BizLab stations across the country spent 2019 testing news ideas for revenue at their stations and in their communities. At the BizLab Summit, each station gave a six-minute overview of their project.

• Download their slides (PDF)
• Watch WDET, Vermont Public Radio, and WLRN’s panel discussion, followed by their lightning presentations
• Watch Louisville Public Media, WAMU, and Capital Public Radio’s panel discussion, followed by their lightning presentations

WAMU, in Washington, D.C., acquired and revived the digital news outlet DCist in 2018, helping to fill a void in D.C.’s news ecosystem. DCist.com has a large and loyal audience, but until now the audience was not directly supporting the website.

DCist’s project with BizLab aimed to craft a robust and unique membership program, distinct to the brand of DCist: knowledgeable, playful, and engaging. To test the team’s assumptions, their BizLab project invited previous backers of a Kickstarter campaign to join a beta membership program. That group was used to test hypotheses about which membership benefits and offerings would resonate. A few months later, the DCist launched its membership program to the public on November 1, 2019 and has seen a heartening initial response.

Louisville Public Media’s work with BizLab centered on integrating their new digital property, Do502, into their existing network of stations and membership offerings. Do502.com is an event listing site with a focus on curated lists that help people find new things to do and new places to explore in Louisville, KY.

Louisville’s BizLab experiments focused on creating and curating events specifically for the Do502 audience. Early research in the project uncovered that Do502 readers crave limited-access engagements and exclusive series, and the team used their project to explore how to engage their audience in this way. The team also experimented with how to launch and promote a membership to Do502, distinct and separate from Louisville Public Media’s existing membership program.

WDET, Detroit’s NPR Station, has identified many local, small businesses who are aligned with the station’s values, but can’t afford typical radio underwriting pricing. Additionally, it is neither efficient nor profitable for a WDET underwriting representative to pursue sponsorship at the level of a small business budget.

WDET worked with BizLab exploring social media underwriting opportunities for small businesses. Through in-person interviews, WDET discovered that small businesses frequently use Facebook and Instagram to promote events and drive traffic. They also learned these businesses care about the local community, telling their unique story and providing a niche service and product. They love WDET’s non-profit mission and its reputation within the local community. With this information, the team tested a WDET-branded social media post product on Facebook and Instagram that affiliated the small business with the WDET brand and halo, reaching a network of potential consumers. By prototyping it as an online, semi-automated process to sell and produce, WDET created an affordable underwriting product.

Capital Public Radio, in Sacramento, CA, has an existing network of NPR stations across California where in exchange for Capital Public Radio’s State Capitol reporting, partner stations provide weekly underwriting units on their airwaves. The BizLab project was focused on re-designing the function and mission of this network, Capital Public Radio Network (CPRN).

CPRN enjoyed financial success in its early years, through selling these partner station underwriting units, but revenue began to decline in 2009 and eventually fell to zero. Through BizLab, the team explored how to resurrect, restructure, and return CPRN to financial sustainability, by redefining the product in terms of the value it offered to underwriters: a one-stop-shop for reaching NPR listeners across the state of California.

WLRN in Miami has invested in their local coverage of the environment and climate change with a commitment to hosting local events and hiring an environment reporter. WLRN’s goal in their BizLab project was to explore how to generate revenue through this topical coverage and the creation of an environmental newsletter.

Their BizLab experiments tested different newsletter content, styles, and format, and then expanded into a technology integration project: the team brought in News Revenue Hub to integrate their newsletter, payment and CRM platforms. The final environmental newsletter product combines journalism and community engagement through the delivery of specialized content on a significant community issue. The newsletter is driving new membership, increasing current levels of giving, and is a vehicle for targeting specific underwriters for this newly developed product.

Vermont Public Radio’s vision is “exploring the whole Vermont story, together” – no small task when you consider VPR is a statewide public radio service in a rural state with few concentrated population centers. In 2018, during VPR’s 14-county listening tour, listeners consistently asked for more coverage of their local communities. VPR’s BizLab project centered around the idea of making the station “feel more local” in Windham County, located in Southern VT, to determine if this would increase loyalty, engagement, and ultimately, revenue.

To accomplish this, in partnership with VPR’s dedicated Southern Vermont reporter, the team worked to raise the visibility of regional content and the reporter’s profile in the community via social media and a new email newsletter. They also increased engagement with the community by soliciting story ideas and planning a “News & Brews” event to involve residents in the news gathering process. They are now also exploring the possibility of geo-targeted underwriting opportunities that would allow local businesses to reach their local customers.

As we began research efforts with our cohort stations early this year, I reviewed each partner organization’s analytics data and immediately began to notice distinctive patterns in the time of day when users engaged with each site. BizLab cohort partners included a local event-focused site and a hip local news site, as well as the regional public radio news sites you may be most familiar with. It’s important to keep these divergent content profiles in mind when comparing traffic between sites.

Our first two cohort partners managed sites which illustrated the distinctive traffic patterns yielded by two very different types of content. Do502 is an events site offering a guide to shows, food and activities in Louisville and DCist is a news site with an informal tone which offers stories that matter to people who live and/or work in Washington DC.

