Publisher Mastermind: What reader Insights do you need as a publisher?

Welcome everybody to our third ever publisher Mastermind. Today we're going to discuss Insights. And the word of the day is Actionable Insights. So you as a publisher, you get data. What can you do with the data to help reduce churn, build subscriptions, build your audience? These are very important questions and we've gotten down this path a bit and we have some pretty super cool plan. So in this session we're going to, I'm going to show you three things. We're going to talk about what we have and how to put it to work. Right now, today we're going to give you a sneak preview of what we're actually building, what Jeremy's building right now. And then third, we're going to open up for a bit of a survey on things we have on our roadmap as far as actionable data for publishers and to get a feel for what should we work on first. Okay, so everybody see my screen? Let's jump into it. Yep. Okay, just a little backstory. Dan, I know you're familiar with this. We started with a couple of years ago with Google's Data Studio and we built a fancy dashboard and we did have some actionable data in there, but we, we essentially ended up, and what our publishers told us was we were producing a little too much data. I think it was, I think they were stunned with the amount of data, didn't really know what to do with it. So this time around, now that we have our own Insights Dashboard, we're, we're, we've been learning a lot, we're stepping carefully and we want to prioritize the things that really help publishers move their game forward. The other thing of course is Google decided to cancel Google Analytics, which blew out some of the data anyway. So that's a whole other story. Okay, so let's jump into our Insights Dashboard first. This is something you may have seen, but it's always worth going over it. So if you hop into Leaky Paywall and you hit Insights Menu, you're going to get this dashboard first. And this, this dashboard is super important, especially if you're running a free registration and you should be if you're not, because that's how you build your audience and build paid subscribers. That's another mastermind. I think that's our first one. But this red line here is essentially, this is, I think, a 30 day period of free registered readers that are coming in. And the blue line is the paid subscribers that are actually paying and signing up. And what you'll find when you get that free registration going is the peaks and valleys of the free registration lines up with the peaks and valleys of your paid subscriptions. Okay. Pre registration. The whole point is getting that email address, get them on your newsletter, introduce a little piece of friction with a login email and password, and now you have yourself a super casual reader, as I like to call them, that may very well pay for you down the road. So we have some subscriber data and the thing that I like to look at is what is the ratio of your free registered readers versus your paid subscribers? And you'll figure out what a rate a good ratio is. Is it 5% of your free registered readers turn into paid subscribers? Is it 10%? Is it less? Is it more? And you'll get a, you'll get a sense for a baseline and as you do promotions for things, you can watch this and I, I will suggest right off the top that 10% is a good number to shoot for and doable. Okay. The next tab on our insights is all about your subscription levels, how many subscribers you have per level. Pretty standard stuff. Not sure there's anything to really dive into here, but it's of course good to see how, what the spread is of your subscribers. The next tab is your content tab. This is a super important tab, a critical tab, because this shows you what's converting, what articles on your website are converting, both free and paid. So if we look at the paid side here, we see that this article, this activities article, converted 5 paid subscribers in this, whatever the time period is that you're, you're looking at. And then, so that'll give you a sense of what articles are actually making people say, yes, here's my money. And the same goes for the free side. So someone comes in, they read a free article, then on their second article that they click on, they get a, a registration message that says, hey, if you want to read this article, you can, but you have to register email and password typically. And it will tell you again what articles converted those free registered readers. In this case this Allende article, 70 people decided to type in their email and password. And that's powerful because you're introducing a little piece of friction in this process. And people are saying, readers are saying, yes, please, I'll jump over that wall. And now you have somebody on your newsletter that's registered for free and is ready for nurturing into a paid subscriber. Okay. If you have the attribution survey installed, which you hopefully do, the next tab in there will capture where these free registered and Paid registered readers come from. So when somebody registers or pays, they get this little pop up and it's very simple but very powerful. It says, hey, thanks for being a subscriber, we want 5 seconds of your time. How did you discover us? Search engine social media recommended by a friend, which by the way is direct. That's essentially, I think somebody pointed me in your direction, which is powerful. The email newsletter, of course. And then this other box is a gold mine. And what we've been finding is people fill out the other box. Now sometimes you get some kind of random stuff, but, but when you look at the attribution tab, you'll see that, that the search engine, the email, social media and the direct, the friend rank and you'll see what's important to you. Today there's a lot of talk about social media really declining in terms of promoting news and article content. And it's true, it is declining. And just about a year and a half ago I talked to a news publisher and all their number one source of traffic was Facebook. And that's no longer the case. That's a big change. So you have to keep an eye on what's actually working. And then if you look at the other field and I've blacked this stuff out, but you can see that in this case Pinterest sends some readers to the site. Maybe there are some organizations, other publications or blogs or whatnot that are sending people to your site. And the goal here is, what I would do is take a look through this maybe once a month and see where people are coming from. Maybe there's a, there's an organization you can reach out to and say, hey, we're getting some subscribers from you guys, people that are actually registering on the site. Would you like to sponsor something that, that could be one way to, to address it or you could flip it and say, look, we're interested in maybe putting up some advertising on your website or do writing a guest post on your blog. So this is going to be essentially your guide to where people are coming from. And the best thing about the survey is that people are telling you directly. It's, you're not reliant on technology to, to figure out where somebody came from because it can be misleading with bots. And maybe they really found out about some. You originally did a trade show, but they happen to Google you and then bring you up, but they're telling you the trade show instead of the data saying Google. So it's, this is really valuable data. Okay, so that's what we have going for insights now. What's next? So Jeremy promised, I think, to provide a little sneak peek at what we're doing. We're building a dashboard. And Jeremy, I'm gonna. I'll let you share your screen if are you ready for me? You're muted just in case you. Yep.

