Carola York, Jellyfish Publishing - Maximising return from your digital subscription marketing activities

Maximising return from your digital
subscription marketing activities
Carola York, Jellyfish Publishing
Dovetail User Group, 11 December 2013
© Jellyfish Publishing 2013

Carola York
Managing Director, Jellyfish Publishing
Jellyfish are a full service digital marketing agency, renowned for their expertise in
PPC, but who also now offer SEO, Social, Display, Analytics and Optimisation services.
Jellyfish Publishing is a standalone business division within the Jellyfish Group,
dedicated to serving its numerous publishing clients. It works in partnership with
publishers to create digital campaigns which generate new subscribers on a risk-free
Cost per Acquisition model. We also own and run www.magazine.co.uk.
I joined Jellyfish Publishing last year following 25 years working for a range of
consumer and business-to-business publishers – both big and small - including
The Spectator, EMAP, The Tablet, TSL Education, The Economist, EIU and IPC.
As a specialist in subscription marketing, I help Jellyfish’s many publishing clients
grow their print, digital and app subscription businesses.
2

Carola York, Jellyfish Publishing | 11 December 2013

What I’m covering today...
1.

Recent changes in SEO and PPC affecting subscription generation

2.

Working effectively in today’s multiple device landscape

3.

Maximising return from your PPC activities
Improving ROI through the use of ReMarketing
Improving Click-Through-Rates from ads using Google’s latest initiatives

•
•

3


Recent changes in SEO and PPC
affecting subscription generation
4


Organic search has fundamentally changed
• The September Hummingbird update to the Google search
algorithm was significant, and was driven by Google’s desire to be an
‘answer’ engine rather than a ‘search engine’.
• Google is now rewarding each word in a query, ensuring that the
whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is
taken into account, rather than just particular or individual words.
• This could now be impacting your SEO visibility and organic traffic
volumes (and therefore your subs) - and definitely will in the future
unless you are taking proactive action.

5


Content is now king
• SEO optimisation is now about providing users with meaningful content – as opposed to optimising the
content you have for high volume driving keywords . You need to think about topics rather than keywords.
• What questions does each page on your site answer? Think about the ‘how’, ‘what’, ‘where’, ‘when’, ‘why’
and ‘who’ questions.
• Understand your audience. What are they looking for in relation to your product?
• Optimise for multiple keywords. There’s more than one way to say the same thing, so use a variety of
different words and phrases in the copy on your pages.
• Analyse your competitive landscape. Looking at who ranks higher than you for particular keywords or
phrases will give you clues into what your potential visitors are looking for, and how you can optimise your
site better.
6


And Google will continue to make further updates
• Whether we like it or not, Google set the rules – and the rules change regularly!
• Google’s previous Panda and Penguin updates were about fighting spam. The latest Hummingbird update
is about creating a better experience for the searcher.
• The search giant depends upon people using its engine to find answers. If people stop coming to Google,
who’ll click on the paid ads that surround organic search results they rely on for their revenues?
• That’s why they must remove irrelevant search results, and give people what they want, whenever and
wherever they want – including now from spoken ‘conversational’ search queries.
• Most marketers view subscriptions from organic site traffic as ‘free’. But unless you invest (time and/or
money) into optimising and improving the content on your site to meet Google’s new ‘rules’, these free subs
are likely to start to decline.

7


PPC is no longer a simple ‘one click to sale’
• The user journey from someone clicking on a PPC ad is no longer straightforward.
• This flow chart illustrates some actual conversion paths for subscription sales – showing PPC coming in and out
of the user journey, both before and after other online marketing channels.

• Given these complex user journeys, Jellyfish now manage most digital marketing campaigns on any ‘any click’
rather than ‘last click’ PPC basis - so PPC is given credit even if only part of the user journey towards a subscription
sign up.
• And ‘any click’ attribution ultimately delivers higher subscription volumes from the same spend.

