If you manage several websites, “grow the audience” leaves a lot of the decision unfinished. Which audience? Coming for what? And where should the next week of editorial or product work go?
My work at Ziff Davis spanned brands including PCMag, Mashable, and Offers.com. I drove product direction geared toward audience growth and editorial strategy tied to commerce content, with monetization through affiliate commerce, advertising, and media partners. We also bought three Black Friday sites in two years.
The audience plan affects the product people use, the content a team has to maintain, and the way the business earns money. A target for total visits doesn't settle any of those choices.
I'd want a portfolio review to end with a decision about where to put people and what they should improve. To get there, we need to keep the individual businesses visible.
The same topic can serve different readers
Consider a hypothetical portfolio with a product-review site and a deal site. Both cover laptops. On the review site, a reader is comparing battery life, performance, and price to decide which laptop fits their work. On the deal site, a reader may already know the model and want to find an available offer.
It's tempting to look at the overlapping topic and assign one team to make one definitive laptop page. But which reader would that page serve? A detailed comparison that buries the current offer creates work for the deal shopper. A list of discounts doesn't resolve the buyer's uncertainty about which machine to choose.
Before combining the work, I'd inspect a small set of pages from each property: what brings people in, what the page promises, what it helps them do, and what they do next. Search queries and on-site behavior would give us clues. I'd also read the pages. A visitor leaving a review without clicking a merchant link may still have received a useful answer; an analytics event can't tell us that by itself.
If the pages serve distinct needs, I'd preserve the editorial difference while looking for work the teams could share. Product specifications, merchant feeds, and availability checks are candidates. The comparison and the offer presentation still need someone responsible for the reader they're serving.
If both sites make essentially the same promise, use the same information, and reach the same audience, I'd be more willing to consolidate production. Even then, combining production and moving public pages are separate decisions. I'd want to understand existing traffic, returning readers, and the value of each destination before changing where people land.
A growth total can point you at the wrong work
The reporting question follows the editorial question. Suppose, in this hypothetical portfolio, visits to comparison articles increase while visits to deal pages decline. Total traffic could rise even as affiliate revenue falls. That doesn't establish that the new traffic is poor or that the comparison content should be cut. It tells us to separate the change in audience mix from what happened within each part of the business.
I would start with visits and revenue by property and page type, using comparable periods. For seasonal properties, I'd compare the same stage of the shopping season rather than treating an ordinary week and Black Friday week as interchangeable. I'd keep revenue from affiliate, advertising, and media partnerships identifiable instead of folding them into one rate and asking it to explain everything.
Then I'd follow the part that changed. If deal-page visits are steady but affiliate revenue falls, the next questions concern merchant clicks, completed purchases where reporting is available, commission terms, and whether the offers are still available. Those findings lead to different work. A broken merchant link needs a fix. An expired offer needs an update. A commission change may require revisiting which coverage the business can afford to maintain.
If deal-page visits fall while the revenue earned from the remaining visits holds roughly steady, I'd investigate distribution and demand before asking the team to redesign the pages. If comparison traffic accounts for the growth, I'd assess that content against its own purpose, including advertising value and whether readers return, rather than assume it should behave like a deal page.
The useful output is an explanation specific enough to assign work. “Revenue per visit is down” is a signal. “The decline is concentrated in deal pages whose offers are unavailable” would support an immediate editorial and product response, if the page inspection and reporting actually showed it.
Make the next investment small enough to understand
Say the inspection finds that both teams manually check many of the same merchant offers. I'd consider a shared availability feed, with each team retaining control over which offers it recommends and how it presents them. The case for that work would be fewer stale offers and less repeated checking. It wouldn't require making the sites look alike.
The next week of product work could go toward testing whether a shared feed is useful for one group of pages, before committing to a larger build. I'd record how much checking the editors currently do, how frequently unavailable offers remain visible, and what happens when the feed disagrees with the merchant page. Someone needs to own those exceptions. Otherwise, we've moved the work into a queue that nobody manages.
Afterward, I'd look for less manual work and more accurate pages, alongside merchant-click and revenue trends. If accuracy improves but editor time doesn't fall, there may still be a reader benefit, but the promised efficiency hasn't arrived. If clicks rise while revenue doesn't, I'd investigate the merchant and purchase data before calling the change a commercial success.
There are also cases where a shared system isn't worth building. One small property with a short seasonal peak may be cheaper to maintain manually. The decision depends on how often the work repeats, what errors cost, and whether another team can actually use what we're building. A portfolio gives us options; it doesn't make every integration worthwhile.
For the next planning meeting, I'd bring one proposed allocation of effort: the property and reader need we're prioritizing, the work we're funding, what we're postponing, and what evidence would cause us to change course. That makes the tradeoff visible to the people who have to execute it.
A portfolio total can tell us whether the whole business grew. The leadership work is deciding which part deserves the next investment, and being clear enough about the reason that we can tell whether we were right.