33 | Subscriber Behavior: What insights do you need?

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Today we are going to talk about insights. We're going to talk about data that you can track with your subscribers. And so this is Paywall Podcast. This is episode number 33. I am Pete here with Tyler from Paywall Project once again, and we're going to dive deep into what kind of data should you be looking at to make informed decisions about your publication? And I want to, I just want to kind of kick this off because there are lots of different data needs and we could really, we could really go deep into all sorts of squirrely rabbit holes. But I want to keep this one sort of foundational and simple, and I do that based on experience. We built a product over a year ago with Google's data studio where we, we called it Insights. And we pulled, we were pulling in data from, oh my goodness, from, of course, Google, from social, from Leaky Paywall, from other, you know, other third party sites into a portal and tracking the data, like what, you know, what were subscribers doing? You know, what was Facebook doing and Google doing? And what are newsletters, what are, what are they doing as far as, you know, conversions and things like that? It's all really important and all really good, you know, what articles were readers reading, subscribers reading? All good stuff. But what was interesting is that for most of, most of our publisher base that we, and we set this up for some publishers, but most publishers found that it was almost too much information is really what it boiled down to if you're, and it's a, you know, it was really pretty brilliant setup. And if you have a, you know, if you have a marketing agency like 50 Fish Wally, 50 Fish guiding you through the data and helping you with campaigns, that's, that's, that's brilliant. Like, that's the perfect solution. But if you don't, what do you really need? Like what, what are sort of the foundational things? And the thing that we heard over and over again was what articles are converting paid subscribers. Like, that was that sort of golden kernel of information that we heard publishers really wanted. And it's something you could look at on a daily or weekly basis and not be overwhelmed by the data. So we sort of backtracked over this past year. And we also Google, as many of you know, Google, made some changes to Google Analytics, as in they're going to cancel it. So that wasn't great. So we, as a company, we decided, look, we just need to build our own standalone system that's not dependent on some of these big platforms. And because we're, we're. Hey, hey. We're using WordPress, we're working natively, we can pull this data. So the thing I want to lean into and start with here is, okay, if you're using leaky paywall, you have Insights already built in here as included, and you can take a look at them. So I think, I'm sure. Am I sharing my screen?

You are. Yep.

