Case study: How Hello! pulled ‘new levers’ to turn Google threat into huge audience growth
Sophie Vokes-Dudgeon, Chief Content Officer at Hello! Magazine, says Maro helped her team transform their editorial strategy across platforms.
Hello! Magazine has been a fixture of British media since 1988, when it brought the celebrity-access journalism of its sister title ¡Hola! — already an institution in Spain since 1944 — to UK newsstands, launching with an exclusive interview and photoshoot with Princess Anne.
Nearly forty years on, it remains family-run, with editions reaching readers across dozens of countries, and is widely credited with pioneering the celebrity weekly category in the UK.
Like every major publisher, much of Hello!'s digital audience came via Google, until a sharp drop in referral traffic over the past two years forced a rethink. The new strategy was grounded in what makes the brand distinctive: quality, access-led journalism that readers seek out, wherever they are.
That meant meeting audiences across Apple News, MSN, NewsBreak, SmartNews and more, while also driving deeper audience relationships via their own website.
Maro gave Chief Content Officer Sophie Vokes-Dudgeon and her team the visibility to do that with confidence: a single daily view of performance across every platform, which helped Hello! grow rapidly — even doubling engagement on some channels.
At a Glance
Client: Hello! Magazine (part of HOLA Group)
Challenge: A sharp drop in Google referral traffic, and no clear way to see what was working — for which writer, on which platform, at what return
Solution: Daily, performance data across the Hello! website, Apple News, MSN, NewsBreak, SmartNews and moreImpact: Audience engagement growth across all syndication platforms, with some growing by as much as 102%. Revenue grew to match, and editorial and audience teams realigned around the same daily numbers
The Challenge: Knowing What's Working, Where
As Sophie Vokes-Dudgeon, Chief Content Officer at Hello!, explains: "When you're writing for website traffic, you're optimising against one metric. Suddenly you're looking at page views across half a dozen platforms, each behaving differently from week to week."
"We needed that data presented clearly enough that we could see, by writer and by platform, what was actually working."
The Solution: One Clear Daily View Across Every Platform
Hello! rolled out Maro across Apple News, MSN and NewsBreak, which ranked stories simply — top performers, mid-table, and the ones working nowhere at all. That surfaced an immediate win: a handful of stories every day were underperforming everywhere, making it an easy call to redirect this effort to areas where their content was generating greater impact.
The bigger shift came when the team moved from monthly, after-the-fact reporting to a live daily view. Having this simplified view of performance with Maro reframed how the team thought about reach versus return.
"Every single day I know: have we hit, have we not hit? And the impact on commissioning is huge."
The Impact: Growth Across the Board Thanks To A ‘Brand-First’ Content Strategy
Since adopting Maro, Hello! have seen clear results:
Page-view increases of between 33 to 102% across aggregator platforms, depending on the channel, with revenue growing to match over the past six months
Engaged time with UK audiences increased 46% on Hello!’s own site versus the start of the Google Discover decline, following a refocus in content strategy towards what makes Hello! special
Top performing content went up 12%, while bottom performing content dropped 11%. Maro’s clear traffic light system has helped guide more deliberate commissioning with better results
Editorial and audience teams aligned around the same daily numbers, creating a shared sense of mission among a large and multi-functional editorial team
The headline isn't growth at any cost - decisions on commissioning are grounded in data but also whether a subject “feels like a Hello! story”. This avoids the platform dependencies that have caused publishers challenges in previous years, and supports Hello!’s efforts to grow meaningful direct relationships with audiences through their VIP membership programme.
"Once bitten, twice shy. Before, we'd ask 'what's driving traffic?' Now the question is always 'does this make sense for the brand?' first," she explained.
"Journalists like data — but they're not going to dig in the way an audience team will. If it's being presented to them on a daily basis and we're all celebrating the same wins, you start being on the same team."
In their own words…
"We've got more levers to pull now, which makes the whole approach feel a lot safer than relying on any single channel ever did."
— Sophie Vokes-Dudgeon, Chief Content Officer, Hello! Magazine
Want to see how Maro can help your newsroom pull the right levers across every platform?
