How a digital news site in Uttarakhand grew its digital ad revenue
The Challenge
Launched in 2018, Uttra News is a Hindi language news portal that focuses on local news from nine districts of Uttarakhand, India. In addition to covering trending news, it also reports on national and international news. However, Uttra News has been experiencing a decline in website traffic and advertising revenue.
Results
Uttra News participated in the Google News Initiative (GNI) Advertising Lab to do a detailed assessment of their website and advertising revenue. It covered aspects such as Core Web Vitals, website performance (Page Speed, Best Practices on Images and CSS, Technical Site Optimisation, Lazy Loading), and advertising optimisation like Ad placements for higher viewability, Auto Ads and Interstitial Ads.
Since 90% of the users were active on mobile devices, a speedy mobile web experience was essential. A Progressive Web Application (PWA) on https://m.uttranews.com was created to optimise the website on mobile.
With direct support from Readwhere and GNI, after the implementation of PWA and Core web vitals, the following results have been achieved:
184% increase in page views
78% improvement in page load time (average page load time dropped to 7 seconds from 25 seconds)
10X increase in organic traffic from search and discover, thanks to page speed index improvements
484% increase in revenue after the above optimisations