Michael Donohoe, chief product officer at Rest of World, writes about what the international business news site learned after implementing a registration wall.
Donohoe writes, “Be careful about looking at the registration count in isolation.
“Traffic changes. The share of readers reaching the meter changes. As you adjust the threshold, you change how many people are even presented with the registration decision. Pure numbers hide the details.
“One useful metric we’ve found is verified registrations per 1,000 page views, which allows us to compare performance as traffic changes over time. This has typically ranged from about 1.5 to 2.7 registrations per 1,000 page views. We also established a pre-wall baseline for verified registrations, so we measure incremental registrations above what we would have expected to receive anyway.
“So we increasingly track rates instead.
- Registrations relative to traffic
- Wall exposure leading to registration started
- Registration started leading to verified account
- Known-user rate (what share of page views come from identified readers)
- Subsequent engagement and retention of registered readers
“Some of these measurements are still imperfect. The question isn’t ‘How many accounts did we create?’ It’s whether the system is getting better at identifying engaged readers without materially damaging the reading experience.”
Read more here.
