Dive Brief:

• Coca-Cola is revamping parts of its strategy for branded content website Journey, which replaced the company's corporate website three years ago, as organic reach and traffic from social media platforms like Facebook are on the decline.
• Journey, which has generated upwards of half of Coca-Cola's social media growth over the last three years, is switching gears to include more "fairly affordable" paid traffic methods, according to Doug Busk, Coca-Cola's director of digital and social media communications. "[Paid mechanisms] have more than made up for a challenging environment for brand publishers," Busk told Digiday.
• "On Journey, which is staffed by about a dozen reports and editors, articles run from straight corporate news (a new bottle) to health and wellness articles that don’t even mention the brand," Digiday reported.

Dive Insight:

The brand has developed its own version of the ROI measurement for its articles, which Coca-Cola calls EOI, or "expressions of interest."

EOI is "a combination of traditional metrics including pageviews, bounce rates, read rates, time spent, sharing and commenting. The formula also tries to cut out repeat posts or engagement stemming purely from Coke’s enormous social media presence," according to Digiday.

With Facebook's referral traffic falling for top publishers (a 32% decline so far this year), Coca-Cola is looking beyond this traditional method and shifting focus to publishing directly on platforms. Busk says the company is keeping a eye on "alternative publishing environments" like Apple News, Pocket, and Facebook’s Instant Articles. Currently, Instant Articles is only open to traditional publishers, but this could be an area of expansion for Coca-Cola and other major brands in the future.

"We’re on a verge of what I find is a renaissance of publishing and publishers. We’re going to filter against where can deliver the best quality experience for readers, so if we can’t deliver a quality experience, then we won’t get on it," Busk told Digiday.

With versions of Journey currently available in 18 markets, Busk says that Coca-Cola plans to double that number over the next year.