CASE STUDY HOW LIFTIGNITER HELPED RANKER INCREASE RELATED CONTENT CLICKS BY 50% OVERNIGHT! @lliftigniter liftigniter W W W. L I F T I G N I G T E R. C O M
RANKER: THE KINGS OF RANKING Infatuated with lists, serial entrepreneur Clark Benson decided in 2009 to start his fifth and most fun startup yet: a digital media company that creates lists that are ranked through the wisdom of crowds. Ranker had a winning recipe, but they had one problem: how to get the best content in front of their users. Ranker teamed up with LiftIgniter to implement personalization software to serve better recommendations to their visitors and to make their site more irresistible. Ranker is performing extremely well and has become the Kings of Ranking within a short period of time, as recent metrics have shown: Traffic increased more than 40% year-over-year More than 30 million unique monthly visits More than 100 million votes on over 100,000 topics
WHO IS RANKER Ranker is the leading online destination for broad, opinion-based, crowdsourced rankings of everything, from topics ranging from entertainment and pop culture, to sports and politics, to brands and lifestyle. The company s technology is centered on user engagement, turning its lists into the best possible rankings based on the wisdom of crowds. A Quantcast Top 50 site, Ranker attracts more than 30 million unique visitors each month. As a result, Ranker has one of the largest databases of opinions with over 100 million votes gathered on more than 100,000 items. ABOUT RANKERS CO-FOUNDER Clark Benson CEO Clark Benson started Ranker in 2009 because he himself is fascinated with lists a long-time staple in editorial. He built the company on the premise that the wisdom of crowds will provide a better answer than any one person s opinion. Ranker put the power in the hands of their audience to solve debates on almost any topic imaginable, instead of telling their audience what the answer should be. Using Ranker s unique technology, those lists become the best and most authentic rankings on the web. More than ever, consumers trust and value the opinions of their peers and other customers over the brand themselves, which is why consumers flock to Ranker as a reliable source of what s the best. With their unique technology platform, Ranker has built one of the world s largest opinion databases, which provides them with unprecedented first-party consumer data. This allows for deeply connected data around characteristics that audiences of all demographics consider the best, funniest, most annoying, overrated, attractive, worst, cool, etcetera.
CHALLENGES RANKER FACED Ranker has great content that not only comes from the Ranker team but is also shaped by visitors. Visitors participate in developing the lists by coming up with definitive rankings. The problem Ranker faced, though, was serving " up the most clickable content to each person browsing. Ranker has hundreds of distinct topic areas, and when you have a site that is so diverse, it can be challenging to build an in-house content surfacing system that serves up the best content for each person on the site. Ranker developed a system themselves, but since it was not their core competency, they decided to give LiftIgniter a chance to see if they could get even better results. HOW RANKER IS USING MACHINE LEARNING PERSONALIZATION TO IMPROVE METRICS Ranker has expanded their use of LiftIgniter from one widget/module on the site throughout the site. They are now personalizing the user experiences across article pages on mobile, desktop, video and more. Ranker recognizes that while page views are important for revenue, even more important is the long-term, high-value experience of users on the site. We are in the attention economy, stated Adam Spector, Co-Founder of LiftIgniter. Ranker recognizes that earning user s attention & trust is critical to winning against all media competitors. It is expensive to find each new user and convince them to come to Ranker. Ranker recognizes that once users arrive, they should have the best, most optimized experience to keep them engaged. If you provide the best experience, users will return more often, share more articles, and cost you less to retain. Giving them the best experience, from visit one, is critical to that experience.
HOW LIFTIGNITER S PERSONALIZATION TOOLS " HELPED RANKER TRAFFIC SKYROCKET During LiftIgniter s proof-of-concept (POC), related content clicks increased by about 50% overnight and over time with at least 75% after further optimizations. Liftigniter has saved us a bunch of engineering oversight, and it s hard to say if we would be able to build something quite this well. - Clark Benson, CEO Liftigniter powers Ranker s related content modules. For example, Liftigniter found a connection between Ranker s best board games list and an anime on Netflix page, whereas Ranker s internal logic would have always shown a card games list alongside that page. Ranker is an advertisement-based publisher, which means the better the recommendations, the more lists people view and participate in, the higher Ranker s revenue will be. LiftIgniter s product keeps people on the site for longer periods of time, thus increasing overall revenue. Engaged users are a critical user group at Ranker. These engaged users vote more often, share more often, and return more often. By enabling intelligent, realtime discovery for that user at that moment in time LiftIgniter made it far easier for users to find lists they really care about, thus improving almost all key metrics. On top of this, advertisers like knowing there are clear engaged users and Ranker is not just another site where users come and disappear. LiftIgniter helps Ranker grab a user s attention from the first visit. Over the last year, Ranker s traffic surged by more than 40%, especially since implementing LiftIgniter s Millennial demo. Ranker now has more than 30 million monthly unique visitors, and time spent on site and pages per visit increases have also surged, making it one of the most engaging sites on the web.
RANKER S TAKE ON PERSONALIZATION AND THEIR PLANS FOR THE FUTURE We love having a property that touches 8 percent of the US online audience every month with cool and engaging content and seeing that audience continue to shape that content. - Clark Benson, CEO Ranker is a 100 percent data-driven company, and they are constantly adding site features that highlight their data. They will soon be launching a B2B tool to allow brands to know their audiences even better. LiftIgniter s personalization and recommendation algorithms helped Ranker to achieve great results, and they only see growth in their future. When asked whether they believe personalization is important for publishers, they said that personalization is here to stay, and publishers must keep up or else get left behind in a cloud of dust generated by not only Ranker but also Facebook and Google. Those massive players are doing everything they can to make user experiences, on their own properties, fully personalized with machine learning. Ranker and similar sites need machine learning to compete. Good thing that LiftIgniter was born out of Google s top machine learning research group! If you would like to see the same level of growth that Ranker experienced since implementing LiftIgniter software, try our, no-risk POC that guarantees a minimum of a 20% improvement. You ll be amazed at the results! If you would like to see similar results on your ecommerce site, try our no-risk proof-of-concept that guarantees a minimum of 20% improvement. Learn more at liftigniter.com.