Don’t view your PPC spend in isolation
• These complex user journeys are easy to track for digital channels, but people receiving your marketing emails,
telesales calls, and your other offline campaigns will all be influenced by PPC – and vice versa.
• So do consider the effectiveness of your TOTAL marketing spend.
• Monitor the potential uplift in sales from all offline and online channels when you run any single large scale
campaign – and you’re bound to see an increase.
• Although you obviously want to track and monitor spend, response rates and CPAs by individual channel,
consider that they all impact each other when setting and agreeing budgets!
• Cutting brand or DM spend might impact the subs volume you’ll generate from PPC.
• Cutting PPC might impact the subs volumes you’ll get from your organic traffic.


Working effectively in today’s
multiple device landscape
10


Use of multiple devices is now prevalent...

11


But conversion rates from mobiles are still low...
• Depending on the brand, Jellyfish Publishing see the highest conversion rates coming from either desktop or
tablet devices – with mobile struggling a long way behind.
Brand A
Desktop
Tablet
Mobile

Clicks
34,029
6,370
4,168

CTR
1.79%
1.86%
1.78%

Subs
504
79
41

Conversion Rate
1.48%
1.24%
0.98%

Brand B
Tablet
Desktop

Impressions
1,892,284
11,160,060

Clicks
45,706
263,423

CTR
2.40%
2.40%

Subs
749
4,123

Conversion Rate
1.64%
1.57%

Mobile

12

Impressions
1,903,069
341,985
234,758

1,266,901

22,844

1.80%

180

0.79%


Even with responsively designed sites...
• Responsive design definitely helps to boost subscription conversion rates from tablets and mobile
devices – but even with it we are still seeing far lower conversion rates from mobiles.
Site before being made responsive

Impressions

Clicks

CTR

Subs

Conv. rate

Tablets with full browsers

47,275

1,690

3.57%

183

10.83%

Mobile devices with full browsers

31,737

1,611

5.08%

100

6.21%

Same site made fully responsive

Impressions

Clicks

CTR

Subs

Conv. rate

Tablets with full browsers

38,074

1,879

4.94%

289

15.38%

Mobile devices with full browsers

22,198

1,525

6.87%

126

8.26%

• And, when deciding whether to embark on this sort of project understand what you are likely to actually
achieve for all your time and effort.
• A 1% improvement in conversion rate from desktop devices could generate significantly more than a 5%
increase in your mobile conversion rate!
13


And PPC can no longer by managed by device
•

•

This makes it far tougher to optimise PPC by device than
before.

•

14

Since the move to Enhanced Campaigns in July, Google now
view Desktop and Tablet as the same form of traffic – with
bid adjustments being able to be made for mobile only
traffic.

However, Enhanced Campaigns does now allow you to track
conversions cross-device i.e. a click on a mobile ad leading to
a sale on a desktop will be able to be credited back to the
mobile click - but only if the visitor is logged in to Google on
both devices.


Maximising return from
your PPC activities
15


Monitor and track your metrics daily
• Weekly or monthly monitoring is not enough.
• You could be spending valuable budget on paying for clicks on
keywords which are not converting.
• Make sure you check the following stats every day:
 Number of Impressions served
 The Click-Through-Rate for your ads
 Their Position and Quality Score
 The Conversion Rate for each keyword
 Your average Conversion Rate
 Your average Cost per Acquisition

16


Improving ROI through
ReMarketing
17


Make sure you have Remarketing in all forms set up
When people visit your website, but leave without buying,
Remarketing lets you reconnect with these hot prospects, entice
them to return and encourage them to buy a subscription.

Optimising Remarketing is one of the best ways to improve the
ROI from your PPC campaigns.
The main remarketing options now available include:
• Text and image ads served via the Google Display network
• NEW! Remarketing for Search
• NEW! Remarketing for Similar Audiences
• NEW! Remarketing via Google Analytics

18


Remarketing text and image ads

Text

Image

19


Good for subs generation – and brand awareness
• Although Remarketing might not always directly pay it’s way, if you take into account the ‘viewthrough-conversions’ – those people who viewed an image ad, but didn’t necessary click on it, but
then went onto order via another channel – this shows the real impact of Remarketing.

