic and immediately maximize the redesign's success, while giving the development team time to make codebase changes without sacrificing the improvements already made.
Using special tags that connect to other tools, SearchPilot enabled TMB to track organic traffic, user interactions, page performance, and ad revenue, providing a complete overview for effective decision-making.
