Subscription conversions in the Optimize view

With the Optimize view under Insights, you can see exactly where your users are converting and analyze how to improve those conversions. Optimize lets you segment historical data across many dimensions to identify what brings you closer to your subscription goals and what holds you back.

Conversion tracking

Marfeel lets you track any custom event that matters to you. We provide different conversion tracking methods. You can also set up multiple conversion funnels to differentiate between trial and regular subscriptions, which is the recommended setup. Marfeel processes these events in real time and records detailed context about each conversion.

How to use the Optimize view to analyze conversions

Optimize allows you to choose from a range of goals related to traffic, engagement, loyalty, revenue, and subscriptions. Each goal comes with a different set of options to explore the data.

For Subscriptions these include Date range, Attribution and Drill down.

Date range

Preset options: Real-time, This week excluding today, Last month, etc.
Last X number of days, e.g. 30
Custom date range, e.g. March 3rd to March 24th

Attribution

You can select from several content attribution scores for subscriptions. Some examples include:

Last hit: the last page on your site visited by the user before the conversion event
Last editorial hit: the last editorial page (i.e. article read) before the conversion event. This eliminates home and section pages as well as sign-up pages.
Inverse decay: applies more credit to page views at the beginning of the path, using a 4-view half-life. Use this to identify content-acquired users that later converted.

Click the ? next to Attribution to see the definitions for all 11 attribution scores.

Drill down

Group subscription data by 10 different categories of dimensions. Options include Host, Page technology, URL, H1 length, or Has video.

For example, select Last hit for attribution and drill down by Date to see subscriptions per day for the last 30 days. In the example below, the publisher can see that on March 5th they had 17 subscriptions and published 517 articles, averaging 0.03 subscriptions per new article. This indicates how much new content they need to produce to reach their subscription goal.

Which device brings in more conversions?

How is your mobile site doing compared to desktop in terms of subscriptions? Drill down by Device category to find out. By checking Ratios and Users, you can see that desktop has far less traffic than mobile devices. However, if we take a look at the conversion rate, we can see the percentage of subscriptions is higher on desktop. Is this related to user habits, or does it have anything to do with this publisher mobile UX? It’s common for users to prefer to make purchases on a computer, but there may be ways to make the process easier on mobile.

Where are my subscriptions coming from?

To see where your subscribers are coming from, drill down by Traffic medium with internal. Filter by Subscriptions that are Greater than 0. In the example below, you can see that Internal traffic has a good conversion rate, as does Email.

Click the Logarithmic scale icon to filter out outliers and make smaller traffic sources easier to compare.

Learn more about traffic source vs traffic medium.

How do individual users convert?

To go deeper into the user journey, click on User journey under the number of Subscriptions.

Another window pops up showing the cookies from the users that converted. Open any of these links to see every step a user has taken. All of this comes from raw data, so you can go back in time as far as you need. The single user journey shows:

Device reconciliation: after registration, Marfeel reconciles devices. Before conversion, different devices are counted as separate anonymous users; after signing up, you can see when the same user has multiple devices.
Country of the user
Content consumed leading up to and after the subscription: see what the user was reading, or wanted to read but was behind a paywall
Traffic attribution per session: observe every page viewed before, during, and after the subscription

Click the Save button in the top-right corner to save any Optimize report to a workspace for future reference or share with team members. Once you have saved the report, you have the option to subscribe to receive the report in your inbox or a Slack or Microsoft Teams channel at regular intervals to stay on top of optimization opportunities.

Conversions in Compass

Goal tracking works best when everyone in the newsroom can see what contributes to winning subscribers. That’s why conversions are available not only in the specialized Optimize view, but also in Compass. You can add Subscriptions as a Featured KPI on the Compass real-time view to keep the whole team aligned on the same goals.

Going deeper

How do I analyze subscription conversions in the Optimize view?

Choose the Subscriptions goal in the Optimize view under Insights, then refine the data with date range, attribution, and drill down options. You can group conversions by dimensions like host, page technology, URL, or device category to see what drives subscriptions.

Which attribution models can I use for subscription conversions?

The Optimize view offers 11 attribution scores. Examples include Last hit (the last page visited before converting), Last editorial hit (the last article read, excluding home, section, and sign-up pages), and Inverse decay, which credits early page views using a 4-view half-life.

How can I see an individual user's journey before they subscribed?

Click User journey under the number of Subscriptions to open the journeys of users who converted. Each journey shows device reconciliation, the user’s country, content consumed before and after the subscription, and traffic attribution per session.