While DCist sees peaks of mobile traffic during each commute and steady desktop traffic during the workday, Do502 desktop traffic hits its peaks on Monday and Fridays when their events emails are sent out. Also, Do502 mobile activity reaches its peak on Fridays and Saturdays, while DCist mobile activity falls off on the weekends. This is when most events covered by Do502 occur, and meanwhile DCist readers know not to expect to see new content published on weekends.

With that in mind, I identified a few common time-of-day patterns in our cohort analytics data; have a look, then use the final section to compare your own data.

If: Your traffic sees mid-day plateaus during the work-week:

Then: You provide a steady feed of diverting content which draws your users during their workday.

• Consider this context as you make editorial decisions, or as you decide how to interpret analytics results.
• Google Analytics is not revealing communiqués from Spielbergian extraterrestrials. When your plateau is distinct as it is in the example, it’s likely that you have a localized audience.

If: Your traffic features distinct peaks:

Then: Your users are largely choosing to engage with your property at the beginning and close of each day.

• It might be worthwhile to review sessions per user per day to understand whether for your site this pattern indicates that users are coming twice each day, or that there are two cohorts of users who respectively visit in the morning and evening.
• To understand what your users are doing during peaks, identify your peak hours and then see what sources of acquisition are strongest during peaks compared to the rest of the day.

This pattern could indicate that your site’s engagement is driven by the commute, especially if it’s especially pronounced for your mobile users.

If: Your weekday traffic exhibits a sharp morning incline, then a slow decline for the rest of the day:

Then: Your audience has good reason to check in with you first thing, but you aren’t providing as compelling a reason to return later in the day.

If you see this pattern in your site, consider whether it’s a strategic priority to attract more users throughout the afternoon. If so:

• Consider regularly publishing some content in the afternoon, so your users can have a reason to return after their morning session.
• If you’re sending newsletters in the mornings, check to see how much newsletter traffic is responsible for your morning peak. If its effect is negligible, consider some A/B tests around sending the newsletter in the afternoons instead.

Now you try!

1. Start by adding this report: SessionData Extract|v01 to the Google Analytics instance for the property you’d like to measure.
2. Set a recent date-range which results in no more than 5,000 rows of data in the report; that should give you plenty of space to extract a full year’s worth of data.
3. Set the report to show the maximum 5,000 rows, then export this report to google sheets.
4. Open this template google sheet I’ve built. The template is view-only so make a copy for yourself so you can edit. TEMPLATE – Time of Day Comparison
5. Now, copy the data from your exported google analytics report into the TABLE tab of your copy of the google sheet. The charts on the subsequent tabs will populate with the data you’ve added. Which of the described patterns or BizLab cohort station patterns does your traffic most closely resemble? Take a screenshot and tweet me your results at @Ted_Fuller!

Advanced: Apply custom segments to the SessionData Extract report to extract data for specific segments, i.e. regions, activities, demographics etc. Then, compare the data you’ve collected!

I’d like to thank Amira Valliani of glow.fm and Joan DiMicco of the WBUR Bizlab for inspiring this article.

[I’m Sarah Barden, a BizLab Summer Fellow investigating revenue streams for WBUR CitySpace. I just graduated from a dual degree program between Wellesley College and Olin College studying mathematics, engineering, and user experience design, and I’ve started a Master’s in Engineering Management at Dartmouth this fall.]

Two main ways to generate revenue from your audience at events are through tickets sales and donations. Making revenue through tickets sales has been CitySpace’s main source of audience revenue so far, with about $58,000 in net ticket revenue for events since opening in February, through the end of July. 

Asking for Donation at Events

Prior to this summer, CitySpace had not asked event attendees for donations. Based on our data analysis, that over 70% of our attendees are not WBUR donors, yet the majority of event attendees are WBUR listeners and familiar with WBUR’s events and content.

Because of this, we hypothesized this audience was primed to give to WBUR’s CitySpace.  So we decided to test asking for donations both at the event and at the moment of ticket purchase. For our testing, we used two different platforms: GiveLively, a donation platform, and OvationTix, our existing ticketing system. 

We first used GiveLively to test live donations asks during events at CitySpace. The GiveLively fundraising platform is free for nonprofits that includes text-to-initiate donations and a live display showing real-time donations. During events, we could project a screen with instructions on how to donate: 

When attendees text “cityspace” to the number 44-321, they receive a donation link where they can donate using Google/Apple Pay or credit/debit card. The mobile-friendly webpage is shown below:  

We made asks at three different events, receiving $216 in donations from 11 donors. There were 306 attendees total over these three events, so only 3.6% of attendees donated, and donated an average of $19.64 per donation. We had widely varied results across events: most of the 11 donations came from just one event, which we suspect has to do with the emotional content of the event, inspiring people to donate. 

Asking for Donations at Ticket Purchase

After the event donation experiments, we turned on the ability for people to donate to WBUR CitySpace while purchasing or reserving tickets through our ticketing system, OvationTix. 

In the first two weeks this capability was on, we received $167 from 27 donors. There were 585 ticket transactions total, so 4.6% of ticket buyers added a donation — a higher percentage than asking for donations with GiveLively at events.

