Optimising Platform Performance for Ad Revenue and Data Monetisation

Beautyheaven is a health and beauty site. More accurately, it is a really popular platform for people to review health and beauty products. Here’s how it works:

• BH have a database of tens of thousands of various beauty products.
• If you’re interested in that product, you can read all about it, plus read & watch in depth reviews
• I can join and become a member. As a member, I can upvote on other member’s reviews, as well as make reviews of my own
• The more I participate, the more points I get. These points allow me to graduate to different levels. At the start, I can leave reviews. Once I’ve managed to get to the top level, I’m getting sent free products to review, and basically living the Life.
• I can also use my points to (buy product in the Beautorium), which is a points based flash store (only up for short bursts of time, since they sell out so quickly).

We worked with the BH team to take the site from a very small and basic Ruby on Rails site, to a much more stable and sophisticated platform. Traffic profiles are unusual, with large surges at various points.

Being an advertising funded business, we needed to work with the BH team to optimise how pages worked with various ad technology. This meant coming up with ideas and approaches for new features, such as interactive quiz tools, integrated slideshows and community content.

• create new features or tools that a brand could sponsor
• build tools and processes to improve efficiency - such as BrandX being able to run a campaign for all of the month on all pages in skincare, and any search result or community forum content that relates to skincare. Except those pages already sold to BrandY for the next quarter. Oh, and nothing that recommends using BrandZ.
• come up with new ideas - such as how to monetise data reports and scaling

In 2015 BH was (acquired by Bauer Media), and integrated into their existing digital platform.

Bits we’re especially proud of:

• beautorium (loyalty pop up store)
• integrated sponsorship CMS
• dynamic slideshow tool
• interactive quiz generation CMS
• product & review pages
• Salon directory
• SEO structured CMS
• excellent platform uptime and performance