Regula Marti accompagne les organisations médias dans leurs transformations à l’intersection de l’éditorial, du produit, de la technologie et de la stratégie business.

Dans cet article, Regula explique que l’engagement n’est pas une métrique unique à maximiser : il reflète différents besoins et moments de lecture, où un même comportement peut signaler du succès ou, au contraire, des blocages selon le contexte. Elle recommande de ne plus se limiter aux moyennes et aux métriques par article pour analyser l’engagement par segments d’audience et par session, en se concentrant sur une question clé : les lecteurs trouvent-ils ce qu’ils sont venus chercher, et reviennent-ils ensuite ?

Khalil A. Cassimally est consultant en développement d’audience, besoin de l'audience et IA, et contributeur régulier d’Audiencers. Dans ce guide, il partage 7 stratégies pour ne pas seulement devenir data-informed, mais data-led.

Early 2023, Poool launched the first Conversion Funnel Benchmark Report, a new quarterly study that seeks to provide digital publishing professionals with the data, insights and expertise to both compare their conversion performance to others in the market and optimize each step in the funnel towards subscription. Having released the Q1 report earlier this year, available to all publishing professionals, the Q2 & Q3 2023 report’s are now live and available exclusively to Poool clients.

As with our previous reports, this edition shared benchmark data for 4 KPIs to improve the single conversion rate metric. Specifically, this framework:

• Takes into account the user engagement journey prior to the paywall, understanding that a user’s decision to convert doesn’t just happen at the point of the paywall
• Allows you to pinpoint exactly where you’re losing traffic to make very targeted corrective action
• Helps you to compare yourself to others in the market by reducing the number of factors at play

To access the report in full, with all takeaways and best practices to accompany each KPI, it’s here.

Step 1. Percentage of traffic on premium content

Def: out of total traffic on your website, how many users visit premium content vs free, unblocked content?

Overall average: 68%
Range: 1%-100%

The average traffic on premium content in Q3 (68%) is significantly higher than Q2 (56%), reflecting a tightening of digital subscription models, likely due to a growing level of maturity amongst these publishers and the continued fall in ad and print revenue streams.

Specialist media lie at the top of this scale with a very high average of 92%, the first time that a publisher-type has been above 80%. This reflects 2 key trends that are developing in the industry:

• The increasing focus on subscription models over advertising or print
• The nichization of the industry as publishers realize the benefits of specializing their value proposition to secure a smaller but more highly engaged audience who have a greater propensity to subscribe.

The takeaway: even if you aren’t a specialized media, you can build thematic sections, and use audience segmentation to benefit from each ‘niche’ within your wider title.

As for traditional news publishers, the average is at 66%. This figure has continued to increase year-on-year (21.3% in 2019 for instance) as publishers tighten their subscription model, not only placing increasingly more content behind a wall but also promoting these premium articles more widely.

We can compare this to lifestyle publishers who lie at the other end of the scale, with an average of 16.49% of traffic on premium content. These titles often publish a wide range of content and tend to have a very large, more volatile audience who are less likely to subscribe.

The advice in this case would be to maximize on soft conversion strategies, such as newsletter sign up or registration, to increase engagement and collect first-party data. This will not only positively impact propensity to subscribe but also allow you to increase ad revenue through targeting, personalize the user experience and gather data for us in AI and dynamic conversion strategies. Even if the reader never subscribes, you’ll still be able to benefit from their engagement in other ways.

In the full report:

• How to optimize this metric
• Balancing frustration and engagement
• Why and how to integrate registration into the user journey prior to the paywall

Step 2. Paywall visibility rate

Def: the percentage of users on premium content who see the paywall.

Overall average: 55.48%
Range: 1.60%-86.00%

Note, this metric shouldn’t be considered as a question of how much content you’re blocking. Rather, how many potential subscribers are being lost at this stage because they never actually see the paywall? It’s not only a question of paywall ‘height’ but also of content and engagement.

Since 2020, the interquartile range has shifted up a whole 10% (from 30-60% to 46.66-70.73%), and we can even see a difference since Q2, where the average was lower than Q3, at 54.72%. This reflects the increasingly tighter paywall strategies being employed by publishers as both them and the market becomes more mature. However, we’d also add that many are finally realizing how many readers are lost at this stage in the funnel, and the negative impact of a wall that readers on premium content never see.

