Mediafin, a leading Belgian publisher that owns L’Echo & De Tijd, came to Froomle with the goal of increasing engagement on both of their brands, specifically looking at increasing the articles per session of users. After implementing the Editor’s Pick Module on both the homepage & article page of both brands, they saw promising results but challenged us to go the extra mile and increase the performance of the module even further. Specifically, they wanted to understand how content of different ages and popularity affect the overall performance and feeling of “freshness” when browsing the website.

The Froomle team got to work optimizing the Editors Pick module across brands by launched an A/B test of different ensembles of Froomle algorithms. This module allows for editors to choose the pool articles that the module can recommend from. The goal is to improve CTR, but also to increase re-activation of older evergreen content. By adjusting the weight of different filters and algorithms within an ensemble, we were able to change the percentage of influence that recency and popularity have on what is recommended.