To make a difference in the lives of those who read and support us daily, Público is committed to investigating and developing quality, in-depth information based on credible sources.

Contributing to an informed society means having informed readers who, by registering on the  Público Web site, get access to a few benefits — such as the ability to read more free content, saving articles to read later, activating alerts, and subscribing to newsletters.

By doing so, it is possible to boost readers’ interest in the content produced by Público and make them more regular readers of the newspaper — which could lead to greater reader engagement with the newspaper and bring them closer to the brand.

With this in mind and focusing on growing our registered readers, Público adopted an ambitious strategy of closing the Web site access with a datawall. To test it, we closed the Web site for 10 days to all users who entered via search engines and social media platforms.

The subscriptions and design teams worked together to create a new interface experience. To speed up the registration process, we redesigned the datawall promoting registrations via social buttons (Google, Facebook, and Apple) instead of the traditional Público  registration process.

Payoff at the datawall

The results couldn’t have been better. While the existing datawall collects an average of 3,500 registrations per month, the new one collected 41,000 registrations in just 10 days — a 75x higher conversion rate than the existing one.

The other good news is that traffic from search engines and social media channels remained constant, preserving the total site pageviews. Seventy-one percent of the datawall’s exposures came from Google and 29% from social media traffic. Besides that, 59% of the total registrations originated from Google, which means users are more likely to use this button instead of the others.

Two months later, we concluded that 57% of registered users returned to the site. Those users increased their pageviews by 13 times compared to anonymous users, which shows a significant increase in user engagement.

Next steps

After this test, Público is continually testing new datawall designs and segments, presenting this option for users from various group channels and optimising the registration experience.

Additionally, Público is working to improve its value proposition by adding new benefits and features to engage its registered users.

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