One publisher in the benchmark, for example, tested increasing the paywall height by 10% and saw a more than 100% increase in click-through rates (the next KPI in the funnel towards subscription).

In the full report:

• How to optimize this metric
• Improving conversion rates on mobile and apps

Step 3. Click-through rate (CTR)

Def: how many of these users who saw the paywall actually click on the “Subscribe” button?

Overall average: 1.07%
Range: 0.04%-11.90%

This graph successfully sums up the results that we’re finding for this stage in the funnel… There’s a lot of variation!

To help make these results more valuable, the market average is around 0.2%, whilst the average CTR amongst Poool clients (who regularly update their wall, build dynamic walls for each audience segment and run A/B tests on wording, design & scenario) has been between 1.07-2.56% average over the 2023 reports.

Unsurprisingly, given their niche focus and so higher levels of engagement, B2B, specialist media and finance publishers are the best performing in this metric.

In the full report:

• A/B testing to optimize CTR
• « Keep readers on their toes » – the simplest strategy to put in place to reduce paywall blindness

Step 4. Conversion rate out of total clicks

Def: how many users who click-through your paywall end up paying to become a subscriber? 

Overall average: 2.45%
Range: 0.61% – 6.61%

Note that these benchmarks are not representative of overall conversion rates but rather how many users who clicked on the paywall ended up converting into a subscriber?

For comparison, Piano’s 2021 benchmark found a conversion rate of 0.22% for anonymous users who make up, on average, more than 90% of a publisher’s audience.

These conversion rates are gradually increasing each quarter as clients are improving performance at each of the previous steps in the funnel towards subscription.

In the full report:

• How can you optimize this metric?
• How can you be dynamic with the Poool Dashboard? – audience segmentation based on location, content type, source of traffic and readers who nearly subscribed but didn’t

Bringing the conversion steps together

Turning back to the new framework as a whole we can place our benchmark averages into each of the 4 steps:

Thanks to this broken-down conversion funnel, you can calculate and compare performance at each of the 4 steps, understanding exactly where you need to focus optimization efforts.

For instance, you may spend time and resources on optimizing paywall design, but in fact you’re losing the majority of your traffic at the first step – i.e. users are never actually moving through to a premium article where they have the chance to be exposed to the paywall. What’s the point in building a well-designed paywall if no one even sees it?

What you’ll also find is that even small improvements to each step will culminate into significant improvements to your overall user-to-subscriber conversion rates as increasing performance at one step naturally impacts the performance in the steps that follow.

Also in the report – What about unsubscription? We look at how making it easier to leave has convinced more people to stay in Norway.

Download the client-exclusive Report in full to discover the optimization strategies to put in place with the goal of improving each KPI in the funnel towards subscription.        

After noticing Gina Bulla, executive director of audience research at The Atlantic, sign up to The Audiencers’ newsletter, I just had to get in touch to hear more about her role. What exactly is audience research? What type of research does her team run? And how are the findings used to increase engagement, conversion and retention at The Atlantic?

I was excited to learn more about our audience on a deeper level beyond what we could know about them from data and demographics. I saw an opportunity for those insights to strengthen our work across the organization. Fast forward a few years, and I pivoted to lead our Audience Research team. 

It’s a new role for me, but what made the leap easier is Audience Research is an emerging discipline in the publishing industry. So there’s an opportunity to determine what Audience Research means for The Atlantic along with the industry. And, The Audiencers helps connect me with others in similar roles—so thank you for that!

What is audience research at The Atlantic? 

I always say that my job is listening to people. We can glean so much data from our metrics, and our Data Science team are expert at analyzing and making sense of it. But there are also so many questions that data can’t answer. That’s where Audience Research comes in, to try to answer the questions that data can’t answer: why is something happening, how do people feel, and what are their unmet needs and desires?

It’s important to me that when we think about Audience Research, it’s not just our current audience that we want to connect with but our prospective audience as well. Of course, our super fans are an incredibly important voice, but to truly understand who our audience can be, we also need to connect with groups that are less (or not yet) engaged with us.

And probably the most important role of an audience researcher is to advocate for our readers and ensure their voices are heard when building new experiences.

What are The Atlantic’s research methods? 

