How Kiplinger uses Facebook ads to grow its newsletters
Personal finance publisher Kiplinger has never relied heavily on Facebook for distribution. But when it comes to growing its free newsletter, it’s found a lot to like about the platform.
The publisher has used Facebook ads to gather more than 30,000 new email newsletter subscribers in the past couple months. Subscribers, in turn, help to fuel Kiplinger’s fastest-growing source of revenue. In the past year, native advertising and branded content has grown from 5 percent of Kiplinger’s digital revenue to 20 percent, said Andy Nolen, the publisher’s director of digital operations and advertising.
Most of that growth comes from native ads that run in its free newsletters that go to 300,000 readers. It costs as little as $1 apiece for new newsletter subscribers, and Kiplinger makes an average of $3 on every subscriber it gets.
“We sustain that list and grow that list largely through Facebook now,” Nolen said. “We find that to be very good ROI.”
Kiplinger’s revenue comes from several different sources. In addition to digital advertising and a section of its site where it offers affiliate commerce deals, it also has paid newsletters and a print magazine with a circulation of over 500,000.
Kiplinger’s site gets around 3.5 million visitors per month, with about 55 percent of them coming through search, according to SimilarWeb data. According to Nolen, organic social media accounts for less than 10 percent of the site’s visits.
Based on the free newsletter growth on Facebook, Kiplinger wants to test it to sell subscriptions to its paid newsletters and other products. “We see [our Facebook page] as sort of store shelves that are empty at the moment,” said Ben Demers, Kiplinger’s social media manager. “Once we have that established, I’m going to start rolling our regular organic posts [about those products]. The ROI is untested on that.”
While publishers have noticed that the price to distribute branded content through Facebook has risen since Facebook cut the organic reach of publishers’ content in the news feed, the price of the lead ads hasn’t crept up in the same way.
Facebook has tried to help publishers acquire newsletter subscribers through its Instant Articles format. But those efforts never made much of an impact on Kiplinger, which found — like many other publishers — the format’s monetization prospects too limited.
To target prospects, Kiplinger uses Keywee to help find lookalike audiences similar to people who have liked Kiplinger’s Facebook page. It expects to spend more over time. “As native advertising grows, the ROI’s only going to get better,” Nolen said.
-
Newsletter publishers say they continue to see uptick in revenue despite advertising slowdown
At a time when larger media companies are feeling the pressure of the economic downturn and advertising slowdown, newsletter businesses continue to be in a period of revenue growth.
-
TikTok’s CEO faces bipartisan skepticism in first Congressional hearing on security concerns
The hearing comes amid calls to remove TikTok from government devices and in some cases even ban it entirely.
-
Media Briefing: What to expect at the Digiday Publishing Summit
As DPS draws nearer, top pain points for publishers are coming to light.
-
SponsoredHow advertisers are leveraging omnichannel attribution and measurement to power CTV
Sponsored by MNTN Connected TV advertising has joined and expanded the larger ecosystem of campaigns that advertisers deploy. As such, omnichannel marketing strategies now encompass television and mobile devices, tablets and other screens such as out-of-home. And as customers engage across these different touchpoints, brands are seeking and moving their measurement and analytics efforts to […]
-
New app launches through Apple hoping to win with ‘zero-party data’ when others haven’t
Caden's new app lets users connect data from their Uber, Amazon, Netflix and other accounts in exchange for money. Will it take off?
-
‘The next level for us’: The New York Times eyes better retention for games in subscription drive
The games division is focusing on finding new ways to mine the inherent competitive nature of games like encouraging people to play multiple games in a single session or through new achievements and rewards for progression.
