Product Updates: Excerpts, preferred sources and sticky masthead learnings

It’s November! Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate, and to those who don’t, enjoy the 30 day month… We’ve continued to be relatively busy in Product Land running some tiny experiments with Google preferred sources and personalized promos, making some subtle improvements to our fonts across the site, as well as fixing a number of bugs we hope you didn’t spot… 

Here are the highlights, and a reminder that if you have any questions, feedback or just want a chat you can shoot us an email at hello@restofworld.org

What we did 🚀

Google Preferred Source

You may (or may not) have noticed a little callout on articles that allows you to add Rest of World as a “preferred source” in Google Search. This relatively new feature allows you to save your preferred website and news sources so that they show up more consistently across Google’s Top Stories and Search functions. The idea is that it gives you control to make the search experience more relevant to you. The feature is currently only available to users in the US or India, so we’re experimenting to see what the uptake might be like. 

If you have not seen it on our site, fear not, this promo is programmed to display only to people who have US or Indian English set as their primary language in their internet browser. We’re testing two design variations of the module and measuring clicks per view conversions on them, but we expect this number to be relatively low given the relative novelty of the feature. 

As part of this release, we’ve also now extended our module display logic (we call this Subprops) to show or hide promotional units based on the browser’s language preferences. We don’t have a signed in experience, we don’t track user data and we don’t know your geo location, but we can infer user preferences based on some information provided by the browser (e.g. Chrome, Safari etc.) It’s a very fast and lightweight method of showing certain elements on our webpages. 

Our subprops system allows us to configure certain modules or promotional units to display based on the user referrer, date and time, device, the type of article the user is currently on, and now the browser language settings. It’s a powerful system that allows us to customize the user experience when we know very little about the user. Cool, eh?

Document Excerpt

We’ve extended the Quote block in WordPress to support a new type of treatment: the Document Excerpt. This came as a request from our visuals team, who were looking to highlight key pieces of text within source documents for a story. This treatment allows them to quote the source text, highlight key phrases and add a citation and source. 

It’s a relatively simple extension to our current Quote Block styles in WordPress that we hope will improve the overall reading experience. 

Donations

If you’re a regular reader, you might have seen that we’ve been pushing our Merch store and donations in the last few weeks… That’s because we’re a nonprofit organization, and we rely on the generosity of our readers to sustain our journalism. 

We ran a “personalized” promotion earlier this year, but we’ve now modified the module ever so slightly so that it displays the number of articles read by a user in the entire past year – an idea we “borrowed” from The Guardian. We store article data in local device settings, so this data is only ever visible to you on that specific device. It doesn’t cover every device you may read us on, so possibly you’ve read many more articles than what the promo tells you?! 

We always appreciate donations and we love welcoming new Rest of World members, but donating is not a possibility for you, then please consider sharing Rest of World with a friend so we can reach even more people with our journalism. 

What we learned

Mobile Masthead on articles

Last month we launched an experiment to display our site masthead downpage on articles on mobile devices. Since we launched on November 4th, masthead navigation clicks have increased by 410% compared to the previous period, and average views per visit on mobile are up by 3.6%. However, engagement rates on articles on mobile are down by 5%. At this point it looks like people are using the masthead and finding more content, but this might be slightly negatively impacting overall engagement rate on articles on mobile… It’s still quite early into this experiment so we’re going to keep monitoring.

In case you missed it

We’re offering a 20% discount on all merch store items until this Saturday 29 November. Get that Rest of World tote you always wanted!

Finally…

Please feel free to shoot us an email at hello@restofworld.org if you’ve got any ideas, questions, requests for features or feedback for us. We genuinely love hearing from you.