Close

Request a Proposal

Copyright © RebelMouse 2019

Follow Us:

Azula Sees 398% Facebook Growth in Switch to RebelMouse

At the end of August 2017, Azula switched to RebelMouse, leaving WordPress in their rear-view mirror. Since then, traffic to their site from Facebook has risen 398%.

Wait, what? How can that be? Aren't publishers supposed to be seeing decreases in traffic from the big blue social media machine? Well, in short, a lot of them are. But it's not because Facebook decided to hurt them or tweak publishers into giving them more money. It's because publishers haven't been able to adapt to platform changes fast enough to avoid the natural traffic penalty of falling behind the times.

We started working with Azula at the end of June 2017 to help them modernize their website, control their tech spend, and — most importantly — grow their traffic. Coming from a WordPress-based site, they saw (and felt) the limitations that are at the core of a decentralized WCMS. They lacked support for Facebook Instant Articles and Google AMP and had to pay for third-party hosting and developer fees. That meant spending a lot of time (and money) managing tech and less time capitalizing on great content.

Azula launched with our Social UX for Media, and the results were staggering and instant. In the month since launch day, Azula has seen across-the-board growth:

  • +288% increase in page views
  • +132% increase in users
  • +173% increase in sessions
  • +398% increase in Facebook traffic

Their growth isn't slowing, either. As Azula's staff learns to leverage our advanced workflow solutions like the RebelMouse Particle Accelerator, they're sure to fully utilize the faster, more agile path to growth that is now in front of them.

At RebelMouse, we live and breathe change. Our platform is built and innovated in real time. As a centralized web CMS, all sites on our system benefit from the incremental upgrades that we release along the way. New social platform changes happen all the time, and you can rest assured that our expert team is reacting to those changes so you don't have to.

Are you ready to kick your WCMS to the curb and start really growing? Request a proposal, and we'll show you how to turn the volume up to 11.

Related Articles Around the Web
google news

Publishers No Longer Have to Submit Their Site to Google News

Google's Publisher Center creates new opportunities for audience growth

Just before the start of the next decade, Google announced an important change to its Google News offering with the launch of Google Publisher Center. The new interface merges Google News Producer and Google News Publisher into one to streamline the partnership process for publishers.

Overall, the change should make it easier for publishers to manage their Google News settings, including updating themes, directing URLs to section pages, and configuring user permissions. Read the full list of features here.

Keep reading... Show less
remote work

How to Find Work-Life Balance as a Remote Employee

Tips from our CEO on making the most of an office-free lifestyle

Working from home is becoming increasingly popular, with an estimated 66% of companies now allowing remote work and 16% operating completely office-free. RebelMouse is one of those fully remote companies, and over the years we've mastered how to stay close to each other despite being spread across more than a dozen countries. We believe working remotely is good for both our personal lives and our productivity. Read more about this here.

Still, working free from the shackles of an office environment doesn't mean every day is a dance party in your pajamas from 9 to 5. Working from home comes with its own set of challenges just like any other job.

Keep reading... Show less

The Power of Our RebelCMS Front End

A quick guide to how we power the modern content lifecycle

The open web is not linear. In the next decade, quality content will continue to mean nothing without effective distribution that translates into increased wins on site, search, and social. The content lifecycle is fluid in nature, and users are only going to become more picky about consuming content where they feel the most comfortable. Keeping tabs on the modern user is a tireless job, and most publishing technologies cannot keep up with the rapid speed of the industry.

RebelCMS offers an intelligent front end that gives content creators the powerful tools they need to guide a modern content strategy that's backed by data and designed for savvy audiences. With blazing page speeds, an elegant user experience, and community-focused marketing tools snapped into every workflow, publishers can take back organic growth and sustainable revenue as we enter the 2020s.

Here's a brief summary of how we power the modern content lifecycle:

Keep reading... Show less

Inside RebelMouse’s Quality Assurance Operations

How We've Perfected Stress-Free Publishing

At RebelMouse, we like to refer to our enterprise publishing platform as "lean tech." Most publishers have a natural inclination to start doubling down on teams of developers who try to build unique experiences to help stand out above the noise. But they should actually be doing the opposite: Lean tech is the preferred way to cut through content saturation. By allowing RebelMouse to obsess over your product, content producers, editors, managers, and everyone in between can focus on creating quality content and taking advantage of opportunities to leverage distributive publishing strategies that create real revenue growth.

One of the major reasons we're able to maintain a lean tech environment is thanks to our approach to quality assurance (QA). We make updates to our platform daily to ensure our clients always have access to the most robust, high-performing, and secure version of our platform. Behind the scenes, this means having a solid QA structure that's efficient, creates less bugs, and catches the ones that do pop up before they go live. It's a system of checks and balances that's hard and costly to replicate on a custom CMS. Here's a glimpse into how it works.

Our Tech Stack Toolbox

  • Cucumber
  • Java
  • Junit
  • Maven
  • Selenium WebDriver
  • TeamCity
  • Zalenium (Selenium Grid)

Our Checks and Balances Workflow

Automated Regression Testing Cycle

The Lifecycle of a Product Update

When an update is first made to RebelMouse, TeamCity immediately triggers the start of automated tests to review integrity.

TeamCity Build

TeamCity Agent

The tests run in parallel on TeamCity's Build Agent. Next, Zalenium creates docker containers with browsers that matches the count of parallel threads. An Allure report is then generated from the test results, which shows the state of the application after the update.

Allure Report Pass

If a test doesn't complete successfully, the testing framework receives a video with a failed test and attaches it to the Allure report.

Allure Report Issue

Based on the report analysis, a QA specialist will create a "bug" ticket in our product management software to address the issue if needed. Then, information about the bug is immediately sent to the project manager and we begin the process of correcting the problem.

The media powerhouses we power can publish with confidence knowing that any product issues that arise are met with a tried-and-true process to fix the problem with little-to-no disturbance to their workflow. If you have any questions about this process, please email support@rebelmouse.com.

Related Articles

Related Articles Around the Web
Subscribe to Our Newsletter