THE CHALLENGE
When we approached Zwift Insider—the premier destination for indoor cycling news and stats—in early 2021, they were in the enviable position of being a profitable publisher with a positive growth trajectory. The challenge was to demonstrate an uplift in technical and financial performance for a website that was already doing so much right.
THE APPROACH
We began by meeting with the team at Zwift Insider to establish their goals and business requirements and to better understand the challenges that they faced. During these sessions, it emerged that the team was looking for a white-glove, full-service monetisation strategy which allowed them to shift focus and continue with the business of creating world-beating content. The team at Zwift Insider also enjoyed having access to their own data with the incumbent provider, which they could download and manipulate at will.
We followed up these sessions by running a battery of bespoke tests on the website and it’s advertising set up to identify efficiencies that could be realised. We tested performance of the website in the browser, compliance with legal and technical frameworks and undertook a top to bottom technology review.
THE RESULT
Upon launch, we were able to push an entirely new ad set up with fewer ad units, removing any ads that rendered incorrectly and reduced browser memory used by advertising by 50%.
We introduced a new consent management platform (CMP) which prevented the dropping of cookies prior to a user granting consent and ensured compliance with the GDPR legislation in the EU.
The ads.txt file was reduced significantly, affording Zwift Insider more control over who is selling their inventory and we reduced the number of errors in the file from 137 to zero. We implemented a bespoke script which gave secure user access to the ads.txt file. This allows a user to securely edit and maintain an accurate ads.txt file without having to log into the FTP server and make changes manually.
We wrapped everything up in the industry standard malware and brand safety tools to ensure a safe experience for advertisers and the loyal users of Zwift Insider.
On an ongoing basis, we tackle any technical issues as they arise, closing an average of 11 technical tickets per month and have supported Zwift Insider in developing their direct brand advertising business.
All of Zwift Insider’s performance data and revenue is centralised from various sources via the Trade House Media API, normalised into a bespoke database and visualised in a powerful and fully customisable proprietary analytics dashboard.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly for this independent publisher, we were able to improve RPM by 3x compared with the previous providers. All this revenue is collected by Trade House Media’s finance team and insured by Allianz to give Zwift Insider peace of mind in knowing that their advertising business is in safe hands.