There was an average of $6.19 per donation, which was significantly less than the average donation through GiveLively. This is likely due to the recommended donation amounts displayed. As seen in the screenshots below, the OvationTix preset amounts were 5, 10, 25, and 50, whereas in the GiveLively test, the presets were 10, 25, 50, and 100. 

Our experiments found that the effort to raise donations at events was high (because of our team needing to break the event flow and coach people on texting to donate) and the yield was lower than the zero effort approach of asking ticket purchasers for donations. Our team will continue to run experiments, including one where OvationTix is set to the same preset amounts as GiveLively, to compare more easily. But our overall conclusion is that donations are best asked at the time of ticket purchase. 

Ticket Pricing

Ticket sales were an existing revenue stream for CitySpace, and we wanted to analyze ways in which this revenue could be increased. Since opening, most events at CitySpace were priced between $0 to $20. We hosted 17 free events, 5 $5 events, 17 $10 events, 12 $15 events, 7 $20 events, and 1 $50 event. 

In the survey discussed in my prior post, we found that price was not a driving factor in attending (which indicates price flexibility) and we received comments about pricing such as “Very reasonably priced which makes it affordable for a broader audience than many other events.” ($20 show) and “Thank you for making this affordable for the whole family.” ($20 show).

This led us to believe that we could raise prices for certain events, but how much and when? Our CitySpace team wants to keep some low prices to have an economically, geographically, and racially diverse audience. Raising the price of all events to $50+ would make events economically out of reach for a desired population. But tickets can not always be free or below cost, because CitySpace needs to remain financially sustainable. 

More evidence for raising ticket prices is the relationship between ticket prices and attendance. In analyzing audience data, we found that that a lower ticket price is correlated with lower attendance. In the chart below, each of the vertical bars is one CitySpace event and the height of the bar is percent of ticket purchasers who attended. If 200 people bought tickets and 100 people came, the bar would be at 50% attendance. The data shows that as the price for events decreases, the percentage of attendees decreases. This relationship makes sense because the more you have financially invested in an event, the more likely it is that you will want to cash in on that investment by attending the event.  

Because CitySpace wants to have some free and low cost tickets to not exclude any groups from attending, a mechanism for addressing the willingness of some to pay higher prices is variable pricing, which is offering different ticket prices for different levels of perks at an event. 

Variable pricing is also a way to increase the number of attendees at an event. If tickets are $20, that might attract 100 people to the event. If there is also a discount ticket price for $10, it can attracts students, senior, or low-income individuals that otherwise would not have come. If there is also a high ticket price for $40 with better seats, for example, this attracts people who have more disposable income and perceive an added value for attending.

In analytical terms, a flat price of $20 might only make $2,000 in revenue, but with three different ticket prices, revenue increases to $3,000. The 100 people who bought regular tickets will still attend the event, but different ticket prices attract new buyers, as outlined in the table below:

To predict future ticket sales revenue based on variable pricing, you can use spreadsheet calculations to plan out how many events of each ticket price you plan to hold. For example, say you plan to aim for 60 events in a year and want half to be free or low cost. Predicting the tickets sold per event and how many of each event will show the total revenue for those events. You can add to this basic model premium and discount pricing, to fine tune the model to determine where variable pricing will most increase revenue. 

The CitySpace team is currently testing variable pricing for events this fall, where higher ticket prices get front row seating and sometimes an extra gift, and they will be evaluating the revenue generated from these events.

Summary

1. For donations at events, we recommend choosing the ask strategy that works for you. In CitySpace’s case, using our ticketing platform to allow ticket purchasers to simply add on a donation was the best route forward, and doing live donation asks will only be done at a few events, since it is not feasible for the team to do live asks at all events. For events where your audience is seated for a long, unique event with breaks, like a conference, gala, or dinner, live asks may work very well.
2. Variable pricing is a wise move to increase revenue while keeping events affordable for certain populations. In particular, variable pricing can attract new attendees that would not have otherwise come. It is worth it to try this method at a few events to test out logistics, revenue amounts, and attendance.

[I’m Sarah Barden, a BizLab Summer Fellow investigating revenue streams for WBUR CitySpace. I just graduated from a dual degree program between Wellesley College and Olin College studying mathematics, engineering, and user experience design, and I’ve started a Master’s in Engineering Management at Dartmouth this fall.]

Goals of the Feedback Survey

Our learning goals for the survey were:

• Get general feedback on events, both quantitative and qualitative
• Understand what brings people to events
• Understand how people hear about our events
• Audience demographics

This information reveal opportunities for new revenue. By combining these learnings with existing data about ticketing, attendance, and marketing efforts, we will be able to determine how our current pricing relates to value delivered. 

