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Glamour expands mobile push with site relaunch

Condé Nast?s Glamour magazine is ramping up its digital initiatives by relaunching its Web site with a design that uniformly loads content across mobile and PC screens.

Condé Nast?s Glamour has revamped the site after seeing 25 percent of the publisher's traffic coming from mobile devices. In particular, access to social media plays a large role in the new redesign.

?We had a mobile site that was optimized and a successful product, but like a lot of mobile sites it was rudimentary, and from a brand perspective it was not consistent to the desktop site,? said Mike Hofman, digital managing director at Glamour, New York.

?A lot of the growth that we are seeing is from mobile, and we see it as being a pivotal part of our audience,? he said.

Refreshed look
According to Mr. Hofman, 18 months ago Glamour was seeing eight percent of traffic coming from mobile devices compared to the 25 percent that the publisher sees now.

Additionally, Glamour.com has doubled its online traffic year-over-year, currently bringing in 5.5 million monthly unique visitors.

When the publisher originally began planning for the redesign, the company knew that it wanted to take a responsive approach, meaning that it was designing for four different types of screens ? smartphones, tablets in both portrait and landscape mode and desktops.

The smartphone version was the first to gel for the brand and helped impact the designs for the other three screens.

Social media also plays a big role in the redesign, which often also overlaps with mobile.

For instance, Instagram?s core audience of beauty and fashion enthusiasts matches Glamour?s demographic. Glamour has roughly 150,000 followers on Instagram.

Additionally, images have been blown up to fit the size of mobile devices. Pinterest sharing is enabled in every photo on the site.

Retailer Bebe is the launch sponsor of the Web revamp. On Dec. 6, a campaign from the brand will go live across Glamour?s Web, smartphone and tablet platforms. This is the first time that an advertiser has bought space across all three of Glamour?s digital properties at once.

As consumes continue to digest content on multiple devices, Mr. Hofman said that he expects more advertisers to buy cross-screen campaigns.

A slide show on Glamour's new mobile site

Mobile publisher
Glamour has been active in the mobile space for a while.

For example, the company ran a mobile bar code campaign in the September 2011 issue that encouraged consumers to follow brands? social media accounts by scanning a QR code. The Friends and Fans campaign generated 512,339 reader engagements (see story).

Similarly, Glamour partnered with L?Oreal earlier this year on a campaign to let users shop Lancôme and Yves Saint Laurent products from inside New York taxi cabs.

The company worked with SpyderLynk on the initiative, and in June claimed that 25 percent of consumers who snapped the mobile bar codes bought the products (see story).

When it comes to Web traffic, Mr. Hofman said that the publisher sees particularly strong mobile traffic in the evenings and on weekends.

Going forward, the executive expects to see shorter visits with more repeat traffic.

For example, when Glamour performed user testing on the new site, participants continually pulled out their mobile devices after the testing session was complete.

?Usually what would happen is that a user filled out the survey and then pulled out her phone,? Mr. Hofman said.

?Watching that behavior happen again and again shows that it?s important for us to focus on mobile as a core part of our online strategy,? he said.

Final Take
Lauren Johnson is associate reporter on Mobile Marketer, New York