• So remarketing image ads are great for brand awareness – and the results below illustrate the
earlier point about the fact you can no longer view PPC as just a ‘one click to a sale’.
Consumer
Text
Image

Subs from clicks
24
17

Initial CPA
£37.13
£16.06

View through subs
0
99

Overall CPA
£37.13
£2.35

B2B
Text
Image

20

Impressions served
643,582
220,904

Impressions served
44,936
155,490

Subs from clicks
1
5

Initial CPA
£31.62
£22.46

View through subs
0
49

Overall CPA
£31.62
£2.08


Separately target visitors who hit your shopping basket
• Your hottest prospects are going to be the people who visited your site, started the
sign up process, but something stopped them finalising their order. So make the most
of your abandoned baskets!
• Remarketing allows you to split your targeting between those who only visited your
site vs those who went on into your payment pages.
• Design your ads to remind these visitors that there is still time to claim a‘special
offer’ - or test a special introductory price –to entice them to finish signing up.
General site visitors
All

Clicks
630

CTR
0.12%

Conv.
2

CPA
£142.32

Conv. rate
0.32%

View-through Conv.
0

Payment funnel visitors
First Page
Second Page
Third Page
21

Impressions
533,391
Impressions
688,449
14,362
98,594

Clicks
1,135
23
199

CTR
0.16%
0.16%
0.20%

Conv.
19
1
17

CPA
£67.10
£19.07
£13.39

Conv. rate
1.67%
4.35%
8.54%

View-through Conv.
135
6
181


Remarketing for Search
• Remarketing for Search (RSLA) allows you to use different bids and keywords and serve separate ads to those
people who have visited your site – when they next search in Google.
• This can help improve your PPC ROI as you can customise this element of your search campaign – and customise
your ads – to entice more of these valuable previous visitors into becoming paying subscribers.
• For example, you probably couldn’t normally afford to bid on a generic term such a ‘magazine gift subscriptions’
in a standard search campaign for any one magazine. But if someone has visited your site and then enters this
search into Google afterwards, you probably can afford to bid on this using RSLA.
• Some typical results:
Brand
Standard Search Campaign
Remarketing for Search Only

22

Impressions
49,320
240


Clicks
5,185
51

CTR
10.51%
21.25%

Subs
174
10

CPA
£7.58
£1.98

Conv. Rate
3.36%
19.61%

Remarketing for Similar Audiences
• Google’s Similar Audiences allow you to find people who share characteristics with people who have already
visited your site.
• AdWords looks at the browsing activity on its various display network sites over the last 30 days, and uses this,
along with their contextual engine, to identify people with the same interests and characteristics of the people in
your own site’s remarketing list.
• Your ads will then be shown to people whose interests/profile/online behaviour are similar to those of your
existing site visitors.
• Similar Audiences helps you target and reach new and well qualified prospects you might never even have
considered before.

23


Remarketing through Google Analytics
• Remarketing using Google Analytics allows you target people who have already visited your website, based
on the behaviour they exhibited when visiting your site.
For example:
• You can target just those visitors who spent over, say, 3 minutes on your site (i.e. they were very interested in
your content) and you exclude those who bounced in and out of the site quickly (who were less interested).
• You can target previous sites visitors by their demographic profile – their age, gender etc.
• You can target those who read two similar pages of content with a targeted ad reflecting that same
content area.

24


New initiatives improving
Click-Through-Rates
25


Enhanced Sitelinks
• Make your ad bigger
• Gives more detail about your brand & subs offering

26


Image Extensions
• Make your ad bigger
• Enhances your brand offering
• Stands out visually from other text ads

27


Review Extensions
• Give credibility
• Gives more detail about your brand offering

28


Combine them together
•
•
•
•

29

You dominate the search landscape
Great for branding
Sells your content
Pushes your offers


Follow Jellyfish Publishing

Twitter: @JFPublishing
Jellyfish Publishing

30


Thank you
Carola York
Managing Director
01737 749673
carola.york@jellyfishpublishing.co.uk

Jellyfish House
London Road
Reigate
Surrey RH2 9SS

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