Give me just a minute.

Yep. Okay, cool. Just let me know when you're ready. And so we're building our own dashboard carefully. What we're doing is we're plumbing the data in to back here to plumbing the. All the leaky payroll data in to. Into our new dashboard. And what are we doing? We're tracking a few things here, let me go and pop this up for you guys. So our approach here is to create a very subscriber centric view. And that subscriber could be a free registered reader or a paid subscriber. And what we're doing primarily is tracking subscriber events. What are subscribers actually doing on your website and how did they get there? What did they click on? And so then we're going to empower you guys to create segments based on the data that you want, which we'll talk about in a little bit, and be able to send that segment to your email marketing service so that you can then push out a very hyper targeted message or promotion or whatever it is to a very specific niche, as you said Dan there. And at some point we may, we're looking at possibly emailing directly from our app. Okay, so let's. Jeremy, whenever you're ready, stop sharing and go for it. All right.

We are working on an integration with leaky paywall and a app called Segment. And what that does is it allows you to send in events from your website. So you can do page views, but you can also do custom events, such as when someone logs in, when someone clicks on a specific button, such as a subscribe button, when someone fills out the free registration form, or when someone fills out the paid registration form. So if you think of an event that happens on a site that a subscriber could do, that is something that we can track within Segment. And so we are currently working on integrating that with a couple of beta publications. And so we're starting to get data. And our goal is, number one, to be able to bring in the correct data. Number two, be able to create boards like you see on my screen now, with data into actionable things that you can take a look at. And then the third bucket is going to be able to create campaigns based on that data. So for example, if you have, if you're doing your free and your paid subscribers, you can say take any free subscribers who haven't converted to paid yet in the last 30 days and let's send them a campaign. So those type of actions are things that we're working for to be able to let you guys do. So if you take a look here, this is a app called Mixpanel. And so with segment, you can take in your events and you can send them out to what they call destinations. And so there's lots of different destinations. You can do things like mailchimp, as Pete said, but you can also do things like analytics dashboards like Mixpanel. And they have over 450 integrations, but those are the two that we're focusing on at the moment. And so as you can see here, we can see active users on the website, you can see by city, by country as they come in. But the real power here is you can easily create your own metrics. And so what we're doing is we're going through and creating metrics that are very specific to leaky paywall and to publishing. So for example, we have one here where you can create a funnel. And we can create a funnel based on a subscriber being created. So think free registration and then a subscriber being updated. So think someone going from free to paid. And then so with that those events being tracked by segment, we can then create conversion funnels so we can see exactly how many subscribers are created and then how many of those that were created, how many update into a paid level. And so it's really powerful, the things that you can build and be able to see. And then obviously the longer time periods that you have, the more you'll be able to see trends in that data. But there's a lot of, I would say almost infinite. Right. Possibilities of things that you can build based on events, being able to filter on certain criteria within those events. So it's really pretty exciting the things that we're going to be able to allow our publishers to be able to see with this new, new way that we're tracking data. And the best part in my opinion is that we're no longer locked into specific ways that Google handles things. And if they decide to turn something off, we don't have to worry about that because this is all in its own system. So that's what I got.