Survey Design

I used SurveyMonkey to create a 14-question survey to be conducted after events in CitySpace and distributed through post-show emails. We collected 164 responses in total, from 9 events. The survey questions were:

1. Which event did you attend at WBUR CitySpace?
2. Overall, how well did the event meet your expectations?
3. How would you rate the following aspects of the event? Speaker/Performer(s), Host/Moderator(s), Length of event, Facilities, Audience Q&A, Concessions
4. Would you recommend a WBUR CitySpace event to a friend? Why or why not?
5. CitySpace is run by WBUR (Boston’s NPR News Station). Had you heard of WBUR before today?
6. When deciding whether or not to attend this event, how important were the following? Topic, Speaker/Performer(s), Location at CitySpace, Date and Time, Price of Event.
7. How did you hear about this event?
8. How did you primarily get to this event?
9. We are considering creating a CitySpace membership. What perks would you like to see in CitySpace events membership?
10. What age range do you fall into?
11. Which of the following categories best describes you?
12. What gender do you identify as?
13. Which race/ethnicity best describes you?
14. If you would like to receive the WBUR CitySpace newsletter, please share your email here.

Response Collection In-Person vs. Email

Announcements were made at the beginning and end of the events asking people to complete the survey because this feedback would help us improve future events. After the event, we collected responses in the CitySpace lobby with one or two people asking attendees leaving the venue to fill out a short survey. We had one or two laptops, a tablet, or a link to fill out on a phone. The second collection method was a link to the survey in the post-show email, asking attendees to offer their feedback. 

Overall, we found that the in-person ask after the event generated more responses than the post-show email, but only if we were actively asking individuals for responses as they left and if we had enough devices to make the wait time as short as possible. The in-person ask was time and labor intensive, however, so if your team needs a simple survey solution, the post-show email ask can still bring in some responses.

Significant Survey Results

Overall, we had positive responses to our general feedback questions. 73% of survey respondents said the event they attended was “Better than expected” or “Much better than expected”, and each specific aspect (Speaker/Performer, Host/Moderator, Length of event, Facilities, Audience Q&A, Concessions) was rated 4.4 or higher out of 5.0, except for Concessions, which was rated 3.8. 

The following charts are some of the more surprising or significant results of the survey beyond general feedback.

People attend CitySpace events for the topic, not the location or price.

We asked “In deciding whether or not to attend this event, how important were the following?” and respondents rated each aspect on a 5-point scale “Extremely important, Very important, Somewhat important, Slightly important, Not at all important”.

The chart below shows that topic is the most influential factor for these survey respondents. Regardless of specific speakers, location, date/time, or price, people are coming for the topic of the event. The least important influences were location and price. For location, people would be willing to see this event somewhere else, but we can not change the location of CitySpace. Because the price was also rated low in importance, we now know that people would be willing to pay more for topics they love.

Most people come by car to CitySpace events

We have heard anecdotally that transportation is a barrier to attending CitySpace events. Driving a car in rush hour traffic and then finding parking near CitySpace can be difficult, but CitySpace is about 50 feet from a public transit train stop in Boston. Given this, we were surprised that about 50% of attendees reported traveling by car to our events. This may be due to the timing of events in the evening: if most people are driving a car to work, attending a 6pm event likely means they drive directly from work. For those taking public transit, the commute could be up to an hour for those coming from outside the immediate area. To bring new audiences to CitySpace, beyond the neighboring areas, we are now considering offering Lyft or Uber codes, or similar, to support those interested in the event but unable to commute to the location.

People hear about CitySpace events in “Other” ways

We thought CitySpace’s email newsletter, website, and social media efforts were bringing in our audience. But almost 50% of survey respondents answered “Other” when responding to the question “How did you hear about this event?” This was very surprising to the CitySpace team! The free-form responses to “Other” mentioned friends, family and directly from the speakers. 

These responses are informing our marketing efforts. There may be ways to increase ticket sales through certain marketing channels, or use marketing efforts to offer discounts or special offers as ways to get more emails and more audience.

Most of the CitySpace audience are WBUR listeners, but not all are donors.

If you read the first post in this series, I shared this data in learning about CitySpace’s audience. When asked “Had you heard of WBUR before today?” 42% said “Yes, I’m a member” and 46% said “Yes, I’m a listener but not a member.” A listener who is not a member (donor) is a potential donor. We hope to convert these attendees into WBUR donors by offering more engaging programming, and inspiring them to donate.

The CitySpace team had thought attendees would be listeners, so were surprised that 12% of survey respondents were either not listeners or had not even heard of WBUR before attending an event.

Edit your survey to only collect useful data, but keep it similar!

After a successful run of the summer survey, we reviewed these results and decided to continue surveying our audience, but to make changes to the survey. We removed the questions that we felt we had found the answer to and adjusted questions we thought could be simplified. 

We simplified some of the longer questions where respondents had to rate many aspects of the events on a relative scale. We also adjusted certain parts of the survey to be more specific, for example, the questions about ticket price. Overall, however, we kept the survey as similar as possible so that we could compare the results over time. 

Summary

1. In terms of what influences people to come to events, we found that the event’s topic on average was the most influential, followed by speaker/performer. In looking at specific events, such as a comedian or a podcast, speaker/performer outranks topic because the audience wanted to see that specific person.
2. Since price was in the bottom two for important factors influencing attendees, we can infer that price is less important, and therefore people may be willing to pay more for people or topics they really want to hear. This matches up with some survey comments that mention CitySpace prices as being “reasonable.”
3. Half of event attendees learn about CitySpace events outside of CitySpace’s direct outreach, instead through word of mouth, and other social media. The CitySpace team can use this insight to change their strategy on CitySpace social media marketing and also take advantage of these other forms of marketing in order to increase ticket sales and awareness.
4. With so many listeners attending CitySpace events who are not yet donors, we believe this is a prime opportunity for donation asks at events, when buying tickets, or through email asks. The next post will dive more into how we tested asking for donations.

