Pete Ericson and Wally walk through Leaky Paywall's traffic analytics page, comparing channels like organic, direct, email, and social. Pinterest emerged as an unexpectedly strong source of both traffic and subscriptions compared to a year earlier.
Okay. We're jumping into the website traffic channels page and why don't you take it away, Wally?
Great. This is one of my favorite pages. I come from the world of analytics and diving into organic and the other channels that are driving traffic. So I love this one. Organic, direct, email, social and referral are our big hits here that we can look at. So we can see that, you know, organic is up, direct is down a little bit, email is up, but the really cool numbers are on the right in the, in the chart. So from here we can see not only the sessions that are being driven, but the subscriptions that are being driven as well and how they are trending. So we can see here that Google Organic drove 8,392 sessions, but that is 419 less than the previous period.
Right.
So you know it, we can kind of get a sense of what's happening. And it's also subscription has the same comparison view, which is great. Gotcha.
Now I only have the last seven days loaded up here. And just to confirm this period, comparison is for one year ago, same period.
Yes. So this one, this chart, we are comparing one year ago, same period.
Okay, cool.
Yeah, we can adjust these from, you know, if a client wanted to see it defaulted to period over period, that's fine. And we, we often do that for different folks.
Gotcha. So there's a little bit of flexibility in here too if, if somebody wants to tweak something.
Yeah, yeah. All right. Very good.
Yeah. So this looks like a great spot to take a look at, you know, where people are coming in and how those are converting subscriptions.
Correct.
And one of the things I learned from you earlier on was you'll get some unexpected traffic sources. Pinterest is what comes to mind that actually convert subscriptions and that from what I've learned here, that helps you focus on that particular source, essentially.
Correct. Correct. Pinterest, we have found for this brand, is a huge driver of traffic. And that is an often overlooked piece that I think publishers can leverage. So even if you push it out to the 30 day view, you're going to see Pinterest at the top of the list here for, for this particular publisher.
Yeah, I just, I just shipped it to 30.
Yeah. In a 30 day view, the subs are right up there for, for a source that is, you know, sort of set it and forget it and you put your info up there and, and people find it and, you know, it's all about hitting the paywall. So. Right on that to be an effective, effective platform that really came out from these stats. You know, we saw it rising and that was the real reason behind trying to drive it further.
Nice. All right, Anything else about the channels view?
No, this one's fairly self explanatory as well. We have a nice sessions graph at the bottom that just kind of shows us, you know, year over year, how they're trending. Just below where you're highlighting Pete.
Oh, yeah.
So that one's nice. It just gives you an idea of where we are, where we were and how things are trending.
Nice.
From Donations to Subscriptions: How KB Independent Built a Sustainable Local News Model
