Driving up user engagement with an additional 6% Page Views Per User

Citywire is a niche financial news site that commands the attention of every B2B finance media buying agency in London, the world's most significant financial centre.

Niche audiences command high prices and it can be hard to improve on yields when much of the display inventory is already sold out.

The commercial team at Citywire are very open to innovation and felt a unique differentiator for them in the market would be the provision of an editorial recommendation service that looks at both the context of the page and the unique reading habits of each user.

The Citywire team like to run their own applications on their own machines, so Grapeshot supplied a web service to run on their own network architecture.

Like a Google Appliance box that gets inserted alongside the other servers in the rack space: but with the difference that Grapeshot uses each article to find the most relevant articles to showcase. Automatic editorial services, with no labour costs of tagging pages or building rules. Grapeshot calculates a recommended set of other articles to read, responding to the user's reading habits and establishing an important engagement with each user.

Quote from Citywire's Chief Operating Officer, Richard Cook:

"The Citywire installation is in its second year, with a premium advertiser booking the editorial space as a branded service to each user. The best news recommendations are served to each and every user based on their own particular reading habits. Personal and to the point.

The additional user engagement has helped Citywire to lift overall page views per user by another 6%, providing a further top-line increase in the available ad volumes available for sale by the commercial team."