Overall, if your team has the ability to collect data through a post-event survey, think carefully about the questions you ask, and know that you can try the survey for a few weeks and then edit the questions as needed, though keeping it similar enough to compare results over time. This data on events not only helps improve general event structure, but with asking questions about people’s motivations for attending events and how they feel about price, you can gain insight into how flexible your audience is on prices and what they value most about the venue.

While WBUR Guides did not turn a profit, the process of building the site and testing promotion methods revealed critical insights into the prospects for affiliate marketing within Public Media web properties. 

WBUR’s Future with Affiliate Marketing

Should we make a similar effort again, we’d use Facebook ads only for testing content and for email acquisition. Also, we now know not to embark on such an effort without securing a commitment to promote the content extensively where our regular readers and listeners are most engaged, which is on-air and on www.wbur.org.

At WBUR, we’ve seen steady year-over-year revenue growth from Amazon ever since we began inserting their affiliate links into our book articles in August of 2017:

Amazon retail eCommerce sales in the US have shown consistent growth, and eMarketer projects further growth in the future for Amazon and US eCommerce sales in general. Barring unpredictable macro-trends in the economy, we expect that consistently applied affiliate links on existing content will expand revenue each year for the near-future.

The clean and transparent design of the guides site attracted praise from our underwriting department, so we may work with them to repurpose the design of WBUR Guides for sponsored content. Additionally, the data yielded from our more than 120 ad tests will be helpful in focusing how we pitch sponsored content to potential underwriters. Thanks to those tests, we know that our audience is interested in women’s shoes and sustainable home goods, and we know that the audience coming from www.wbur.org is more receptive to content that is closer to journalism in its style.

Our Advice to Public Media Organizations

Following these tenets should help you prepare to engage in affiliate marketing at your organization and accurately measure  your audience’s reaction once you’re ready to promote it.

• Begin by promoting Amazon affiliate links. The variety of products from their site means you can promote almost anything, and see what has traction. When you’ve identified your niche, find a vendor in CJ which caters to that category and take advantage of CJ’s higher commission.
• Publish and test a variety of content, including different writing styles. The results may surprise you. Until we ran tests which proved otherwise, we’d expected vegetable delivery to outperform women’s shoes.
• Track everything. Track each step that your audience takes so you can understand where they’re hitting snags, and determine which audience is most likely to yield product-clicks.
• Organic Traffic is your most valuable asset. Work with your editorial team to integrate affiliate marketing content and promote affiliate content within your news site as much as is possible. The closer the affiliate content is to your core content the more your audience will embrace it.
• Facebook is great for testing, but using it simply to advertise your content is unlikely to produce a profit. You’ll always pay more for your audience than they yield in referral fees.

If you haven’t already, check out our previous posts in this series on affiliate marketing: The Challenge, The Strategy, and The Numbers & The Lessons.

If you have any questions about this experiment, or if you’re planning affiliate marketing content, please feel free to contact me at tbfuller@bu.edu or on Twitter at @ted_fuller

As we approached the Affiliate Marketing project, we established key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure while testing, and to guide the refinement of our strategy. Both of our KPIs are based on product clicks from our product guides on WBUR Guides to retailer websites. Once users leave our site we can’t track which of them convert to purchase, so product clicks are the limit of our ability to track users from acquisition through to conversion.

Our most important KPI for evaluating each promotional campaign is Product Click Rate. This allows us to judge varying audiences by indicating their relative likelihood to click one of our products.

Product Click Rate = Quantity of Product Clicks / Quantity of Users

When comparing paid campaigns, the most important KPI is Cost-per-Product-Click. This makes it easy to understand which of your paid campaigns is arriving at your desired end-result most cost-effectively.

Cost Per Product Click = $ Cost of Campaign / Quantity of Product Clicks

Traffic to Guides and Earnings from Amazon and CJ Affiliates

Between site launch on May 23, 2019 and the close of the project July 31, 2019, more than 39,000 users visited our site in over 42,000 sessions.

• That activity yielded $203.01 in referral earnings from 111 purchases. (I’ll spare you the grisly details, but $203 is far less than we invested in Facebook ads.)
• 77% of user purchases came from Amazon, and the rest from individual retailers registered with CJ Affiliates.
• Overall, we received a 7.01% commission from our referred Amazon sales, and a 12.76% commission from CJ Affiliates.
• 72% of our Amazon sales were for indirect purchases – i.e. users clicked one of our links, then bought something else entirely.

