News Digital Networks Australia’s director of food Fiona Nilsson has announced the evolution of Australia’s largest food platform with the beta release of the new taste.com.au ahead of the site’s relaunch in January.
One of the biggest digital projects of the year, the full rebuild of taste.com.au involved the migration of 60,000 content pieces and six million pieces of user data. The significant investment and redevelopment of taste.com.au has been designed to evolve the brand into the next decade.
Nilsson said: “Taste.com.au was the first Australian food website of its kind when we launched 10 years ago. Through continuous innovation we’ve maintained our strong leadership position over time because our audience, the Australian home cook, is at the heart of everything we do. The level and scale of data and insights we have of the food market, along with Australian home cooks, allow us to consistently deliver the content they are seeking.
“This major investment in the site represents our commitment to growing our leadership position by evolving taste.com.au along with the needs of our audience. Launching in beta first enables our users to help shape the product features they would like to see ahead of our hard launch next year. Feedback from the millions of Australians who use taste.com.au every month ensures we will deliver the most sophisticated and intuitive consumer experience of any food website.
“For our advertisers, the changes on taste.com.au deliver a market-leading suite of new products and partnership opportunities. Adhesive ad formats on desktop and mobile will make it a leader in terms of viewability. We’ve increased our data-targeting abilities even further and will be launching a new native video platform to address the growing needs of advertisers seeking bespoke video content. This represents an enormous opportunity given our videos are uniquely connected to shoppable recipes.”
The new taste.com.au includes:
• Content that has been completely reorganised in four editorial verticals to reflect what’s important to Australian home cooks and what they are searching for most often – with individual home pages for “Quick & Easy”, “Healthy”, “Baking” and “Entertaining”.
• Unique in the food category, the new intuitive “smart search” feature makes suggestions as consumers type for relevant results across all content
• A full site redesign has refreshed taste.com.au with a clean and simple design featuring food as the hero
• New content templates from the 50,000 recipe pages with video-led cook-along recipes
• Investment in video, including 180 new videos forecast to deliver millions of views across top rated recipes
• Brand new member dashboards for the site’s one million plus members
Leading the food category for 10 years, taste.com.au has become an integral part of inspiring Australian home cooks to plan, shop, cook and share every day. The site was the first to take the consumer on the full journey from inspiration to recipe and to cart.
Taste.com.au reached a unique audience of 3.47 million in September with a margin of 2.04 million ahead of the closest competitor. Nielsen Digital Ratings Monthly, September 2016.