We are primarily focused on qualitative research, so activities that allow us to solicit feedback verbatim from current and prospective readers, like interviews, forums, and surveys. We’ve been experimenting with diary studies–longitudinal research, where we can connect with participants over a period of time to understand their habits better. 

Because it takes effort for respondents to participate, we’re selective about the volume of these activities. Speaking to our readers and subscribers face-to-face is a privilege, so we want to respect their time, privacy, and opinions.

We are also tuned in (or listening) to our readers in what I’ll call non-active ways. What is our customer care team hearing? What are people saying on social media? What is resonating across the industry? 

How do you decide what to research? 

We try to balance the big, important questions that can help us define the future of The Atlantic with the more specific questions that can help ensure a product’s or project’s success. 

One of the big, important questions we’re focused on right now is: who are our future subscribers? We’ve just executed research to help us identify audiences that may be inclined to subscribe to The Atlantic in the near or not-so-distant future. We’ll use this research to ideate strategies to increase conversion, engagement, and discovery.

How are projects prioritized? 

That’s probably one of the biggest challenges. Every department in the organization wants insight from our audience, but as I alluded to before, we don’t want to oversaturate them with research requests. 

We ask two questions to filter the projects that we take on:

• Is it actionable, or will we make a decision based on the research?
• Is it really a question that our audience can answer for us?

Your work obviously relates back to a wide variety of teams at The Atlantic – including product, marketing, editorial and data. How do you make sure that each team is able to learn and act from your insights?

Synthesis and sharing out results is one of, if not the most important, steps in our process. For almost every project, we create a report and try to make it as engaging as possible (visuals, videos, etc.). Then we share it in a few ways: via group slacks, and research readout meetings that stakeholders across the company attend, emails, etc.

That way, Audience Research isn’t happening in a vacuum, and what we’re learning can inform any team’s work.

Can you give us an example of how something you learned from audience research was used to increase engagement, conversion, and retention at The Atlantic.

Something we hear a lot from readers as a barrier to subscribing, or sometimes a reason for canceling is that they don’t have as much time to devote to our journalism as they might like. So it’s encouraged us to think about how we can help our audience fit The Atlantic into their lives more seamlessly. I don’t want to say too much because we’re working on some new features right now but keep an eye out for some of those enhancements soon.

I’d like to say thank you to Gina for her time – I certainly learnt a lot and am now an advocate for every publisher employing someone in this kind of role! As she mentioned to me in the interview, Audience Research is a practice that’s fairly new in the industry, but something that’s becoming increasingly valued as publishers are becoming consumer businesses, requiring them to put readers first, understanding exactly what brings them to engage, convert and remain loyal to the brand.

Elodie Mandel est patronne du pôle féminin d’Unify. Elle dirige les équipes de Auféminin.com, Beauté Test et Paroles de maman.

Il y a quelques jours, j’ai été interpellée par une journaliste de l’équipe sur une question : combien je fais de signes pour ce papier ? Derrière sa question, ultra légitime : les contenus longs seraient plus valorisants à écrire… que les formats news ou “listicle”. Et derrière ça, quel type de contenus est le plus rentable ?

Un des casse-tête quand on pilote un site web, c’est celui de la longueur de chaque contenu : news, enquête long form, témoignage, et l’idée derrière la tête produire du contenu avec un ROI optimal… Parmi les éléments de l’équation : le nombre de contenus à produire chaque jour, les moteurs de recherche à séduire (Google en particulier), les indicateurs de suivi de performance classiques (sessions, Pages Vues, Visiteurs Uniques), les KPI de monétisation (eh oui, il y a plus de blocs pub sur un article long que sur une news, sur un diaporama avec beaucoup de photos que sur un mini)… Vous prenez tous ces “ingrédients”, vous le mettez dans le shaker des contraintes habituelles d’un éditeur et vous obtenez… une migraine ! 

Avant de sauter sur le Nurofen, voici quelques éléments de rationalisation pour planter le décor : 

La longueur du contenu en fonction de chaque objectif

Que vous soyez journaliste, éditeur, directeur marketing, data scientist ou directeur monétisation… vous ne regardez pas forcément pas les mêmes indicateurs et pourtant. Par exemple, le journaliste ses audiences, la Data les abonnés et ou logués, la programmatique les revenus… Parmi les enjeux de l’éditeur, concilier ces différents indicateurs.