Lesson: Begin with Amazon, then use CJ Affiliates

Our advice is to start out with Amazon and test a variety of product reviews your audience may appreciate. Measure their ROI with analytics, and monitor the products for which you’ve earned referral revenue. When you’ve found a niche, use CJ Affiliates to connect with advertisers who may be paying higher commissions than Amazon. Our reasoning is:

• Amazon offers a greater variety of products which you can advertise, and you’ll earn revenue for any Amazon purchase made by your referred audience in the 24 hours after they clicked your referral link. That’s powerful when you consider that Amazon was responsible for 33.7% of the eCommerce market in 2018.
• CJ Affiliates pays a higher commission but does not offer the above described advantage of cross-purchases. Choosing the right niche will result in higher earnings from CJ, but reviewing unpopular niche products could lead to no revenue at all.

Most Successful Guide & Product

We published a total of 11 guides, covering 10 categories including sustainable home goods, women’s shoes, travel goods, fresh vegetable delivery, and reusable straws.

Our audience was receptive – of the 120 users who answered our embedded survey, 87% said WBUR Guides are “useful,” and 82% want to see more Guides.

Our guide to women’s shoes, The Six Most Comfortable Shoes for Every Type of Traveler, proved to be the most popular:

• We ran a Facebook ad sending users to our homepage where we list all our published articles and 71% of those who clicked on an article chose to visit the guide to women’s shoes, despite its position as ten out of eleven in the list.
• Our first run of Facebook ads tested fresh vegetable delivery, eyeglasses, women’s shoes, and children’s toys against each other, to determine which of our ads had the greatest appeal. Users who saw the ad for Women’s Shoes clicked through at a 2.04% rate, more than twice the click-through-rate of any other ad in the test.

The above described ad series yielded three shoe purchases; no other guide produced such immediate and consistent results. In particular, one shoe, the Born Lemhi, produced more click-throughs and revenue than any other single product we advertised. Testing the image of that pair against our other featured women’s shoes in a series of Facebook ads, it yielded an ad click-through-rate four times greater than the other shoe options.

Lesson: Publish and Test a Variety of Content

Publish a variety of content and test it head-to-head using A/B testing. Find your niche by understanding which products attract an audience and then generate click-throughs and purchases. Before testing, we thought fresh vegetables and toys would perform better than women’s shoes!

Lesson: Track Everything

Before you begin to promote your content, be sure that you are prepared to track your audience’s response. You’ll need:

• Google Analytics: Install this on your site to track your site’s overall usage and analyze your audience.
• Google Tag Manager: Connect GTM to Google Analytics to track important actions such as product clicks as goals in Google Analytics. 
• Google URL Builder: Every time you distribute a link to your content as part of a campaign, use this tool to set up UTM parameters, including a unique campaign name for each link. When users click those links and arrive at your site, the parameters you added allow Google Analytics to attribute that traffic to your specified campaign.

When these tools are used together, you’ll be able to attribute each user and each product click to a campaign. That way, when you strike gold and a torrent of product clicks register, you’ll be able to understand which campaign sent those users and either repeat or refine your technique.

Advertising platforms like Facebook can tell you what it cost to acquire the users, but not whether those users converted to product clicks. When using these analytics tools to connect the cost of the campaign to the end result of product-clicks, you’ll get a clearer sense of ROI.

Finally, survey your affiliate marketing audience either through a marketing email or by embedding a survey on your site. Our survey collected ideas for further guides, and the overwhelmingly positive responses justified our effort to promote them on WBUR.org.

Sources of Traffic

Over the course of the experiment, we promoted the site with 104 Facebook ads, 16 banner variations on www.wbur.org, 2 mentions within articles on www.wbur.org, 6 tweets, and 1 marketing email.

We saw the best product click-through-rates for audiences originating from www.wbur.org and from our email list. Paid traffic originating from Facebook was far less likely to click on one of our suggested products – even our most successful Facebook ad could not compete with the results from organic traffic.

*This marketing email was a low-volume test with only 14 email addresses, but it showed encouraging results.

Successful WBUR.org Affiliate Articles

It has long been WBUR’s practice to use Amazon affiliate links when an editorial article makes reference to a book. These links appear in articles sharing lists of books, i.e. holiday gift guide or summer reading lists, as well as author interviews. This is an exception to the station’s overall guideline against posting affiliate marketing content on WBUR.org.

The above chart follows the large number of orders (blue bars) as well as the page traffic for the summer reading list article (red line). The yellow line indicates the portion of that traffic sent from our paid Facebook ads. Our campaign successfully sent users to the article, but the visible gap in the chart between traffic and purchases indicates that users sent by Facebook ads were not as primed to make a purchase.  Before our campaign ran, over 5% of the page’s audience made an order, earning $.08 cents per user. During the period of our campaign, that dropped to 1.5% or only $0.02 cents per user.

This chart follows the earnings generated by the article each day (green bars) as well as the amount we invested in Facebook ads each day of our three-day campaign (red bars). Our campaign resulted in a somewhat anemic boost to earnings, and did not recoup the $600 spent on promotion.

Lesson: Organic Traffic is Necessary to Produce a Profit

Your station’s organic web traffic is your most precious resource in Affiliate Marketing; this audience is already engaged with your content, and you’re more likely to hold their interest through to a product click. Work with your editorial team to expose your content to the readers of your news site as much as is possible.

In our case, we couldn’t treat our guides as if they were regular news articles on WBUR.org, but we managed to extract concessions like inserting links to guides into relevant articles as well as promoting the content with banners on WBUR.org.

