Favorite Feature #16: Reports on Referrer Sites and Homepages

Contextly Analytics now includes more data to help sites decide what to do more of, including data on referrers as well as traffic to non-story pages such as homepages and tag/category pages. Continue reading

GutenSidebar! Contextly’s Sidebars Now Work with the Gutenberg Editor

Contextly’s cool editorial tools to add sidebars to posts now works with the Wordpress Gutenberg editor (and the Classic editor, too!). Continue reading

Kill All the Authors’ (Bios)

Author bios don’t belong at the end of a story; they should live on their own page. Boost engagement and CTRs and pageviews per reader by simply moving them out from under stories. Continue reading

Favorite Feature #13: Reusing a Curated Sidebar (or We Love Libraries)

Creating a manual sidebar is one of my favorite Contextly curation tools. Curated Sidebars let you choose internal or external links, providing context to readers in a fast, writer-friendly editorial interface. Even better, the in-story sidebars both look good on … Continue reading

Favorite Feature #11: Adding Related Links Pointing to Another Site

The middle of the month deserves a sneaky feature, so here it goes: Here’s how you can add a second site to your curation search and have Contextly think it’s your default site. Let me explain: say you wanted to … Continue reading

Favorite Feature #10: Analytics Reports, Not a Dashboard

Early on, we made a counter-intuitive decision. We were not going to build a dashboard. Instead, we would send a daily, weekly and monthly report to our publishers with info on how Contextly was working and other info about their … Continue reading

Favorite Feature #9: Promoting Custom Content

Sometimes you want to show off holiday content or a particularly powerful section of your site. We made custom sections that take any RSS feeds and incorporate it into your recommendations. Continue reading

Favorite Feature #7: Promoting What’s Valuable to You

One of the lessons we learned early on is that publishers have more than just content they want to recommend to readers. Publishers might have their sports writer talking every Tuesday at noon about Sunday’s game. Or have an email … Continue reading

Favorite Feature #6: Customizing the Main Recommendation Display

So far, our set of posts on our favorite features has largely focussed on editorial tools. Things like choosing links for SEO building; or cool sidebars that build engagement and lower the bounce rate. For the Friday edition, I want … Continue reading

Favorite Feature #4: Auto-Updating Sidebars in the Body of Stories

Getting readers deeper into your site to earn their loyalty requires giving them ways to find your best stuff. So why not give them a portal from inside the body of a story? That’s the Contextly Auto-Sidebar. Continue reading