As the publishing giant behind Grazia, Cosmopolitan, and Time Out in the Middle East, ITP Media Group dominates the digital sector with 39+ titles and over 104million monthly users. To maintain its competitive edge, the enterprise sought to refine its WordPress infrastructure with an update of its Piano integration, ensuring seamless performance and actionable data at scale.
As a leading analytics and personalisation platform, Piano delivered a robust foundation for audience engagement and monetisation for ITP, however as the publisher’s online ambitions grew, so did the opportunity to fine-tune the integration for even greater speed, precision, and flexibility. By partnering with Big Bite earlier this year, ITP has now elevated its setup across three key areas, resulting in smarter insights, lightning-fast page loads, and sustainable agility.
Boosting engagement with optimised performance
With audiences demanding instant access, every millisecond counts. Our engineers conducted a thorough performance review of the existing Piano setup, identifying opportunities to streamline script loading and execution.
By shifting to asynchronous script loading, we removed bottlenecks in the critical rendering path, accelerating page loads without sacrificing functionality. We also implemented a precision-tagging system, ensuring all content properties (such as paywall status) were properly classified before Piano Composer was even activated. Additionally, we put strategic delays in place for non-essential Composer functions, maintaining all the personalisation power while eliminating unnecessary processing weight to deliver ITP’s premium content faster while preserving every bit of Piano’s analytical depth.
Precision control for maximum efficiency
Rather than rely entirely on Piano’s immense automation, we put in place precision manual triggers for key actions, streamlining the number of processes being carried out on every page load. This gives ITP’s team surgical control over when and where key actions fire, and means that the Piano system only activates when it truly matters, lightening page loads without compromising the platform’s power. For example, ITP now has the ability to set any post to a nominated access level such as ‘hard paywall’ restrictions for premium content, reducing the logic Piano needs to operate.
Performant personalisation
One of the greatest strengths of Piano is its ability to create deeply personalised experiences, so to leverage this functionality without derailing performance, we restructured configurations into lean modular components. As well as enhancing speed without sacrificing sophistication, this approach also makes ongoing updates easier, empowering ITP’s teams to adapt quickly to new audience needs.
Transforming moments into momentum
Every user action – from viewing a paywall to completing a subscription – holds untapped potential, so by weaving Piano’s callback system into ITP’s wider publishing ecosystem, we’ve transformed these moments into real-time opportunities.
By hooking up the Piano integration with third-party APIs, ITP’s digital setup facilitates real-time analytics updates, dynamic UI adjustments, and seamless newsletter subscriptions, giving the media brand a living network of data-driven insights that evolves with every visitor.
Looking to improve engagement at scale?
Find out how a streamlined Piano integration could improve your publishing performance.
