What is suggested content? A complete guide to what the proposed content means and why it is important

“Suggested content” is a term we hear constantly when discussing online content marketing. Suggested content - if used correctly - can help you increase traffic to your site, get more leads, and increase your sales, and all of these are great reasons why you should consider incorporating this type of advertising into your marketing strategy. In this guide, you'll learn more about suggested content, why content recommendation is such a valuable tactic, the different types of suggestions on websites, and the Jubna platform for suggested content marketing. We'll also share examples of content suggestions so you can see how content suggestions can help you grow your website, app, or business.

What is suggested content?

At its simplest, suggested content is a system for suggesting content to visitors who view or read a topic on your site based on the interests of those visitors. It's similar to YouTube or Facebook recommendations, for example, but for the content of news sites, newspapers and online magazines. It is a form of integrated advertising, where ads appear in a way that integrates with the rest of the site’s content and does not negatively affect the user’s experience while browsing your site. You'll often see content recommendations at the bottom of the article titled “You Might Also Like” or “Recommended Content” that encourage visitors to check out more articles or topics on your site or other sites with similar or dissimilar content.

However, as you will see shortly, this is not the only purpose of content suggestions. The recommendation system mainly suggests a list of recommendations in a given field, using one of two methods: collaborative filtering or content-based filtering.

Content-based filtering

Collaborative filtering depends on the user's previous behavior, such as the products he previously purchased or the topics he viewed, coinciding with similar decisions made by other users, and thus it is possible to predict the desires of the first user based on the decisions of other users. As for filtering based on content, it is based on people’s interaction with the content that they are searching for now, or that was previously read by the user, and that interaction is used as a guide for recommendations. You can also get hybrid recommendation tools that use both methods.

The difference between internal proposals and external proposals

There are two main types of content suggestions: internal content suggestions and external content suggestions. Internal suggestions draw visitors deeper into your site by recommending more of your content for them to see. Internal suggestions help reduce the bounce rate on your site and increase the time visitors spend on your site pages. This also boosts engagement with your content and can lead to more shares on social media, creating more awareness of your site name and content. If you write and publish a lot of valuable content on your site, it's helpful to use in-page content recommendations to make sure more visitors see that content. On the other hand, if your site is new and you don't have a lot of content yet, you may not get the full benefit of on-page content recommendations. Here's an example of on-page recommendations:

Off-site suggestions take visitors to advertisers' websites or landing pages by recommending content that might be related to your page content that the visitor will find interesting and useful. This type of content-based proposal is useful for sites that rely on income from advertising, which will increase your income over time and as your site visitors grow. It's also useful for sites that are part of a larger publishing network, as you can use suggestions to direct traffic to other sites in the group. When using off-page suggestions, it's important to make sure the content you recommend is high-quality. If not, it could hurt visitors' perception of your site.

Where to place proposals

One of the critical factors in achieving your goals with content proposals is where you put them: You have to put your proposals in the right place so that visitors will see them and interact with them. One common location for content suggestions is at the bottom of the article, so there is a place for visitors to go after they finish reading a post or article on the site. Example of recommendations below the article:

Placing suggestions within the content is not the only option. You can also provide content recommendations via on-site widgets that pop into place when people are near the end of the page or have been on the page for a few seconds.

Why are content suggestions important for publishers?

Content suggestion is important because it provides a good user experience, as they see the most relevant content to what they are looking for at any given time. This, in turn, helps improve the time spent on your site, increases user interaction with your content, in addition to providing the publisher with excellent and continuous income from advertising revenue. Content suggestions work well for both advertisers and publishers. Publishers can generate excellent advertising income and increase traffic by visitors, and advertisers can use content suggestions to place their advertising content on reliable sites with high-quality content, and get heavy traffic from these sites, without worrying about it being blocked by ad blockers.

What is the content suggestion platform?

The Content Recommendations Platform, also known as the Content Discovery Platform, is the software that makes content recommendations work. The platform uses algorithms to automatically identify relevant content and recommend it to site visitors based on pre-defined criteria. For example, you can choose to recommend content on a specific topic to visitors of a specific page. One example of a leading content recommendation platform is Jubna. Jubna's content discovery functionality allows marketers to reach new visitors, target potential customers, increase brand awareness, and allows publishers to boost engagement through high-quality placements and precisely targeted recommendations.

Finally

As you've seen, content recommendations are likely to increase reader or visitor engagement, leading to increased brand awareness, as well as more leads. Now that you've learned more about how content-based recommendations work and how they can help your brand, we invite you to connect with Jubna to learn more.