Yep, we have a lot of power here and we can take all this events data. What are pre registered readers doing, what are paid subscribers doing and what elements on your website are being clicked on so you could see what's actually working and what's not working. And so we're, that's why we're moving slowly on this because we want, or maybe we're moving quickly, I don't know, depending on your perspective. We want to make sure that we're producing the data that really has a great impact. And we don't. We want to be careful about overwhelming publishers with too much data which learned that lesson last time. And if we make it, if we make it actionable, which is the word we started with, then you can actually do things with the data like emailing very specific segments of your readership. All right, so here we go. Let's, let's go to the next thing. So this is, this is participation time. So what I'd like you, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through two slides. This slide, the first slide is going to be data centric. The second slide is going to be like email action to your segments centric. And what I, I'm going to describe each of these bullets and I'd like you to get excited or not excited about the, what I'm describing and uh, let us know what you think is, would be really the, the number one or two or three priorities as far as this data goes. So hold on, here we go. Okay, first one, see most popular articles for paid subscribers. This could work for free registered readers as well, but tracking the activity of a paid subscriber and which articles they're gravitating towards. Okay, number two, what elements, in other words, what buttons or links or elements on your site are generating clicks? Is it the subscribe button in your menu? Is it this? Is it the upgrade messaging in your subscription message or nag? Is it some? Is it the conditional display promotion? Is it something in, in that you're advertising either on in the sidebar or in the content of your articles that's generating the clicks? So you can put something up, see what it generates and just make that decision. Yes or no? This is good. Or let's remove it. This is in no particular order by the way. How about measuring the pre registered readers that don't really participate very much on your site? They're low, they're low intent, they like your content, they're on your newsletter, they're reading a few things, but they're not really heavy users. How about maybe targeting that specific segment and offering a day pass for them? This is something that we're seeing work in on Other publications and as an idea tracking the data of free registrations that the actual. In other words, what's the conversion of the upgrade message? What's the percent conversion of the free registration message? Do we need data on like the use case would be? All right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna update my messaging for the free registration. Does it affect clicks? I'm gonna upgrade my messaging for paid the upgrade message to become a paid subscriber. Does it affect clicks? Does it affect conversions? All right. Yep, just said that paid subscriptions. What are the most popular articles for paid subscribers? Okay, yeah, I guess I really like that one. How about this one? Registered users. These are free registered readers. How about after maybe 5, 5 upgrade message views, they get triggered a special offer. In other words, these are your free registered readers. They keep hitting your upgrade message that says hey, pay, I can get full access and all your benefits. And maybe they've seen that five times. So you're going to give them a special message, a promotion of some kind. And by the way, these are coming from all these ideas we've been assembling over the last couple of years in terms of what publishers have been telling us are important to them. So we're trying to fine tune the ordering of this and see if there's holes that we missed. Churn percentage every month. What percentage are canceling or not? Re upping. Okay, that's it for this slide. Dan, you seem like you have an opinion.

I do. I think you can group these which are essentially assessing the effectiveness of articles. For example, what's most popular. And I would love you to tell me something about Dwell time because I get a click showing that they read the article, but I don't necessarily know if it's 2500 word article that they spent two minutes on or less. Right. Group all of those kinds of things together as a package and then the one day pass is so cool. We do a thing called a sip where we give them unlimited access and they don't know what they want until they go to the search tool and actually type in green tea or black tea or something like that. So as soon as they do, if they've got unlimited access to the data, then those they're going to see nine articles pop. Right. And bats are really important because then they see how much depth we have and that there's a whole bunch of things available to them. So if you say you've got one more article that may be good, but if you say hey, take a, a sip in our case, take A day of free access unlimited and see what you come up with. I just think that might be a powerful incentive for people who are coming to the site because they want to find out something as opposed to just the article that you happen to put in front of them. All of the work that you have on nags is so powerful because we don't actually, in my case, I don't put enough time and energy into the nags, but I know that when I do, I can appeal to certain people in a call to action. Right. The nag actually makes them do something. I like it when I say do this and see this and they do, and then they come away from that. I noticed you put their popular articles in two places. But that idea of ranking articles as opposed. You showed that slide earlier, ranking articles that actually convert people. As an editor, that says to me, okay, we'll assign more articles like that. Why don't I put up six or eight of those? Something else it did for me. I went back and picked some of the highest performing articles over the last seven years and I rewrote them and put fresh leads on top of them and looked at them as seven years have passed. And you know what they boost? They are still at the top of the Google search engine and now they've got a date that's seven years younger than it was before. And I didn't change the URL or anything. So essentially what we've done is we've just added value to a login or whatever to a URL that existed before. I didn't test it, but I think if I sent those out in a drip that I would actually get an overwhelming bunch of readers again, principally because it's. It's exactly the same topic, which is what? Herbal teas will hurt you. And I've always noticed as a newsman that when you say what will hurt you or how many people got shot yesterday, you get a lot of attention. And in this particular case, it's a. It's got like 14 source links in it. It's a really good article for understanding that particular problem. So this is great stuff. I think that of all of the things that I would say that appeal to me most right this minute and is innovative is the day pass as opposed to one more article.

Yep, yep. You could test that on your, your first stop, the free registration or the day pass. You could also test it on your upgrade message as well. So you could subscribe for full access or just subscribe, pay for one day.