Avant les Registrations Walls, l’équation était assez simple : un contenu “pour Google News” ça passait à partir de 1200 signes, pour Discover, un 2000 signes bien construit avec un titre accrocheur et bien pensé pour le story telling faisait le job à condition d’avoir un site optimisé techniquement, et d’avoir travaillé la légitimité de votre site par catégorie. Bref, pas besoin de produire très long pour faire de grosses audiences et récolter des CTR à + de 10. Pour les contenus SEO longue traîne, des outils permettent aux contents managers d’étudier la concurrence et de déterminer (grosse maille) quel est le nombre de mots à produire pour se positionner sur tel ou tel mot clé. 

Mais ça, c’était avant…. non pas que le SEO ne soit plus important pour les sites web mais parce qu’en 2023 l’enjeu c’est certes l’audience, mais davantage l’engagement et la monétisation de ces audiences. D’ailleurs beaucoup d’éditeurs connaissent aujourd’hui une stagnation voire une baisse des sacro saintes audiences… et pire une baisse des RPM (revenu pour mille pages vues, via la pub) ! La fin programmée des cookies tiers change évidemment la donne. L’occasion peut-être pour ces grosses machines en pleine crise de croissance de changer de modèle.  L’objectif : produire du contenu avec un ROI. 

Comment les stratégies de membership rabattent les cartes

Avec les Data et Paywalls (le fameux membership sur lesquels tous les groupes médias s’échinent), les éditeurs se confrontent face à de nouvelles questions. De plus en plus de médias s’y convertissent… Un retournement de situation après une époque où “cacher le contenu” était vu comme un risque de faire fuir les users, d’augmenter les taux de rebond et de perdre des revenus (liés à la pub dans les contenus désormais cachés).

Désormais le graal, c’est le Lead, choper les noms, prénoms, mails de ces fameux users, les convertir de visiteurs anonymes et volatiles en participant d’une communauté.

L’enjeu ? Faire revenir les lecteurs sur le site, les faire consommer beaucoup de pages et souvent, les fidéliser et leur proposer des services, des produits, etc. Et pour cause, un utilisateur logué est X fois plus profitable qu’un utilisateur volatile… et faute d’utilisateurs logués, mission impossible de lui proposer demain des services payants à forte valeur. 

Du court et catchy on dit oui… même en mode paywall

Avoir une marque forte, ça peut aider… mais ça ne suffit pas d’être Le Monde ou Paris Match. Avoir des contenus exclusifs, pas vu ailleurs. Prenez La Lettre A, le « Voici » de la presse pro avec ses titres accrocheurs ultra catchy. Pas de fioriture, on va dans le vif du sujet.

Du scoop, des titres chocs et un paywall très très haut : comprenez peu de contenus disponibles en accès libre. Ici la valeur c’est le scoop, l’info brute. Ici 281 mots, un article donc très court, mais d’une valeur sans égale. La recette est diablement efficace. Si vous êtes accro aux potins des médias, vous avez sans doute déjà souscrit un abonnement.

Le contre exemple de cet article très court et avec paywall, prenons le traitement des faits divers chez La Dépêche, la Voix du Nord ou Le Dauphine Libéré… je dois vous l’avouer : j’adore les faits divers, le sens du récit, du détail. Un conte moderne et souvent horrifique qui fait palpiter.

Prenez le feuilleton de janvier : Leslie et Kevin, une disparition mystérieuse, une concurrence entre le sites d’infos, les portails généralistes, chaque jour un rebondissement qui rend addict et des visites à gogo. Et qui tire son épingle du jeu ? La PQR. 

Ici les résultats Google où contenus ouverts et paywall se côtoient (la preuve que oui, c’est possible d’être bien référencé avec un wall !)

Ce qui fait sa valeur par rapport aux contenus en accès libre : le sel propre à l’enquête de terrain. Ouest France apporte un contenu unique. Les plus patients attendront le lendemain pour avoir un résumé sur les sites de BFM TV ou sur les portails. Ils feront sans doute des milliers de clics sur Google Actu et Discover, mais devinez qui remporte le gros lot du membership ? Ici qualité et exclusivité du contenu / récolte de leads / et audiences vont de pair, c’est assez rare pour être souligné. 