You should expect push-back from your editorial team. Journalists may have an antipathy towards Affiliate Marketing in principle, as it departs from orthodox journalism standards. Get your foot in the door where you’re allowed and track your results, surveying your audience if possible. If you can demonstrate that your content added value for the reader while earning income, you may have an easier time making your case for further affiliate marketing efforts.

Lesson: Facebook ads will not turn a profit for affiliate marketing

You’ll always pay more for your audience than can wring out of them in referral fees. Consider using it instead as a tool for testing content or to acquire email addresses. Our Facebook ads only worked during the period when they ran. If instead you can get the user’s email address, you may continue to market your affiliate content to them at no cost using an email newsletter.

Writing Style

Over the course of the project, we hired two contributors with distinct voices. We asked our first author, Rebecca Palermo to write product reviews from a personal perspective, while we asked our second author, Rachel Brandt to used a more explanatory style which more closely resembled journalism. We asked them to each write an article about sustainable home goods, then measured our audience’s reaction to each style.

Our results indicated that users coming from Facebook ads were more engaged with the product review writing-style. Meanwhile, those coming from WBUR.org banner ads appeared to find the explanatory journalism-style content more engaging.

Lesson: Test Different Writing Styles

Try different writing styles to see what is most effective at connecting with your users. Keep in mind that different acquisition methods may affect which content is most-appreciated by your users.

In our case, our realization of the value of WBUR’s organic audience means that we’d stick with a writing style that looks and feels more like journalism, as it appears to capture the attention of that audience more effectively.

Our next blog post in this series on affiliate marketing will cover future prospects for affiliate marketing within media organizations.

If you haven’t already, check out our previous posts in this series on The Challenge and The Strategy

If you have any questions about this experiment, or if you’re planning affiliate marketing content, please feel free to contact me at tbfuller@bu.edu or on Twitter at @ted_fuller

[This is Part 2 of a series of blog posts for WBUR BizLab’s Affiliate Marketing Project, funded by the Lenfest Institute.]

Construction of the Guides Website

To host our affiliate marketing experiments, our team developed a standalone site on WordPress. We called this WBUR Guides and integrated it as a subdomain of wbur.org at guides.wbur.org. In the individual Guides, we highlighted interesting and emerging products in the areas of health, fitness, gifts, travel, and culture. For each product we embedded affiliate links which sent users to external sites where interactions were tracked through CJ affiliate and Amazon’s Affiliate Program. When a reader navigated to an external site through our affiliate links, any purchase they made on that site generated an affiliate commission for WBUR.

We included a feedback form at the bottom of each guide and used the responses to help inform our content strategy.  The form included a field where respondents could enter their email to receive updates on future guides, effectively building out an email list for future promotions.  Finally, at the end of each guide we provided links to other guides to encourage continued browsing of our content.

Promotion Strategy

We promoted WBUR Guides through many different channels, some of which were ‘free’ channels owned and operated by WBUR, or WBUR’s ‘organic channels’ such as wbur.org.  Specifically, on wbur.org, we were able to promote within banner ads on the top of the homepage and within banners displayed in the news feed, using unsold ad inventory.

Another channel of promotion more closely tied to a readers organic experience on wbur.org was through in-article mentions. When an article was published that was closely tied to the topic of a guide, we would add in a text call-out that linked to the related guide. This method of posting links in relevant WBUR articles sent organic traffic from WBUR’s reader audience to our guides.

We also wanted to experiment with Twitter as a promotion channel. The official WBUR Twitter account cannot be used for non-news content, but fortunately WBUR has another Twitter account, WBURExtra, for any content falling outside of the news category. Although this account didn’t have as large a reach as WBUR’s primary Twitter account, testing promotions through WBUR Extra enabled us to gauge what levels of engagement might occur on the main account.

If your organization’s social media accounts are strictly limited to news coverage, it may be beneficial to create a similar ‘extra’ account.  Spinning up a secondary Twitter account does not require new content creation but instead can be populated with content by retweeting posts from other Twitter account holders in your organization.

Paid Social Strategy

Facebook Ads played a major role in this project; with limited promotion on wbur.org, we needed to use Facebook, and specifically paid Facebook ads, to drive traffic to our site, to test our content’s effectiveness at driving affiliate revenue. We hoped to use Facebook’s advanced targeting abilities to send ads to users who resembles the audience of wbur.org, with the assumption that this audience would be equally apt to click through and make a purchase.

With that in mind, we targeted Facebook ads towards individuals who had indicated NPR to be an interest of theirs, as well as individuals who had liked WBUR properties on Facebook such as On Point or Here and Now. We also tested targeting parameters like age, location and gender.

Additionally, we conducted tests around the creative style of our ads. For example, we knew that one pair of shoes was our best-selling item, so we A/B tested each available shoe color to determine which was most attractive to our audience (Brown).

After each ad ran, we reviewed results and iterated rapidly. Within two months, we tested a total of 104 distinct individual ads.

Tracking & Analytics

We prioritized implementing robust tracking as part of our web development effort. This ultimately led to better insights into which efforts drove the most engagement and financial results.  If tracking is not implemented at every step of the user experience, performance analysis will be based on aggregate data rather than focused on understanding how different components of the projects are working in relation to each other. 