Yeah. And you know what? I would do at number seven is after a few times I would give them a significant discount because in most instances they're, they're coming back, so they must be interested in the content. I've got them almost hooked because they're coming back to look at the content five times. But I need to hook them. And so, Tom, I would say that's an ideal time to pop out there. I noticed that the Guardian lets me buy their magazine, their newspaper for a dollar, for a penny a day if I've triggered it enough. So the first offer isn't a penny a day, but after I've clicked it for five days or 10 days in a row or whatever, then I suddenly see a message saying you should subscribe for this significantly lower amount. Washington Post does the same thing. And I think what they're doing is they're recognizing that they can't get them. They don't. Nobody gets them at full price. They can't get them at half price. But maybe, you know, 70% off or some magic number becomes what it takes to get them aboard.

Yeah, the right offer at the right time. And Dan, thanks for bringing up the SEO tactic of looking at old articles that are popular and then refreshing those articles and reposting them as new articles. That is a super thing, especially if you have, if you're publishing long form content as a magazine publisher.

And if that article is what's converting people, that's exactly what you want to do. You want to pump that article up and refresh it because it's also a proven converter. So it's not just popular, it's actually making you money. And I'm all for that. Churn is hard to understand for most publishers, me included. I'm almost thinking that there's. It needs to be. You guys need to think about how to make Churn just digestible. In a quick glance, when I go on stripe, I see Churn and I look at it and I can't quite figure out what I need to do to reduce churn. They have three little charts about Churn at the bottom. So it's probably information overkill. But what I would want to do is just say, okay, my Churn is, you know, is too high or too high relative. I don't have the context. I understand what Churn is. I don't have the context.

Yeah, Churn is either I am canceling or my card messed up and expired or whatever. I don't have funds and so that can't happen.

And all of those things can make you feel Bad. And then you realize that there was some relatively innocuous. Innocuous problem. When I see a credit card problem, we go into, into Stripe every couple of days, we send them a personal note. We just say, hey, we noticed this and if you want to cancel, that's great. Here's how you do that. Or we'll do it for you. But you know what happens is a lot of them go, hey, thanks. I just didn't know. Whatever. I didn't pay attention or whatever. I noticed that a lot of banks, a lot of other people send out notices to you now saying that, well, we're going to hit your card and you should update your, Update your information before we hit it. I think that's a courtesy for those.

Yeah. For those listening. Sorry, Jeremy, just take a look at churnbuster IO. It plugs into Stripe subscriptions and will automate recovery of credit card information when Stripe finally gives up on charging.

That rocks, Jeremy. That rocks. That's exactly how that should be handled. Because it's too time consuming to do it manually. Yep. Yeah.

And another thing we've added recently with our recurring payments extension is we. When someone tries to or wants to cancel from the their account page, when they click on it, it opens a modal. Now that you can ask, can you tell us a reason why you would like to cancel? And if they. It's. It's an optional field. But if they do fill that out, then that's then stored on their user profile. So if you see that someone is canceled, you can start to maybe see a trend on why and then make some adjustments based on that data.

I noticed something this year, 100% of my readers, subscribers in Russia were canceled because of the sanctions and they wouldn't process their credit cards and they couldn't find another way to read our magazine because there's. You can't send me the cash and expect it to work. It just, just interesting how that worked because I don't think they were trying to kill Ukrainians. I told them we'll do a workaround here. But it's interesting that oddball stuff both in Iran and in Russia prevents anybody from reading my magazine who's a paid subscriber. If they're a free subscriber.

It worked great.

Don't pay for the magazine if you're in Russia or Ukraine or in Iran.

More tragedy. Oh, my God. All right, so let's move on to the last slide here. And this one is going to be more email focused. So I want you to put on your Imagination hat in terms of how you like to connect with your segments of your pre registered readers and subscribers that we're tracking for you. First one it would be a one question pop up survey for just for logged in readers. It could be anything that you want to ask the readership and the ability and then that information made let's say it's multiple choice and then that information gets appended to the subscriber and you can email that the let's say the segment that chooses whatever the answer B is on multiple choice, a message or a promotion. So that was something that this is something that's actually been on the radar for quite some time. But being able to survey your readership and then also be able to email that sort of micro segment of readership. Okay, that's one. Number two, how about emailing your 500 most loyal free registrants? So now we're looking at a little bit of a different view. We have a group of free registrations and they are active and you set a threshold for let's say how many articles they're viewing or trying to view in a month. Right. And you if let's say 500 of those free registrants go above that threshold, you can capture that segment and then email them a promotion. Likely this one is related. This is identifying super users, I.e. paid subscribers that are super users. So you have people that are paying you and love you, your best readers. They are clearly you're setting a threshold on the website where they let's say they consume X number of articles per month and they be they're you're going to tag them as a super user. The idea there is now you have a way to reach really your biggest fans and survey them. Maybe they have ideas, maybe they want other things.