Five best practices for growing audience and reader revenue were outlined at the 2022 Mega-Conference by Nicole Rocchio, news consumer insights lead, and Tina Xiao, digital growth program manager, both with the Google News Initiative.
They said these five pillars offer the most common areas of growth opportunity.
Rocchio identified three main types of news consumers:
Best practice: To help readers easily navigate your site, make your navigation bar sticky on your desktop and mobile app. This way it stays visible as a reader scrolls through your pages, making it more likely that they will easily nagivate to additional pages.
2 - Ask everywhere
Seventy percent of small business websites lack a clear call-to-action. Do you have a button that says subscribe? Or, join now? Or, sign up?
Best practice: Make your buttons always visible, such as in a sticky navbar.
3 - Push your buttons
The most common way that you can ask your readers or viewers to interact with you online is with a button. For news publishers, the average clickthrough rate with buttons is 5.3%, but some can reach up to 70%.
Best practice: Use a warm, contrasting color for your button like red, orange or yellow.
4 - Stick your landing
Simple, clear landing pages convert up to 4.6 times more subscribers.
Best practice: Clearly highlight savings for your best option. The one thing Rocchio would suggest doing different in the graphic below is to put the best value in the middle — and make that middle box jump out just a bit to grab the reader's attention. Put the most expensive package on the left.
5 - Shorten checkout
Just 13% of news outlets have cart abandonment programs.
Best practice: Set email address as the first field to capture cart abandoners.
Today's challenge: Identify which of these steps you are already doing well and which could help you change the experience for your casual readers ... and turn them into brand lovers and subscribers.
