Polska Press Builds Reader Engagement & Pageviews with Admiral Extend

Goal: Turn One-and-Done Visits Into Deeper Reading Sessions

Polska Press wanted to explore how Extend could encourage visitors to continue reading instead of leaving after a single article. The goal was to surface popular, trending, or related content at the right moment and create additional article pageviews without requiring a major development project.

The team was especially interested in whether Extend could:

• Increase session depth
• Generate incremental article pageviews
• Improve conversion from the engagement experience
• Support both desktop and mobile visitor journeys
• Provide enough data to evaluate revenue and engagement impact
• Scale across multiple publishing properties if the test proved successful

The opportunity was clear: help readers discover more of the publisher’s own content while creating additional monetizable pageviews.

Challenge: Engagement Had to Meet a Higher Editorial Standard

Polska Press was not simply looking for another engagement layer. The team needed confidence that Extend would recommend the right content, appear in the right contexts, and support the reader experience across a complex publishing network.

Several requirements quickly became central to the beta:

• Recommendations needed to lead to article pages—not tag pages, galleries, or other content types.
• Content needed to be timely enough for a news environment, where older articles may no longer be relevant.
• Extend needed to stay off sponsored article pages because those experiences could conflict with advertising-client agreements.
• Recommendations needed to respect the property where the visitor was reading rather than pulling content indiscriminately across related domains.
• The experience needed to feel like a value-add for readers rather than an interruption.

The team also identified practical beta considerations, including mobile trigger behavior, widget styling, clickability, frequency capping, and the ability to test related content against popular content.

Solution: A Phased Extend Beta Across Selected Properties

Admiral and Polska Press approached Extend as a controlled test rather than a network-wide launch.

The beta included:

• Selected-property deployment
• Publisher-led styling and design customization
• A/B testing of the engagement experience
• Testing related content against popular or trending content
• Mobile engagement using idle-time and other behavioral signals
• Frequency controls to manage how often the experience appeared
• Targeting and exclusions for specific content types
• Performance review using pageviews, conversion rate, pageviews per visitor, and estimated revenue

Polska Press took an active role in the implementation. Its team selected test properties, reviewed the experience, handled styling, and provided detailed feedback on how recommendations should work within its publishing environment.

The implementation also evolved during the beta. The team moved toward a fully clickable engagement because it was viewed as a better visitor experience, while mobile settings and frequency controls were adjusted to support a more measured rollout.

The Turning Point: Strong Early Performance, More Demanding Requirements

The beta produced encouraging engagement results. In the first week of the GS24 test, Extend generated an additional 38,796 pageviews, a 6.7% mobile conversion rate, and an average of 2.05 pageviews per Extended visitor. Extend-generated pageviews represented a 1.49% lift against approximately 2.65 million total pageviews in the test period.

The full-clickable experience also performed better in A/B testing and became the preferred journey configuration.

Those results validated the core opportunity: a carefully designed content recommendation experience could create meaningful additional reading activity. But the test also made clear that topline performance was only one part of the decision.

Bartek Zuchowski described results this way:

“The performance metrics are encouraging, and we appreciate Admiral's support throughout the process.”

The Optimization Conversation: From Performance to Publisher Control

The beta shifted the conversation from “Can Extend generate more pageviews?” to “Can Extend generate more pageviews while meeting the operational standards of a major publisher?”

Admiral worked with the team on several areas of refinement:

• Making the experience feel more like a helpful next step for readers
• Limiting recommendations to article pages
• Excluding tag pages, listing pages, galleries, and other non-priority content
• Preventing Extend from appearing on sponsored article pages
• Testing content relevance and freshness
• Evaluating metadata-based and page-level targeting options
• Aligning the implementation with the publisher’s existing technical approach

At one stage, URL-based inclusion and exclusion was not sufficient to distinguish sponsored content from standard editorial content. Admiral’s team subsequently outlined additional targeting approaches, including metadata-based targeting and page-level key-value pairs, to support more reliable exclusions when Polska Press was ready to revisit the project.

This was an important part of the partnership: the beta did not stop at a dashboard result. It surfaced the exact controls required to make the experience viable within a real publisher workflow.

A Collaborative, Low-Lift Test

The beta was designed to reduce risk and allow both teams to learn quickly.

Polska Press was able to:

• Test Extend on selected properties before broader rollout
• Control the visual presentation of the widget
• Provide direct feedback on recommendation quality
• Compare different content strategies
• Adjust mobile timing and frequency settings
• Review performance using measurable engagement metrics
• Pause expansion while conducting an internal review

Admiral supported the process with implementation guidance, performance analysis, targeting recommendations, and ongoing optimization discussions.

The result was a practical learning loop: launch, measure, review the experience, refine the controls, and determine whether the solution was ready for broader deployment.

The Results: Early Impact with a Clear Path to Further Validation

Polska Press’s Extend beta produced measurable early impact:

• 38,796 Extend-generated pageviews during the first week of the GS24 test
  
• 6.7% conversion rate
• +2.05 pageviews per Extended visitor
• 52.47% lift in Extend-generated pageviews for converting visitors
• 4.9% The all-exits revenue lift rate achieved for Polska Press
• A full-clickable experience that outperformed the earlier configuration in A/B testing

In summary, Extend achieved an all-exits revenue lift rate of 4.9% for Polska Press

What Polska Press’s Beta Demonstrated

1. Engagement performance must be paired with editorial relevance

Generating pageviews is only valuable when the visitor reaches content that is timely, appropriate, and aligned with the publisher’s editorial goals.

2. Publisher controls are part of the product experience

For a multi-property news network, content exclusions, sponsored-content rules, domain context, frequency, and mobile behavior are not secondary settings. They determine whether an engagement experience can be trusted.

3. A beta can create value even before full rollout

The test produced meaningful performance data and clarified the requirements for a stronger implementation. That gave both teams a more precise roadmap for future optimization rather than relying on assumptions.

Top 3 Reasons the Extend Beta Mattered to Polska Press

Measurable Engagement Lift

Extend created a clear way to connect a visitor experience with incremental article pageviews, conversion, and estimated revenue.

Publisher-Specific Control

The test focused attention on the targeting and exclusion rules required to protect editorial quality, advertiser commitments, and visitor trust.

Low-Risk Learning

A phased beta allowed Polska Press to test selected properties, adjust the experience, evaluate performance, and decide on expansion based on evidence.