Okay, good. All right. So I have a. I have a real Insights dashboard, and I have hopefully hidden everything to protect the innocent. Who. This is someone that. It's not small boats, which we, I know we talk a lot about. But this is, this is another publisher, I will say this is a news publisher. Okay. So you can kind of get a little bit of a feel for it. And we're tracking, and we're, we're tracking things like, you know, total revenue, new paid subscribers, new free subscribers, and gift subscribers over a time period. And this box here hides the time period. You can just select, okay, I want 24 hours, I want a week, I want four weeks, I want three months. And we'll, we'll expand on this as we go. But the thing I would really want to talk about is the top content leading to conversion. And this is something that I recommend you go look at. If you go into leaky paywall, just, just look for the Insights menu under Leaky paywall in the WordPress dashboard. And this page will load up. And so we have sort of two main categories of conversions. We have what articles converted a paid subscription and what articles converted a free registration. Right? Most publishers are setting up the free registration to go along with the paid subscription. If you're not, see our 31 previous episodes about it. But. And this little number here in parentheses will show you how many times, how many subscribers. This particular article, this is just the URL to the article converted. And so in this case, there were two paid, paid subscribers over this period of time that came in because of this specific article. They were on this article, they got the message that said, hey, upgrade, you know, to. To get full access. And this was the article that finally pushed them over and said, okay, I need to pay to subscribe. And then the free registration is exactly the same thing. This particular article over here triggered seven people to actually register for free to get a little extra access and get on the newsletter. So these, these two things are, I mean the article content you produce, obviously this is the, the core of your, of your business. And it's important to know what articles are really resonating with, with your paid subscribers and certainly converting paid subscriptions. And what's interesting is that your most popular articles from what we see is not, do not necessarily convert to what actually people are willing to pay for. And typically it's the long form deep articles sort of that those niche articles that you can't get anywhere else that convert the paid subscriptions. And so a really good example is we have a pretty good news publisher that their workflow and this might be typical for, for, for you as a news publisher, but they, what they do is they have a morning meeting and they look at the previous 24 hours and they look at okay, what articles were the most popular articles over the, the, the previous 24 hours with our subscribers. And if you look and if you, if you change this drop down to 24 hours, you'll, you'll see all the free registrations that came in over those past 24 hours on those specific articles. Same with paid subscriptions that those are a fair amount of data points to decide. Okay. In this, this particular news publisher they decide what to, what articles to. To follow up with essentially. So like what, what am I going to write next like today based on what articles were really resonating with readers yesterday. So that's a, that's a great use of this, this type of insights. If you're a magazine publisher, it's the same philosophy. What articles are actually triggering free registrations? Those are the ones that are really tipping people over the edge to register. What articles are creating paid subscriptions create, you know, writing follow up articles. Okay. Another thing I'll mention is ratios here. This is. Ratios are really important and this will give you an idea of if you set up a free registration. What we find with publishers is the day they set up the free registration is the day their newsletter starts to grow pretty quickly. Like the, the, the. If you're tight with your free registration, let's say you give away one article a month and then you have to register, which is what we do recommend most of the time. Maybe a couple of articles and then you have to register. Those registrations come in pretty fast and what will happen is a percentage of those registrations will convert to paid and you can look at the numbers and get a feel for, okay, well, if I, if I have a hundred free registrations, how many paid subscribers do I get? Do I get 5? Do I get 10? Do I get 20? Like, what's the percentage? And the percentage works out over time. Because the whole, the whole idea here, of course, is the free registration. Someone's not ready to pay. Some are, a few are, but most are not. And then maybe a month, two months, three months, 24 hours, whatever later, you know, they keep seeing your upgrade message and they're ready to pay. So in this case with this publisher, you can see there's, there's a, quite a, quite a strong relationship between free registrations and paid subscribers. It's a very, very high ratio. And you'll, you'll get a feel for your own content and your own audience, what that ratio is. And that's super interesting to look at. So when, when someone asks us, hey, should I, should I advertise on Facebook? Right? Like, should I promote our publication on Facebook or maybe LinkedIn if it's, if it's B2B. Well, what we usually say is, sure, you can test it, but what do you really, what are you really promoting? Well, what you're promoting is something that will get you an email address, right? So you might be giving away a number of articles. You might have a, a download, you might have a newsletter. You have, you have something of value that if somebody registers for free here, you will collect that email address. And then what you can do is, you know, how much you spend. Let's, let's pick on Facebook for a second. You know how much you spend on Facebook, you'll see how many free registrations you come in, and you'll, and you'll know what the ratio is. Is, is it 5%, is it 10%, is it 50%? You know, what's the number? Typically it's, you know, more like 5 or 10%, but it'll give you a, a real, a real picture in terms of, okay, if I spend X amount of dollars in advertising to drive traffic in and I get X amount of free registrations, I know I'm going to convert a percentage of those to paid subscribers.

Yeah, I just want to make a point, something that happened a couple of days ago. I had a publisher who took their free registration and essentially made a hard paywall in that you had to sign up to see any content. And this was great because a number of people signed up for free, but the ratio to free to paid was not there as it was before when she was asking for one free article and then sign up for free and then you get a little bit more and then you're prompted with the paid message versus signing up for free and getting a couple of articles and, and then seeing the paid message. And I think the value of the reader, the, the potential for them to pay goes down when you force everyone to do it because they might want to read it, but that doesn't mean they're interested in what you have to offer.

That's interesting.

So it was really interesting for me because it was the first time I'd seen that. I mean, I think we've, we've known for a long time that the, you know, if you make it sort of a hard paywall and you require everyone to register, of course you're going to blow up your newsletter. But the value of those subscribers, like are they potentially going to pay? Maybe not so much versus, versus giving them, Giving everyone at least one free article and then asking them to sign up for free. It sort of screens folks who might potentially pay in the future.

