The challenge
Kannada Daily News Paper—Udayavani—is a part of Manipal Media Network Private Limited. Over the past 74 years, the publication has been an agent of change for the people of Coastal Karnataka. Today, Udayavani is a leading daily newspaper and digital news site for all Kannadigas (Kannada- speaking linguistic group) worldwide.
Therefore, as a brand, Udayavani was already well-established. However, the publisher needed help to grow the site revenue and increase pageviews.
The results
As a part of the GNI – Advertising Lab, Readwhere partnered with Udayavani to deliver a three-point plan to help their site overcome these challenges.
- Firstly, the team completely redeveloped the mobile web version of the site (https://m.udayavani.com) and made it AMP-enabled.
- Secondly, the team did a detailed diagnostic analysis of Udayavani’s desktop website for Core Web Vitals scores and areas that needed improvement.
- Thirdly, Udayavani’s digital teams were trained on tools like Lighthouse, Pagespeed Insights, News Consumer Insights and attended the advertising revenue Digital Growth Program workshops.
These tools enabled them to measure and track their website performance. The Digital Growth Program on-demand workshops on advertising revenue educated the publisher’s internal teams to assist them in growing their digital revenue.
Under the GNI Advertising Lab program, Udayavani achieved the following:
- Pageviews increased by 79%
- The increase in Page Per Session and pageviews has led to an overall 102% increase in revenue.
- Direct traffic increased by 67%.
Udayavani expects robust growth in the coming years because of the learnings on analysis tools and website implementations done as a part of the GNI Advertising Lab program.
“Quantum Jumps are what all organisations need, and to achieve it, we need programs like Google News Initiative’s Advertising labs which provided in-time help that came so handy. Under the programme training, our team is now fully equipped with advanced knowledge of the various tools on web performance. And with our new mobile web version, we are forecasting our page views & revenue to grow tremendously in the coming years from where we are now.”
-Harisha Bhat,
Business Head, Manipal Media Network Pvt Ltd.
