The insights and resources provided by Google tools made a huge impact on our ability to better serve our audience and grow our business, all at once.
Elisa Schmitz
Founder & CEO
Elisa Schmitz got the idea for 30Seconds.com, a Latina-led lifestyle site with content that takes half a minute to read or watch, when working as a digital-media executive. “I saw the impact of mobile on moms and how it created a sea change in their consumption of media,” explains the mother of three. “They needed information quickly, because mobile devices are interrupted all the time” by calls or texts. Since founding the site in 2011, Elisa and her staff of five, along with their team of 1,000 editorial contributors, have used Google Analytics to fine-tune content and expand it beyond parenting to cooking, wellness, and more. It was especially useful when people changed habits during the pandemic; Elisa could see, for example, that food and health content was outperforming travel content. “Google Analytics helped us make sense of it all,” Elisa says. “We used it to pivot toward what our consumers wanted and needed.”
As an entrepreneur, Elisa was juggling so much–from growing the site’s audience to forming partnerships with experts–that she struggled to set up a fully viable ad program. In the fall of 2020, she enlisted Google AdSense, which matches ads to site content based on relevance. The result was “a huge aha moment,” Elisa says. “With one line of code, I was able to monetize our ad inventory in a way that I couldn’t do on my own.” In the second half of 2021, the site’s revenue more than quadrupled. AdSense has freed up time for Elisa to collaborate with her global team using Google Workspace, and respond to insights from Google Analytics, producing more of the content consumers are demanding–and even to write a book. Traffic on the site has more than doubled to nearly 3 million unique users a month. “I don’t have to worry about ad revenue,” she says. “I can pour my heart, my energy into what I do best: creating compelling content and building community.”