Google‘s smartphone-based content recommendation feed, Google Discover, has become the single largest traffic referral source for publishing giant Reach plc, its audience director (distribution and customer marketing) has said.
Martin Little told Press Gazette the rise in Discover traffic had compensated “and then some” for a decline in referrals from Google search.
Reach’s overall Google traffic has grown in the second half of this year, Little said, but there had been “a significant shift” in the contributions from different Google platforms.
What Little called “branded search” — traffic from people actively searching for Reach titles like the Daily Mirror or Cornwall Live — has remained “solid”, he said. But referrals from topic-based searches have been falling, contributing to an overall fall in the number of visitors referred via search. Visits from Google News have remained largely stable.
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But Discover is “making up for that and then some on top”, he said, and “has become our biggest referrer of traffic”.
“Overall, almost 50% of our titles are on year-on-year growth now,” Little said, “and that is partly because of the shifts in Google.”
Google Discover promotes ‘soft lens’ content — but isn’t so good for news
Google Discover is embedded in the browsing experience for most users who browse Google Chrome on a smartphone.
Little said Discover “is almost like Facebook was… it’s algorithmically served, it’s based on what it thinks you’re going to like. It’s more of an escapism-type outlet”.
The increase in Google traffic at Reach has in part been driven by greater visibility into how Google Discover works. Previously, Little said, it had been “even more of a black box than Search”.
It is now much easier to monitor both your own and your competitors’ performance on Discover, according to Little. Two years ago it would not have been possible for a publisher to even split out their Discover and Search traffic, but now “you can get a far better lens on what’s working and what’s not”.
Little said 44% of Reach content gets picked up in Google Discover, but the platform is “very selective as to what it takes in and what it doesn’t… Google clearly wants Discover to be a safe environment, with brand-safe content within it”.
He described the type of content that does well on Discover as “soft-lens”: first-person pieces do well, as does lifestyle content and articles about niche interests and sports other than football.
“What is interesting as well is, for us as a commercial publisher, we don’t get a lot of news content into Discover,” Little said. “And by news, what I mean is traditional local news, or harder news.”
Reach’s news content is still holding its own in search, Little said, but there is “always a lag for content getting to Discover”. Although stories sometimes arrive on Discover within a day, “it tends to be 24 to 48 hours before content actually gets in”, which necessarily poses a problem for news content.
“You don’t get court content in there, there’s no crime getting in there, our council content doesn’t get in there as well. Stuff from our Local Democracy Reporters doesn’t really get into Discover.
“We need that content — it’s the staple of our regional brands, and it’s frustrating that we see the BBC’s version of that story get in every single time, but we never see any commercial publishers really getting that sort of content in. So it feels like Google is, on Discover, using the BBC to serve that out, but not actually being very pluralistic in its approach.”
[Read more: Publishers hooked on Google Discover traffic risk race to the bottom]
Google Discover selects ‘curiosity gap’ headlines to show readers
Little said Discover has a notable preference for “curiosity gap” headlines. For every story a Reach journalist publishes, they have to write four headlines: one for Facebook, one for Search, one for the home page and one for newsletters.
“Each of those are written in different ways,” Little said. “Search will have some keyword focus within it and the homepage one will be quite brand-safe. Newsletter [headlines] tend to have a little more of a sell… to encourage them to click through… and then social has got to be quite brand safe as well.”
You can’t feed Discover a specific headline: instead the platform chooses “the one that it wants the most”, and Little said most often Discover looks “for the most alluring headline” or “the greatest emotive element”.
Little defined a curiosity gap as “telling the story as it is but withholding the need-to-know piece of information from that headline so that people still feel the need to go and find out more”. (Advocates of the curiosity gap argue it differs from a “clickbait” headline strategy because curiosity gap articles actually deliver the information trailed in the title.)
He gave as examples the following real Reach headlines: “ITV Loose Women’s Janet Street-Porter speaks out from hospital after major surgery”, “BBC Death in Paradise star quits after five years, but fans will be happy with exit” and “NHS symptoms of silent killer, which hits one in 20 but takes years to diagnose”.
In the latter case, Little said: “It’s a very straight, factual headline, but it makes you think: ‘Well, what are those symptoms?’… And as long as you provide them on the other side, Discover rewards you quite heavily.”
Reach uses newsletters and Whatsapp Communities to build topic-based audiences out of Google Discover traffic
Little said Reach did not want the proportion of articles getting into Google Discover to get too large.
“You won’t want to be too reliant on it,” he said, emphasising that “our portfolio is more diverse, in terms of the ways that we generate traffic, than it’s ever been”.
Tech platforms make for notoriously unreliable long-term traffic sources, and Little said Reach has been trying to turn its fly-by Discover visitors into loyal readers.
“A nice example on the Daily Express would be that the Daily Express does really well with Formula One content on Discover.
“We’ve built up a newsletter audience of about 32,000 people, and a Whatsapp community of over 3,000 people, by targeting the people coming in from Discover on F1.
“The Express doesn’t get the same cut-through on Formula One on any other platform [as] it does on Discover, so we know that the generation of that newsletter audience is connected directly to people coming through…
“We’re laser-focused on thinking about: ‘how can we make sure that that traffic is something that we own over a long period of time?’
[Read more: Whatsapp for publishers: How Reach is driving millions of page views via messaging app]
Little suggested Discover has been one way Google responded to the trend of news avoidance.
“Ultimately, for us as a publisher, in some ways Google Discover is a good thing, because it causes us to really think about — if that’s where the audience interest is, that’s what they’re engaging with, how do we start to diversify our content mix to get a broader range of topics across everything we do?
“And I think that’s actually a good thing because it makes us more diverse, it makes us open to new audiences that previously we wouldn’t have been, it makes us think about content in a different way.
“But all of our principles still stand — the content needs to be high quality, it needs to be well-researched, it needs to be written really well and have good imagery.”
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