Situation
To grow, this major publisher had a need for speed
A global business and entrepreneurship publisher debuted its first issue a little over 100 years ago. Since then, this business and its publications spent the last century inspiring the conversations that changed American and global businesses. The journalists and contributors at this publication cover breaking news and provide in-depth and extensive coverage on topics like business, politics, technology, and innovation for 78 million unique visitors annually in the United States alone.
A division of this major publisher brings that same journalistic rigor to providing consumers with the reliable information they need to make informed online purchases — mostly with affiliate-driven content. With a large team of writers and contributors and a growing demand for content, this entrepreneurship publisher’s editorial team faced a bottleneck in their production process: generating affiliate links.
The tedious publishing process meant that it took editors, on average, 15 minutes to create each product link. With approximately 10 links per article, 15 minutes added up to two and a half hours per article. The team at this major publisher knew there had to be a way to streamline this process and rather spend their time producing more great content.
“The time it took to create affiliate links for our articles was really weighing down the editorial team, but Trackonomics helped make the whole process quick and easy. Now we have more time to devote to writing and editing, and we can’t imagine doing it any other way.”
Senior Editor
Global Entrepreneurship Publisher
Situation
A custom tool to fast-track content creation
The publisher’s fundamental goal was to eliminate the friction involved in the commerce content publishing process. The team needed to reduce the time they took to produce content, reduce errors in descriptions and links, automate the creation of a unique URL to streamline tracking and attribution, and create a system that all of their contributors could comfortably use.
Instead of paying a significant chunk out of the site’s revenues to an external commerce content monetization platform with a rev-share pricing structure, this major U.S. publisher worked with Trackonomics and built a custom tool to achieve their goals. As the world’s first and only data management platform for ecommerce affiliates, Trackonomics by impact.com streamlines and automates link creation.
The team at this entrepreneurship publisher leveraged the Trackonomics platform and API to create a custom, in-house content management system (CMS) product that allowed their team of content producers to generate product links for commerce-focused articles automatically. Trackonomics’ custom technology relied on two key components:
- Automatically populating the titles, descriptions, and images for featured products
- Automatically producing affiliate links with unique URL identifiers
181%
overall YoY revenue growth
2x
increase in content
volume
Situation
(con’t)
The publisher used Trackonomics’ technology and incorporated it into their own CMS. This meant that they could work with partners in a direct revenue model and simultaneously author commerce content and generate affiliate links in one platform.
Outcome
3X revenue from 2X content volume
Since this global entrepreneurship publisher implemented Trackonomics, it can’t imagine working any other way. The integrated system allows contributors from staff writers to freelancers to generate their own product links, reduce the editor workload, cut out bottlenecks, and eliminate manual errors. The
new process dramatically shortens the time between finishing the article and publishing it to under a minute — making it possible to generate much more content than before.
This helped the publisher double its content volume and nearly triple its revenue from 2019 to 2020, contributing to 181 percent overall YoY revenue growth from 2019 to 2020.