Yeah, it makes total sense because you have your very, very casual, never pay users that would read an article and then run into the free registration on the second article and be like, eh, I don't want to bother. But if you're forcing somebody to read to register on the first article, now you're dealing with people who are like, yeah, I kind of want to just read this article and then go away forever. That's right, they register.

Yeah. I mean if you want to blow your newsletter up and have a ton of people to sign up, that's one way to do it. But don't count on those, those signups to be super into what you're offering.

Yeah. And those are almost, those are almost like zombie subscribers. You know, you get, you have these super aggressive like newsletter pop up on your website. Yeah. And you're just taking any email address that.

Yeah. And they're not as valuable not only to you but to your advertisers. If you plan on sponsoring content and your newsletters. Like, you know, keep, keep that in mind.

Well, keep us, keep us posted on what happens with that.

Yeah, yeah, I'll let you know.

I, I imagine Google traffic has dropped a bit and social sharing has probably dropped a bit.

Yeah. And this particular publisher isn't as focused.

On.

Like advertising on like display ads on the site. They're primarily driven by donations and also by subscriptions and other things outside of the site.

Gotcha.

But yeah, it was very interesting to see the flood of, of free signups, but not necessarily high value signups.

Yeah, that's, that's, that seems a little risky to me.

Yeah, yeah.

Say maybe they have a strong brand. They can get away with that. They do.

Yeah.

So. Okay, interesting. So a couple more things I wanted to talk about. Let's finish up on ratios. This number that you see here. New gift subscribers. One of the things that if you, if you, if you have a giftable publication, like a news site, would be giftable to give to the subscription to someone else. What we've learned from the magazine space, which would apply to all publishers that have giftable publications, is that your gift subscriptions should be running about 20% of your total subscriptions. And if it's not, then there's, there's some, there's some upside for you or you can really lean in and start promoting gift subscriptions. It's something that's easily overlooked. I mean, you have, you're going after new subscribers and you, you really focused on those new subscribers. But what about leveraging your existing subscribers to give gifts? What about really paying attention to your holiday times and you know, all, all the major holidays and running specific campaigns to get those gifts going and really, really focus on gifts. You know, don't, don't promote anything else but the gift during those times. I'm not a, I'm not a gift subscription expert. So, you know, there are, there are other people who are very, very well versed on those kinds of promotions. But I'm just sharing with you the ratios. And 20% is a stretch goal for sure, but it is absolutely achievable. And if you look at your own gift subscription percentage, as most of the publishers we deal with, it's lower than that. So I think there's some upside there. Okay, so that's the thing on ratios and attribution. So where are subscribers coming from? That's, that's the last thing I wanted to chat about a little bit. So that's something that we was talking with Jeremy this week about. Okay, what's next for insights? And, and that's, that's high on the list. So we're, we're gonna, we're we're looking at bringing in attribution information and we have actually a pretty creative way to that we're going to do that, but we're going to just keep it a little bit of a secret for now and so you can get a feel for. Okay, where are new subscribers actually coming from? Now the, I think the cool thing and this Is Tyler kind of want to pick your brain a little bit too? Is. We know that social attribution, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn varies widely depending on the year, depending on how tired people get of Twitter or how tired people get of.

Facebook or just how the algorithm swings given one week to the next.

Yeah, exactly. Which you don't want to be dependent on. And that's why the newsletter is so important. We actually just finished recording a webinar with newsletter Glue, who's talking about newsletter strategy, which we'll. We'll post up to see. That was really interesting. But anyway, the newsletter becoming so important because especially with a free registration strategy and you're driving people back to your website, it typically is the number one source of paid subscribers, can be number two, but often is, if a publisher is really leaning in on that strategy, the newsletter does become the number one source. So, you know, attribution is sort of solved already with a strong free registration, strong newsletter strategy. But Google is another strong source of, of leads. People come in and they're. They're searching for something. Google pulls up one of your articles. That person clicks your article, lands on your website. That's a, That's a big chunk.

