How Using Katalys Shop Boosts Commerce Revenue

With 125 million page views and 39 million unique visitors every month, Houston-based Chron.com is a top US news website with a notable local presence. Published by Hearst Communications, Chron.com stands out from other news sources due to its highly diversified audience of readers and its dependable, consistent content.

When 16% of e-commerce sales consist of affiliate advertising, how can publishers keep their revenue-generating affiliate programs without diverting readers away from their pages? Chron.com wanted a solution to this problem, but they also had a few goals in mind.

They wanted to:

• Show measurable results from their marketing/ partnerships
• Partner with an attribution technology team they could trust
• Improve reader engagement on-site
• Increase conversion rates and revenue
• Do all this without exhausting additional development efforts

Chron.com partnered with Fohm.co, a home goods product, to examine how effective Katalys Shop is compared to affiliate product links. Katalys Shop offers a seamless checkout experience for users directly within the ad placement or sponsored content, thereby maximizing product discovery and customer acquisition. They ran an A/B test to compare the two and determine the new strategy’s success.

Katalys Shop performed significantly better than the affiliate link strategy, improving on- and off-site conversion rates and drastically reducing the amount of time to transact. As an added benefit, Chron.com received real-time, transparent conversion data while ensuring its readers stayed on the site after making a purchase. The brand partner, Fohm, also benefited from new customers funneled through a simplified purchase process. Overall, Katalys Shop led Chron.com to higher revenue, better data, and a better customer experience than the traditional affiliate link route.