JDD Case Study: Audience Acquisition and Conversion with upday x Poool.

Journal du Dimanche (JDD) is a French weekly publisher who works with upday improve audience acquisition (9% of their 6 million monthly visitors come from upday) and Poool to increase conversion rates in two forms: a registration wall (converting users into members) and a paywall (converting members into subscribers).

Together, upday and Poool provide the perfect beginning and middle funnel solutions for publishers to monetize their audience. It therefore only seemed right to bring the two companies together into a partnership!

Are you a French reader? Keep on reading here:

How upday x Poool began

In order to have a successful digital strategy, publishers need to both acquire audiences (in part thanks to upday) and then convert them into members and subscribers (with Poool’s solution and consultancy).

Although these two appeared to be complementary, publishers such as JDD found themselves being pulled in different directions…

On the one hand, Poool encouraged them to put more articles behind a wall with the goal of increasing wall/premium content visibility and maximizing conversions.

On the other hand, upday only presents readers with non-premium content. Therefore, they discourage publishers from blocking content to ensure that their articles get featured and audiences can be sent to their site.

Since both acquisition and conversion are hugely important for publishers, upday and Poool decided to come together to overcome these differences and allow publishers to achieve the two simultaneously.

Specifically, what does this partnership mean?

Thanks to a trigger feature in the Poool Dashboard, publishers can configure a premium article to be unlocked for users coming from upday. The goal here is to increase premium content visibility and audience acquisition whilst simultaneously promoting the publisher’s subscription offers and leading users towards conversion.

For JDD:

🎯 Goal: Promote their premium offers and content all the whilst maintaining their partnership with upday to acquire audiences through visibility on their site

✅ The added bonus: De-anonymize audiences through email collection and account creation as well as increase conversion rates of users into subscribers

“This partnership has allowed JDD to remain visible on upday’s platforms (something that’s hugely important for us as 9% of our traffic comes from upday) whilst also collecting leads via a registration wall and converting these audiences into subscribers through a paywall. It’s also about informing users of this new economic business model for publishers - journalism won’t always be free and digital readers need to get used to having to pay for access to information.”

Julien Ferras, Audience Acquisition at Lagardère

Front and back integration

Technically, this works thanks to a UTM_Source or Xtor source that allows users coming from a specific source (in this case upday) to be presented with an adapted journey.

1. User accesses an article on upday
2. The source is identified as upday, and the user is led through a specific, adapted scenario
3. Whilst users coming from other sources of traffic will be presented with the standard journey configured by the publisher - in JDD’s case, they block premium content with a hard paywall

Client-side

JDD leads users coming from upday through an adapted engagement journey, allowing them to discover premium content for free, sign up to the JDD newsletter (for increased engagement and data collection) before encouraging them to subscribe via a paywall.

This journey restarts after 30 days.

Setting up the trigger

There are two options for publishers to put this adapted journey based on source of traffic in place:

Option 1: Trigger

• The simpler option that doesn’t require tech support
• But publishers can only build a scenario made up of a single action
  

In the Poool Dashboard, go to the ‘Triggers’ section and specify which UTM or Xtor source you want to target. You can then select which conversion wall you’d like to present to users coming from this source.

Mediacites employs this code-free option thanks to Poool’s solution, offering users coming from Mediapart an article for free.

As well as configuring a UTM_source for users coming from a specific newsletter to offer them access to an article for free, only requiring their email address to open the wall.

Whilst Bio à la Une unlocks articles for their readers coming from Facebook with the goal of increasing these user’s engagement level.

Option 2: Custom context

• Requires more tech work
• but results in a more developed scenario
  

With Poool, teams can build adapted journeys for users based on their profile or context, such as level of engagement, location or device used. They also have the possibility to set up their own group via the ‘Custom Context’ feature.

To put this adapted journey for users coming from upday in place, JDD created a Custom Context based on this specific source of traffic, building a journey of 4-steps:

1. Invisible unlock
2. Free article
3. Newsletter subscription
4. Subscription (paywall)
   

What does this look like in the Poool Dashboard?

What did JDD seek to achieve with upday x Poool?

• Maintain a partnership with upday who allows publishers to increase content visibility and new reader acquisition
• Provide quality content - allow users to discover the publisher’s premium content for free, which helps the user to see value in both JDD and upday
• Inform readers - journalism isn’t free
• Avoid user frustration created when non-engaged users are blocked by a paywall
• Increase propensity to subscribe
  
  

1. Visibility, audience acquisition and partnership with upday
   

The publisher’s partnership with news aggregation sites such as upday is hugely valuable for their strategy, not only for audience acquisition but also for reinforcing JDD’s credibility as a publisher, allowing readers to build trust in their content.

To maintain this partnership (and its benefits) whilst monetizing content, JDD offers users coming from upday 2 free articles.

Julien shared some interesting statistics on these 2 articles, showing the huge difference between CTRs on the walls. He notes that they’re planning on running AB tests in the near future to optimize step 2 in the funnel.

“We have no choice but to encourage our publishing partners to consider a hybrid strategy so that we can continue to promote their content, or we’ll have to cut the partnership.”

- Bertrand de Volontat, Head of upday France

Another example of a publisher maximizing the value of news aggregation sites whilst employing conversion strategies is Paris Match who offers traffic coming from Yahoo! access to premium content for free, in exchange for account creation.

Paris Match gains traffic and visibility, whilst Yahoo! can offer quality content to their visitors, including articles that are normally reserved for subscribers. As this scenario is only made up of a single step (registration wall requiring account creation), Paris Match set this up without dev support on the Poool Dashboard, thanks to the trigger feature.

2. Lead generation

The 3rd step in JDDs journey for users coming from upday involves a datawall, or Newsletter Wall, that asks for inscription to their newsletter in order to access content.

This has allowed JDD to collect an average of 16 emails per day (data from March 2022).

• Data collection for marketing campaigns
• Understand audience behavior and interests
• Increase engagement through content consumption
• Lead users through a funnel towards subscription

3. Subscription

For the final step of the upday journey, JDD encourages users to subscribe by blocking content with a paywall.

Not only does this wall promote the publisher’s premium offer but it also reminds users that they’ve accessed 3 articles for free thanks to the JDD and upday partnership, increasing the visibility of both company’s value propositions.

Julien points out that conversion rates for users coming straight from upday is very low, but that the important reason for including a paywall in their journey is to make them aware of JDDs premium offer and the value that it provides. By leading them through an engagement journey (which includes data collection), the user is more likely to subscribe in the future and is now aware of JDD as a producer of high quality content.

upday x Poool - overall

The Poool x upday partnership brings together two goals shared by all digital publishers:

• Audience acquisition
• Audience conversion
  

Not only this but the partnership is completely adaptable to any publisher and their unique business model, goals, audience and content.

Interested in finding out more about the upday x Poool partnership and how you can make use of the trigger feature in the Poool Dashboard? Book a free demo and meeting with our team!

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