Longueur de contenus et monétisation

Qu’est-ce qui rapporte le plus ? 1 article avec une vidéo qui cartonne sur Discover ou un diaporama ? Autre version du « Tu préfères 1 abonné ou 48 000 pages vues » ? Le fameux choix cornélien (on aurait pu complexifier les choses en ajoutant le content marketing, mais ce sera pour un autre papier…)

Le problème c’est que le plus souvent ce ne sont pas les mêmes contenus qui permettent d’atteindre ces deux objectifs : faire beaucoup d’audience ou convertir. Et pour complexifier le tout, ces infos ne sont pas toujours transparentes dans l’entreprise, divisées entre les pôles audience, les pôles marketing et l’édito qui perdent encore trop de temps à se faire la guéguerre des chiffres. Un petit message aux DG en passant… 

Pas la peine de taper sur les doigts des journalistes, mieux vaudrait évangéliser au-delà des audiences sur la rentabilité de leurs contenus (eh oui ce n’est pas sale). RPM Sessions ou RPM Pages vues selon les écoles, concrètement on l’obtient en divisant les revenus par les sessions ou les PV et en multipliant par 1000. Le hic c’est que chaque PV ne génère pas les mêmes revenus publicitaires selon qu’il est vendu en direct par l’éditeur ou par la programmatique, c’est pourquoi on tient compte uniquement du revenu programmatique pour un calcul plus juste. 

Avec ce type de raisonnement, les articles avec vidéos s’en sortent beaucoup mieux (les RPM étaient bien plus élevés) que les contenus de type diaporama sans vidéo et ils sont plus rapides à produire.

L’autre élément à prendre en compte c’est le nombre d’emplacements publicitaires par contenu : pour un article classique hors wall, ou un diaporama, plus l’article est long plus il y a de pub : par exemple entre le chapô et le paragraphe 1 puis tous les deux paragraphes

Un élément change la mode ces derniers temps, le fameux « Lire la Suite », qui cache une partie du contenu mais permet aux éditeurs d’obtenir un Minimum Garanti (MG) négocié avec l’acteur pub, non négligeable.

Longueur de contenu, le point de vue du journaliste

Beaucoup de journalistes ont été perfusés, comme moi, à la technique de la pyramide inversée : en deux mots donner l’info en début du papier, puis élargir l’angle.

Si votre article est concerné par une stratégie de membership ou par une stratégie de diffusion de contenus chez des partenaires comme Yahoo, c’est une vraie révolution copernicienne, l’apprentissage d’une autre manière d’écrire, et de penser la construction du contenu. Donner envie, travailler son attaque, son chapo bien sûr, faire monter le désir et garder le meilleur pour les abonnés. Eh oui le maître mot : les chouchouter !

Et là la question du placement du wall est clé  : pas trop tôt sinon le risque est de ne pas envie suffisamment, ni trop bas, sinon il n’y a plus d’intérêt à l’abonnement. Au final, si vous voulez garder votre abonné, il doit en avoir pour son argent !

This article wrapped up: 
- Conversion rate is a valuable metric for publishers, but it doesn’t allow you to take into consideration the all-important engagement prior to the paywall (something that’s highly important for conversions)
- Tracking and optimizing both premium content visibility and paywall visibility rate will help move users through the funnel towards subscribing in the future 
- We recommend aiming for 10-40% premium content visibility rate and 80% paywall visibility rate, but ultimately testing is the only way to find what is optimal for your strategy

The process of converting users into subscribers involves a lot more than just clicking through the paywall and paying. 

The reader needs to find your site (acquisition), become increasingly more interested (engagement), see your premium content and be frustrated enough by the paywall to decide to convert. 

These final two steps involve the visibility of your premium offer, and are the often-forgotten essential steps to optimize in your subscription strategy. 

So, what are these visibility metrics? Why are they important? And how can you optimize them in order to increase overall conversion rates? 

There are two types of visibility rate metrics: 

• Premium content visibility 

The percentage of users on your site who visit a premium content and have the potential to be exposed to the paywall

No. of readers who visit a premium content / Total no. of visitors to your site

• Paywall visibility rate

The percentage of users who visit premium content and also see the paywall. 

No. of readers who see the paywall / Total no. of visitors to premium content

Why is visibility important? 