Yeah. And for local. For the local news publishers that I manage, you know, several dozen of them, most of their traffic, even though they post on social media religiously, most of their traffic is coming from Google and direct these days.

Yeah. You know where you're going because you live in a community.

That's right.

Go straight to the, to the news site and look it up.

Yep.

So what about Facebook? Is, is Facebook. I mean, is it still strong? I know it was strong. We had a news publisher that claimed. And it was a big, big publisher, regional publisher. They claimed Facebook was their number one source. This was, this was over a year ago. So it's a little outdated. Yeah.

And this trend has actually just started. At least I started noticing it when I was looking through analytics of different publishers and noticing that Google and Direct were kind of, you know, together. I would say it's still in the top three or four, for sure. People are still finding news on Facebook regardless of how they've manipulated their algorithm to show news or not show news or whatever, whatever they're doing, who knows? But it's, it's still. It's still an important part, but it's becoming less important over time, which is music to my ears.

Yeah. I talked to a publisher recently who, who said. And he was, he was very much. He was in the sporting news world. He was very Much building the Facebook likes, you know, really working on getting a big Facebook following. And he basically said, I'm just so sad that two years ago I didn't start really leaning in on my email list and building, building the newsletter up.

There's like no value in getting likes, like really on a Facebook page other than, I guess, having a lot of likes, I don't know, having some reach, I guess, when you publish something. But the algorithms are, are kind of dictating a lot of what people see. So it's not. Just because you have 20,000 people that like your Facebook page doesn't mean that when you post content that, you know, even a quarter of them, maybe even, you know, a tenth of 1% will see that your content.

So yeah, that's the control you don't have right over. So any, any big platform like that. Yeah, I, I feel like Facebook has changed. I feel like Facebook has changed their algorithm for the third time in, in regards to news, you know, showing news publishing. They, they, they embraced news publishers and then they said, no, we're not that interested. They embraced them again and said, wait a second. We, you know, we want your, we want your money and. Which is really what it's all about. They want to.

Sure. And some of it is around legislation, potential legislation that might regulate the space a bit and be a bit more like Australia in the way that they deal with local news publishers. So I think there's a lot of things that they're trying to weigh to decide what to do next. But ultimately, if you're a news publisher, you should be focused on your own ecosystem and growing that newsletter as fast as possible.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Watch, watch your, watch your Insights Dashboard. Grow those free registrations and then watch the ratio between your free and your paid and, and that'll, that'll motivate you to, to go, go seeking more free newsletter subscriptions like that and that. Which is the right strategy. The bigger your list, the stronger your reach. And you know, and advertising too. You know, a big, a big targeted list like that. And if you're, you know, think about it. If you're, if people are registering on your site, you started the relationship there, you know that there's more than a fleeting interest with your readership. It's a better, you have a better list, better advertising exposure for your, for your sponsors. So they're willing to pay you more for that, especially with a bigger, a bigger list. So there's some, there's some benefits there.

Yeah, I think it's super helpful too. To see these paid and free conversion data points just because it. From a local news perspective, I think it helps them decide, you know, or at least display. Look, this is, this is what's happening because of content that you're producing. And it's, I think, helpful as a journalist to know that this is what people want to see and this is what they're, what they're paying for and this is what they're signing up for free for. Should it dictate everything that you do? No, but it's certainly a good insight on what's happening and what the local community is most interested in.

Absolutely, absolutely. That's a good rap, Tyler. I would say too, because we are evolving our insights. If you have a request for Data point, please let us know because we're actively developing and we want to hear from more of you in terms of what you actually want to put to work with your publication as far as the data goes, something you could. That you would find useful. All right, so thanks for listening. That was insights. We'll catch you later.

Thanks for listening to the Paywall podcast. If you'd like to get in touch to discuss subscription Strategy, go to LeakyPaywall.com see you next time.