The Sun boosts engagement with enhancements to its puzzle offering

The Sun Puzzles on Smartphone
The enhancements we've introduced to the puzzles pages on The Sun have seen exactly the results we were looking for. The user experience improvements, refreshed design and a wider selection of puzzles, has given our puzzle players reasons to come back more frequently and made it easier for them to interact with more games.
Liz Clow, Group Head of Product at The Sun

It’s well known that metrics count for a lot these days and finding a way to positively impact the key analytics on your digital products is essential.  

Working with Liz Clow, Group Head of Product at The Sun, Digital Marmalade was engaged to refresh and enhance the existing puzzle experience on www.thesun.co.uk, with a clear objective of boosting key metrics – namely dwell time, page views and views per visitor.

We quickly set about brainstorming and sketching some ideas which would lift engagement, whilst keeping integration simple with a view to delivering a solution in just a few weeks!

The key here was not to drive more traffic, but to encourage more engagement from the existing, loyal user base.  With this in mind a combination of optimised specific puzzle landing pages, enhanced completion screens and weekly puzzle archives was decided upon.

One month after the launch of these enhancements, the analytics told us that the approach had clearly worked!

The redesign increased page views per unique user by an incredible 72%! From roughly the same user base, we delivered an increase of 24.7% unique views, which translated into a whopping 114% increase of actual page views.

A bounce rate of only 22%, an extra 1.6 pages per visitor and almost a minute of additional dwell time further show that when you marry the right insight with the right knowledge you can drive some significant ROI. 

Liz had this to say, "The enhancements we've introduced to the puzzles pages on The Sun have seen exactly the results we were looking for.  The user experience improvements, refreshed design and a wider selection of puzzles, has given our puzzle players reasons to come back more frequently and made it easier for them to interact with more games."

We love working on short, focused challenges like this - especially when the ball hits the back of the net!

The Sun Puzzles on Desktop
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