Updated on July 30, 2019.
Website owners are always looking for ways to bring in new visitors, keep them on their website, and turn them into fans or followers.
There are a lot of ways to approach content recommendations. These tools have developed significantly over time, but here’s how our Related Posts are different. We find the right personalized content recommendations for your visitors to help you meet your engagement goals.
1. Most Popular Content
The first widgets for content recommendations mostly showed the most popular content. They determined what was interesting based on which articles were most viewed, had the most comments, or were the most shared.
This was a good start. But the most popular content on a website might not change very much from day to day, which isn’t great for returning visitors. These recommendations might also not have anything to do with the current article, so the visitor might not be interested in that topic.
2. Adding Context
The next wave of content recommendation tools added contextual information. That means they started looking into the content of the articles to make a recommendation that’s similar to the page a visitor’s currently viewing.
Combining contextual information with popularity starts to make for more interesting content recommendations. However, they still aren’t likely to change very much. Additionally, they’re likely to keep recommending the same content, even if people don’t interact with it.
3. Understanding Behavior
More recently, some content recommendation tools are starting to learn from what people click on. This allows the recommendations to learn which articles are relevant and which pages they should be displayed on.
This is a major leap forward. But there’s still room for improvement. That’s because these tools still aren’t tailored to specific visitors, and so they aren’t as relevant as they could be.
4. Personalized Recommendations
The best way to recommend content for a particular visitor is to personalize content for them based on their interests (or the interests of people like them). That’s what AddThis Related Posts do.
We use all of the aforementioned methods and use data from across our publisher network to continuously improve which content recommendations work and for whom.
Content recommendation tools like Related Posts are also advantageous because they can personalize suggestions on the first visit! This enables you to show visitors more relevant content sooner.
We’ve already seen these content recommendations outperform other techniques, increasing the click-through rate on these tools by 50% or more.
Ready to get started? Activate Related Posts on your site now. Just sign into your AddThis Dashboard to get going!