How Western Standard uses content insights to drive more visitors to their website

Creative uses for existing tools

Every morning, the Western Standard meets to discuss their hottest articles from the day before and make informed choices on their content to come.

Publishing the best articles on the most relevant topics drives up Western Standard‘s visitor traffic and, with it, their subscriptions.

Using our new Insights reader behavior platform has made that process even easier.

All kinds of insights

Built in collaboration with eCommerce agency 50Fish, Insights was designed as an at-a-glance dashboard for tracking user behavior: 

  • where they come from, 
  • what they read, 
  • when they convert, 
  • how they’re reacting on social, 
  • which email campaigns trigger action, and
  • the efficacy of your subscription message. 

It was conceived primarily as a tool for better understanding how and when casual readers convert to subscribers. 

Western Standard is certainly using it for that purpose. But they’ve also found a way to use the data to help guide their content at the inception stage. 

Cherry-picking new content

Western Standard is an online news and opinion platform serving Western Canada. They are a high volume publisher, covering a broad spectrum of topics, from a large number of writers. 

As they got to know the Insights dashboard, they found the daily top pages list, which gives a day-by-day accounting of the top articles. 

They started bringing that list to their editorial meetings, using the popular topics to decide where they should focus their attention: what are their readers interested in right now, where should they follow-up with more information, what barely caused a stir?

The immediacy of the information gives them a springboard to keep turning out the brilliant, relevant content that is the foundation of any and all subscription building efforts. 

Interested in learning more about how Insights (and our other tools) can boost your traffic and subscriptions? Have a brilliant idea on new uses for our existing tools? Let’s talk

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