Product Notifications
Released January 2025
This experiment texts price-drop alerts to re-engage indecisive readers and encourage conversions. The feature allows users to sign up for email notifications when product prices drop, providing an incentive to return to our site and complete their purchases. Our hypothesis is that by addressing a key reader pain point—saving money—we can collect more 1PD, boost re-engagement, and conversions.
Project saw an initial sign up rate at .018%. This is a 291.304% increase compared to other Forbes Vetted newsletter sign-ups via inline CTAs.
Product Ratings
Released October 2024
The Product Ratings feature empowers the Forbes Vetted edit team to assign a 1-5 star rating its featured products. This helps readers make informed purchase decisions by providing clear, review-focused information, enhancing both engagement and trust in our recommendations.
The primary objective is to increase the visibility and engagement with our content, ultimately driving more revenue through affiliate links. By providing clear product ratings, we aimed to:
- Improve SERP rankings by improving the relevance and quality of our content.
- Increase CTR by providing more transparency and confidence in product choices.
- Increase CVR by providing more transparency and confidence in product choices.
Key Insights:
- Out of the 9 testing articles, 6 saw an improvement in page views compared to the baseline.
- One testing article led with a +233.41% increase in page views, and another followed with +81.82%.
- Clicks across all testing articles significantly increased, highlighting the feature’s success in boosting user engagement despite broader trends.
Coupon CMS
Released February 2025
On March 5th, 2024, Google released an announcement regarding the March Core Update. The update focused on spam policies and zeroed in on-site reputation abuse. In the examples provided, Google directly listed coupon sites, such as Forbes Vetted, were explicitly listed as an offender of this policy. Forbes took action and de-indexed its coupon pages, removed coupons from the navigation and content, and broke its contract with Upfeat (a third-party vendor we leveraged for coupons).
In early June Google updated its documentation on its spam policies. This update emphasized publishers owning the sourcing of the displayed coupons to readers. After some internal discussions, Forbes determined they needed to build the coupon solution and own the workflow in-house.
Goals for the CMS release:
- Coupon data has been able to be accessed from the Forbes partner Affiliate networks.
- Coupon data is polled on a recurring schedule and stored.
- Editorial content can be uploaded and assigned to coupon brand pages.
- Coupons can be manually created, edited, scheduled, and deleted via the CMS controls.