Publishers employing a premium strategy tend to focus on conversion rates as their north star metric. Of course, the number of users who fully convert into subscribers is important, but this metric doesn’t take into account the value of engagement prior to the paywall. 

In fact, conversion rate is a metric designed for the ecommerce industry, where the buying process is all about impulsive decisions. Subscriptions (in the publishing industry) however are hugely dependent on a user becoming gradually more engaged before finally making the decision to convert. 

For this reason, it’s important to consider and optimize the engagement funnel prior to the paywall. 

In a recent white paper, we covered the 5 key metrics to track and optimize which will accumulate to increase overall user-to-subscriber conversion rates. 

The first 2 of these steps refer to visibility. 

Premium content visibility

In a Poool study analyzing the content strategy of 75 digital publishers, we discovered a correlation between traffic on premium content and the reader-to-subscriber conversion rate. This correlation was true up to 40% premium content visibility (which means 40% of your visitors would be exposed to premium content).

This suggests that by increasing the visibility of premium content, and thus the number of visits to paid content, you’ll increase the number of conversions. 

As this correlation seems to only be true only up to 40% visibility, we’d recommend aiming for 10-40% visibility rate and testing from these to find the best percentage for your individual case. 

How do you increase the visibility of paid content? 

The assumption is that you’d need to increase the amount of premium content published. However, you can instead work on optimizing the visibility of the content already on your site: 

• Place premium content at the top of your homepage
• Promote premium content inside other articles
• Recommend these articles to your users (at the end of content, in email campaigns etc) 
• Place more premium content in your newsletter, on social media, etc.

For instance, on the homepage of Digiday, ELLE France and El Pais’ sites, you can clearly see that they employ a subscription strategy as premium content is given a unique tag. For many publishers, this involves a single color that’s associated with subscription. In most cases in France, this is yellow. 

Paywall visibility rate

There is actually a significant loss of readers moving from visiting the premium article to actually seeing the paywall (the next step in the funnel). Of course, this step is valuable as the visibility of your paywall will correlate with the number of users who convert through this paywall (you can’t click through a paywall if you never see it!) 

However, like everything in the world of conversion strategies, it’s about finding a perfect balance between frustration and engagement. 

Whilst a paywall visibility rate of 100% might frustrate your reader too much and turn them away from subscribing as they never got the chance to engage, a low visibility rate won’t create enough frustration and will result in only your most engaged users subscribing. 

Having said this, the ‘perfect balance’ is different for every publisher and we can see successful examples at both ends of the scale. 

Le Monde, one of France’s most popular publications, has an extremely low visibility rate where it takes a good few scrolls down the article before being presented with the paywall. 

On the other hand, Financial Times, Washington Post and the New York Times have 100% visibility rate with their paywall. 

Financial Times presents a full-page paywall.

The Washington Post employs a pop-up hard paywall.

The New York Times blocks the full article with an anti-scroll paywall. 

Whilst El Pais finds a middle ground and shows readers only  afew lines of content before blocking. 

How do you increase paywall visibility rate? 

It’s not necessarily about increasing here, but about finding the optimal rate for your situation. To achieve this, we’d recommend aiming for 80% visibility rate and testing from here, as well as considering segmenting audiences and employing adapted strategies for each type of audience. 

You can also consider employing a metered strategy, one that offers users access to a quota of articles for free before being blocked by the paywall. This will also help reduce the risks of launching a paywall on your advertising revenue, traffic or SEO. 

You can also try: 

• Employing a different wall on mobiles (where the wall is seemingly further down the page than on desktop)
• Increase wall visibility with a full screen paywall, pop-up wall or anti-scroll wall. 
• Segment audiences based on level of engagement, employing a higher visibility rate for your most engaged users and a lower visibility rate for volatile traffic who need more engagement before being convinced to convert (p.s. You can do this on the Poool Dashboard!) 
• Segment your content and employ a different visibility rate based on the content type. For instance, more popular content could have a higher visibility rate than less popular premium content
• Optimize the order in which scripts are called to the page to configure a wall to appear sooner in the case of bad connection 

Note: depending on your paywall set-up, it’s also important to take SEO into consideration here. For instance, if you’re employing a hard paywall with a server-side blocking method, you should ensure you follow Google’s lead-in recommendations where essential text is left above the paywall to optimize search engine performance. 

Find out more about paywalls and SEO in our white paper.