This article works through Poool's Conversion Funnel Framework, a set of KPIs that publishers can track in their Dashboard and use to optimize conversion rates. Each quarter, the Poool team collects, aggregates and analyzes data from each metric to share a Benchmark Report, giving publishers an idea of where they stand in comparison to others on the market and where they need to put resources to improve performance.
Benchmarks are included in this article and updated every quarter according to results.
When measuring and seeking to improve the performance of your paywall conversion rates, the traditional approach is to use conversion rate as a single metric.
But there's a few challenges with this:
- It doesn't take into account the user journey prior to the paywall, which is an issue given that a user's decision to convert doesn't just happen at the point of the paywall. It's built up over time through a balance of engagement and frustration
- It also doesn't allow you to pinpoint where exactly you're losing traffic, meaning it's hard to make targeted corrective action and put resources in the right place
- Percentage of users who visit premium content (vs free content)
- Percentage of users who see the paywall
- Percentage of users who click on the paywall
- Percentage of users who convert into a subscriber
Explaining the framework
The first two metrics are mainly about visibility, ensuring readers are aware of your premium offers and the fact that subscribing will give them access to additional content and features.
The second are more about calls to action, putting this visibility and engagement to use in order to convert the reader into a subscriber.
Of course, we don't need to add that there are so many additional factors at play when converting a reader into a subscriber, aside from this journey, including quality content, engagement features, a good user experience, a strong premium product… etc.
Visibility
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.
1. Percentage of users who visit premium content
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
Bear in mind that this metric doesn't necessarily refer to the share of premium content you produce, but the amount of traffic that visits it. You might only have 2 premium articles out of the 100 that you publish in a day, but if they're extremely well promoted then your share of traffic on premium content could be well over 2%.
How can you increase the percentage of readers who visit a premium content?
- Promote premium content inside other articles
- Recommend these articles to your users (particularly valuable when you've already converted users into registered members as you can recommend content that matches their interests)
- Place more premium content in your newsletter, on social media, etc.
- Place premium content high up on the homepage and tag them to highlight the value that a user will have access to if they subscribe (i.e. subscribe, and you'll have access to all of this tagged content)
💡 Poool's benchmark for Q2 2024 found an overall average of 68%, and a range from 10-100%. The trend for the most successful publishers since the debut report is between 60-70%, with specialized media and B2B having the highest average visibility rate. We'd recommend aiming for 40-60% and testing from there.
2. Percentage of readers who see the paywall
I.e. paywall visibility or hit rate.
Out of the total traffic on premium articles, how many of these readers actually see the paywall?
= No. of readers who see the paywall / Total no. of visitors to premium content
When publishers start tracking this metric, they're often surprised by how low it can be. Which means that a lot of work put in to optimizing wall copy and design goes to waste.
How can you optimize paywall visibility rate?
As conversion is all about balancing frustration and engagement, it's not necessarily about “increasing” paywall visibility rate, but finding the optimal rate for converting your audience. For instance, whilst The Financial Times has a hard model with a 100% visible wall, Le Monde in France allows us a few scrolls before being blocked by the wall.
Plus you also have to adapt to different audience types and depending on their context, for example if they're reading on mobile or desktop. SEO should also be a key consideration, especially for server-side blocking paywalls.
You can also try:
- Adapting your wall visibility rate for mobile users and based on level of engagement (p.s. You can do this on the Poool Dashboard!)
- Test increasing wall visibility with a full screen paywall, pop-up or anti-scroll wall.
- Allow journalists to choose where to place the wall based on their story telling! We'd recommend reading this article on the hourglass framework
- Optimize the order in which scripts are called to the page to configure a wall to appear sooner in the case of bad connection
💡 This data point is often the most shocking for publishers who haven't previously tracked paywall visibility. And this shows in the fact that the average has significantly increased since Q1 2023, where it lay at 52% compared to 60.7% in Q2 2024.
> Dive deeper into visibility rate KPIs and how to optimize them
Calls-to-action
The moment to convince a reader of your offer. The moment when all the previous engagement and visibility work pays off.
Your goal here is to:
- Highlight the value of your subscription
- Reduce friction, making it easy to make this decision
- Build trust
3. Percentage of users who click on the paywall
How many of these users who saw the paywall actually click on the “Subscribe” button?
= No. of readers who click on the paywall / Total no. of readers who see the paywall
How can you increase paywall CTR?
Aside from continuously testing and updating your wall to reduce paywall blindness, one of the most valuable and effective strategies to optimize paywall click-through rate is a dynamic model, one where the wall adapts to the user's profile or context.
How can the wall adapt?
- The design: colors, images, photos of journalists, format (banner, box or pop-up)
- The offers (annual vs monthly pricing, discounted offer, number of offers on the wall…)
- The wording (value proposition, personalization to the person or the content-type…)
What could the wall adapt to? (i.e. the reader's context or profile)
- The content type (is this wall on an article talking about general news or politics?) e.g. the content is telling you key information about the reader's interests, so use this to your advantage in writing an adapted value proposition
- The source of traffic (did this user come from a newsletter, social media, a partner…?) e.g. users coming from a news aggregation site may not yet be aware of the value you offer, so you could consider leading them through an adapted soft engagement journey, just like Journal du Dimanche did with upday
- The reader's location, e.g. The Guardian's personalized messaging says “you're joining us from France”
To succeed in this strategy, we recommend:
- Creating a calendar event to remind you to update your paywall at least once a month to reduce paywall blindness
- Building designs around key events on your editorial calendar (sales, launch events, anniversaries, etc.) and your audiences' calendar (Christmas, summer holidays, Black Friday, Mother's day, etc.)
- Using colors and design to mark sales or special offers
- Preparing designs ahead of time
💡 CTR benchmarks are often the most diverse. Poool's benchmark for Q2 2024 found a range from 0.05%-15.5%, and an overall average of 1.7%.
> Getting started with a dynamic paywall
4. Percentage of users who convert into a subscriber
Note that this metric isn't overall conversion rate but rather how many users who clicked on the paywall ended up converting into a subscriber.
= No. of readers who convert / Total no. of readers who click on the paywall
How can you increase paywall conversion rate?
First and foremost, you should work on improving the smaller conversion steps prior to payment.
We'd also recommend A/B testing the conversion funnel steps aiming to:
- Reduce the number of steps, clicks and scrolls
- Limit distractions
- Only collect the most important data points, saving the rest to progressively collect post-subscription
For instance, you could include the subscription offers in the paywall itself, or integrate account creation into the journey pre-paywall to make subscribing easier.
💡 From conversations with publishers across the industry around the world, 2024 has been a difficult year for conversions, and this shows in the lower average this quarter - Q1 2024 saw CR at 4.7%, significantly higher than this Q2's 2.6% average. Looking at the data more closely, it's not only paywall conversion rate that is significantly lower, but also overall average conversion rate (0.06% in Q1 to 0.02% in Q2). Plus we can see a few individual publishers who have significantly lower CR this quarter, bringing averages down, whilst for some the metric has remained fairly stable.
Does this conversion benchmark seem low to you? It's because there's a huge difference in performance between anonymous users and registered members (who are highly more engaged). And, when we look at the percentage of traffic in these two audience segments, we'll see that more than 90% of users are anonymous and volatile with a low level of engagement. Hence the value of registration models and soft conversion steps prior to the paywall.
Conclusion
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.
