Overview of this campaign
- To reduce the proportion of wire stories published
- To reduce stories published during ultra-low-traffic timings
- To increase the number of “non-traditional” stories such as explainers, listicles, and multimedia works
- To create one project per quarter that tests a new hypothesis that could guide editorial decisions
- To conduct daily A/B tests on headlines
- To review SEO practices monthly in order to keep up with Google algorithms
Results for this campaign
PV growth
By November, total PVs were up 20.4% yoy, well above our target. This also made BT the top-performing publication in terms of growth among non-Chinese publications in parent company SPH Media.
Special event deep dive
General election (GE) coverage brought in 2.2x more PVs than the previous GE, thanks to our analysis of our GE coverage five years prior, that led us to make recommendations to assign more resources to live blogs, profiles, interactives, and explainers.
Reduction in wire stories
Based off our recommendations, we reduced wire articles by 31% without compromising traffic as overall PVs continued to grow. Selection of wires was also better, as average PVs 18%.
Headline testing outperforms
By November, we had boosted click-through-rates on the homepage by 45%, outperforming our sister publications.
SEO efforts pay off
Google Search impressions rose 8.4% and our average page position increased 47.5%. Google News impressions also rose 35.7%. We recently found out that close to 70% of our Google referrals came from Google Discover, which will be a focus in the next phase of our transformation.
Increased subscriptions
Despite not setting subscriptions as a goal for this transformation process, BT was the only SPH publication in SPH Media with positive subscriber growth from Jan-Dec 2025 (+4%). Most of this growth is organic, i.e. not disproportionately driven by vouchers or discounts.
Almost 30% of all BT sign-ups in 2025 came from paywalled articles, which is around double that of our sister publications.