Publishers like PureWow seeking audience development have a few usual suspects to drive traffic to sites.
There’s Outbrain and Taboola, social amplification and syndication or traffic exchange. And now, to help make social amplification more efficient, they have KeyWee.
“At the most basic level, they find the right audience for the content,” said Anna Lee, senior director of marketing for lifestyle publisher PureWow, which uses KeyWee. “There’s an audience for every piece of content out there. You just have to find it.”
KeyWee, which launched in beta more than a year ago, optimizes publishers’ spend on social media sites. It scans a site’s content and figures out which audiences would be most interested in reading it.
It then uses the publisher’s budget to target that content to the audience most likely to read it. To top it off, KeyWee tailors the messaging in the ad for each audience segment to pique its interest.
“Content marketing is going to a more data-driven place,” KeyWee CEO Yaniv Mavoker said. He views his company as part of that shift.
PureWow started working with KeyWee in November. It outperformed many of the other tech solutions Lee tested.
Traffic from KeyWee has the second-highest conversion rate for email signups on the site, a key metric that moves a reader to the brand loyalist category.
CTRs were 50 times that of the next highest solution. And the rate of high-value engagements (comments, shares and likes) was 1.5 times higher than posts on the PureWow’s own Facebook page.
PureWow sets a maximum CPC it will pay for KeyWee to amplify a piece of content and lets the algorithm take it away. If PureWow wants to reach more audiences or achieve greater scale, it can increase the CPC.
Usually, Lee keeps the CPC lower than what she could achieve on her own. Because KeyWee takes a fixed percentage of the media spend, that ensures PureWow is getting the most value from working with KeyWee.
KeyWee provides a dashboard that shows impressions, clicks and shares. It doesn’t show which audiences liked the content, but Lee has asked for and received data about the Facebook audience segments that KeyWee found engaged in the posts.
Besides PureWow, KeyWee has signed up publications like The New York Times, CBS and Condé Nast. It’s now seeing more traction on the brand side, with Intuit’s Mint Bills product signing on. Since launching in beta early last year, it’s signed up more than 70 customers.
In March, it raised $9.1 million in Series A funding, with two notable investors: Innovation Endeavors, the fund of Google co-founder Eric Schmidt, and The New York Times.
Lee sees KeyWee’s technology as disruptive.
“The ratios between partners changes every month depending on what content is performing,” Lee said. With a relatively fixed amount of marketing spend each month, that means the most efficient traffic drivers win. And lately, that’s been KeyWee.
