Case Studies > Lovin Media Group
The Lovin Media Group are a multi-channel organisation, and one of the fastest-growing media companies on the planet. They have more than 100 million pieces of content viewed per month on their 33 channels across two continents.
The Lovin Media Group are a multi-channel organisation and one of the fastest-growing media companies on the planet with more than 100 million pieces of content viewed per month on our 33 channels across two continents.
As a digitally native, mobile first media publication, the Lovin Media Group have a large and fast-growing social following. Their content is original and engaging, they love social advertising and get excited when the audience engages and share their native advertising creations.
Operating sites that cater to both local and international audiences, the Lovin team are experts at creating unique, engaging and relatable content.
The team from Lovin Media first approached us about our Publisher Plus platform in early Summer 2019. Their sales team had succeeded in winning some high profile advertising campaigns and microsite partnerships, but had concerns about their current sites ability to deliver from a technical perspective.
With a very tight deadline ahead of these campaigns going live, they needed to be fully confident in the ability of their platform to deliver for their clients. Having had issues with site stability, page speed and advertising delivery in the past, they needed a platform and a team they could trust. They needed experts who knew about the common advertising problems they faced - viewability, effective targeting, reporting. Having recently gone through another site migration which didn't have the results they'd hoped for, they needed confidence that this project could be delivered at a critical time for their business, and give them the foundation to support their future growth plans.
Typically we'd begin a Publisher Plus project with design sessions - working on wireframes, user flows and layouts. Having worked long and hard on their current branding, the Lovin team were happy with how their sites looked. This meant that our approach here was to take the visuals from their existing sites, then rebuild them using modern tooling. This rebuild effort meant that we could significantly reduce the size of pages being delivered, making the new sites faster.
Our approach to the new sites was to take our existing resilient and fast API, and focus on squeezing out as much performance as we could from the front end. We took an AMP-first approach to building the new sites. AMP is a framework backed by Google with the goal of delivering content faster to users. This faster delivery, as well as appearing in things like "latest stories" searches on mobile devices means that good AMP support is critical for online publishers. As it's a slightly different format of HTML, often AMP pages are like the poor relation of regular web pages, missing functionality and often content. Our goal here was to deliver wherever possible an AMP version of the site which was indistinguishable from the regular web version. This would mean a faster site, with less maintenance overhead as new features and updates become required down the line.
With such a tight deadline on this project, communication was key. We worked hand-in-glove with the Lovin team, ensuring that everybody involved had a good view of the project status at all time. The trust built up during this process meant that the Lovin team were happy to take our lead on suggestions around AMP implementation, display ad system updates and process improvements to article management.
Our AMP-first approach meant that the AMP experience on the Lovin sites is as good as the non-AMP version, while also delivering much faster page load speeds. These factors combined to significantly increase the Lovin sites' presence in Google search results in the weeks since launch.
Since launching the rebuilt sites, there's been a significant change in site performance. Site stability is no longer an issue for the team, no matter how viral their articles go! Page load times have been reduced by a little over 50%, with a near-perfect score being recorded by Google's Page Speed Insights tool.
The new platform enabled a successful launch of a key commercial partnership, Tales and Trails, showcasing Ireland to an international audience. Across both group sites, changes to the way advertising is delivered have given much greater targeting capabilities, with significantly-improved viewability figures. This delivers a great benefit to their advertisers, while being focused on respecting the consent of site visitors.
We're confident that these changes will continue to increase audience engagement and in turn bring about an increase in advertising revenue to the team at Lovin.
"As a publisher who prides itself on creating best in class written and visual content seven days a week around the clock for our audience and clients, our websites are our bread and butter.
I would have no hesitation in recommending Square1, who created an incredibly intuitive back end for our journalists as well as a seamless UX for our audience, migrating hundreds of thousands of articles with zero disruption to workflow.
We are confident that with Square1 on our side we can offer the absolute best in Digital Content to our audience and client base."- Megan Cassidy (General Manager Lovin Media Group)
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