Hey y’all!
The Fandom Traffic Team Roundtable, held in the #stars-roundtable channel, was a success. It facilitated engaging discussions and valuable insights among Fandom Stars and the Traffic team behind Fandom's strategies. This roundtable provided a platform for Stars to connect with the team responsible for driving visitors, increasing engagement, and optimizing wiki visibility across Fandom.
The Traffic team members contributing to the discussion were Jenny Uchisawa, Senior Community Manager of Trust and safety; Jodie Eilers, Staff Product Designer; Jason Carney, Manager of Software Engineering; and Jase Sanders, Senior Manager of Product Management. Although they couldn’t attend the live discussion, they contributed important information throughout the planning process! Stars and staff brought their expertise and experience to the table, sharing their insights and strategies for enhancing the Fandom experience.
Stars seized the opportunity to pose thoughtful questions, delving into the team's processes, exploring avenues to strengthen communication, and uncovering other strategies employed by the Traffic team. The roundtable discussion was characterized by an atmosphere of transparency, with staff providing responses and engaging in lively exchanges with the Stars. They even explored opportunities to discuss the importance of accessibility and couldn’t pass up the chance to include their favorite traffic-related puns throughout the hour.
This summary captures key takeaways, including actionable insights and answers to the questions raised by Stars during the event. The summary served as a valuable resource for those who were unable to attend the live roundtable, allowing them to stay informed and engaged. Read on to learn more about what was discussed in detail below:
Question: What problems do you work on?
Jenny: This is a very light answer, but I love the explanation that was given to me when I first started working with the Traffic team: Google is big & strong, but it is always trying to figure out what to do & who to point search queries to. The Traffic team's goal is to try & wrangle in the wild Google to help it understand that the wikis y'all curate are the best source of info out there.
Question: Engagement requires engaging content, what advice do you for how users can create engaging content?
Jenny: This is so important & such a good question! One of the most important things is to understand what fans are asking when they are looking at the wiki - what kinds of questions are they putting into a search engine before they find the answer in the article, for example. The article should clearly answer those questions in a succinct way.
Here is a good tool to find out what people are asking about different IPs: https://answerthepublic.com/
Jodie: There’s so much I could say from the design perspective here too, but what we’ve been finding in some of the experiments, across the company, is that there might be interesting and engaging things on the page, but people aren’t always seeing them. So we have been doing experiments and research to figure out how to display the wiki page content to people in better ways, without having to use wiki page realestate. It's something the design team talks about constantly.
From the design perspective, if I'm talking about the page layout itself, it's not always where they are on the page, but how quickly a person can scan the page and their subconscious can parse the hierarchy. Things like adequate spacing and a type hierarchy that is really easy to see at a glance. And then we've found that images really do make a difference. For instance, there are some wikis that are quite sparce on images embedded in the text. For a user parsing the page, those images are like little rests, little pulls, to keep the user engaged and interested in the wall of text.
Perhaps only tangentially related to the current question, but have you looked into accessibility evaluation methods and noticed any positive correlations with your specific goals?
Jace: Great callout, and YES. Accessible content performs better for all users regardless of ability, be it organic or machine. Poor accessibility also tends to impact crawl ability and time on site in general.
Jodie: Accessibility is something the design team wants to focus on in 2025. We're hoping to create tools that will help make suggestions for accessible color combos and suggest image descriptions and such. We'll see if we can get to it. Crossing fingers!
How do you get your ideas? The support, yourself, other websites…? And, before the experiment, is there a pre-selection where you select your best ideas, and if yes, how does it work?
Jodie: Ideas come in many ways but they usually start with a problem that needs solved: like, maybe Google changed something and we need a solution to falling page views. (That’s a bad example but you get the idea). Maybe a better example: we’ve received a lot of feedback that people want a place to put pics of the Marvel stuff they collect. Those ideas get discussed in meetings between higher levels and PMs and engineering and design until we prioritize the best ones and start iterating on solutions. Solution ideas become design tickets and design starts working with data and research and engineering to make solutions that can really be made.
Jace:
Nice, and easy question about a small topic
How do you get your ideas
This can come from many places, the big ones usually fall into one of two buckets:
- analysis from the SEO team and Becky, seeing where we have gaps in how findable our content is
- attempting to see areas where we can identify a need from users, where we're not currently servicing that well, or another site might be owning that space, but we think we could do it better
before the experiment, is there a pre-selection where you select your best ideas, and if yes, how does it work?
Yep, all our ideas essentially go through a brainstorming session to refine ideas into something we can test. Then before we prioritise them, we do estimates on what the possible impact of them may be (+X% users, or +Y% additional page views etc). Engineering estimates the effort, and then we work together to rank based on possible impact vs complexity
Are there any similarities with the search engine team?
Jenny: There are - we collaborate with the SEO team a lot. They are amazing at keeping on top of Google's updates & movements.
Jace: The SEO team is one of our strongest internal business partners, they analyze and let us know where things can be improved, and we work together to prioritize and define solutions. Oh, and we then have to go implement them.
Overall, the Fandom Traffic Team Roundtable was a significant event that fostered a deeper connection between Fandom Stars and the team responsible for the strategies that bring visitors to Fandom Wikis! Stars left the roundtable empowered and informed. We look forward to reconnecting with the team in a few months to follow up on the progress, celebrate their wins, and share the significant progress Stars have made to their Wikis!
If you enjoyed this summary and want to engage in future roundtable discussions with Fandom Staff, learn more about the Fandom Stars program and apply here!