As an analogy, consider inventory turnover in a typical store. If we only know that, on average, products will sell twice per week, then we only have an aggregate level for product performance. However, if we were able to understand product performance on a more granular level we can begin to see that the best-selling item sells 20 times a week and the worst selling item only sells once per month. With this type of insight it is easy to imagine how a store owner could make more informed decisions about which products are stocked. This is the type of granularity we have strived to produce in our analytics in order to determine, for example, the best performing promotional channels. This gives us insight into which tactics are working best so we know where our efforts are most productively spent.  From these insights, we iterate our approach to optimize the outcomes.

At the start of the project, reports from Google Analytics indicated how much traffic came to the site and reports from the affiliate networks indicated how much earnings we had accrued, but we lacked insight into which campaigns or promotions were driving or converting that traffic. To achieve those insights we leveraged UTM tags and Google Event Tracking to track the referral source and actions of each web user who visited a guide.

UTM Tagging

UTM tagging is when a web URL is modified with additional identifying information, allowing activity from users to be traced back to the promotion which sent them to our site. Tools such as Google Campaign URL Builder make creating URLs with UTM tags a breeze for marketers looking for more in depth analytics on how different campaigns are performing. Below is a screenshot of Google’s Campaign URL Builder, with our parameters filled out: 

For example, if you are running two campaigns, one on Twitter and one on Facebook, you can create two distinct URLs to the same website with different UTM tags and use your analytics platform to understand whether promotions on Twitter or Facebook are driving traffic more effectively to the website.  The concept of UTM tagging can be expanded to any medium where links are placed online. Any time you promote a link to your site, use UTM tracking so you can trace the source of your visitors to a specific promotion.

Defining our KPI as Product Clicks

In addition to tracking where users cam from, we were ultimately interested in how users behaved once they reach the site. To measure engagement with WBUR Guides content, we used clicks on suggested product links as our top key performance indicator(KPI).

Ideally we would have liked to use actual product purchases as our KPI to measure engagement but our tracking could not extend to the external sites where our affiliate links lead, so we were unable to tie purchases back to specific efforts at promotion. Therefore, the closest proxy we have to actual purchases is clicks on affiliate links leading off our website. 

To measure individual product clicks, we integrated event tracking on our website through Google Tag Manager.  Google Tag Manager allows us to define both tags and what behavior triggers those tags.  Tags and triggers work together to enable more granular tracking of events or actions taken on a website, whether that be a visitor to a site watching a video, filling out a form, or clicking a link.  By enabling tracking on these individual events we get a better sense of how individuals are engaging with our website. In WBUR Guides, we tracked each user who clicked a product link as an event. We then looked for promotion techniques which yielded audiences that generate a high proportion of product clicks.

By integrating UTM tags in marketing efforts and building custom events around actions which measure visitor engagement on the site, one can pin down performance metrics to see how audiences across various campaigns are engaging with the content.  The next section on controlled experimentation will demonstrate the power of this approach.

Designing Controlled Experiments

Our team went through a process of running controlled experiments in order to test the effectiveness of our marketing efforts, evaluating our ad copy, ad creative, promotional channels, and ad targeting. For anyone running experiments, know that there are a few critical steps that should be taken to ensure your experiments are run in a controlled manner, so that you get the data to answer your core question. The following example, testing the effect of including the WBUR logo in our Facebook ads, will demonstrate how a controlled experiment should be set up. 

It is crucial that every experiment has both a control group and an experimental group. Every aspect of the treatment (in this case the ad) should be exactly the same except for the one variable you are interested in testing, in our case the presence of the WBUR logo. 

In our test, we constructed two different ads: one for our experimental group with the WBUR logo and the same exact ad without the logo for our control group. By setting up the experiment this way we were able to attribute differences between the two groups to the presence of the logo, because the logo is the only difference between the two conditions.

In our experiment we targeted the ads in both the control group and experimental group to individuals within the Boston DMA (Designated Market Area), as we presumed this to be the area where the presence of the logo would have the largest effect.

The Ad Click Rate was very similar for both ads (1.49% and 1.69%) and this small difference could be attributed to chance. However, for individuals who clicked on the ad when the logo was present, the subsequent Product Click Rate to affiliate products on external sites, measured through our event tracking, was much higher (8.05%, compared to 5.49%).  This suggests that when the WBUR logo is present in a Facebook ad, individuals clicking on the ad are more likely to continue on to click from the WBUR Guides content to the product website. If we had not instrumented our ads for Product Click Rate and if we had changed multiple aspects of the ads, we would not be able to make this conclusion. 

Takeaways

Building a WordPress property to host your content is not where you should focus your development time. it is much more important to correctly instrument your ads and your site with the right UTM tags and event tracking. Without tracking you will not know why your project is (or isn’t) working. 

Running controlled experiments requires a scientific approach where only the variable of interest is manipulated. It is necessary to have a control group which provides a benchmark to gauge the effect of the variable of interest. The Facebook Ads Manager has built in A/B testing capabilities which will facilitate your process of running controlled experiments. 

Our next blog posts in this series on affiliate marketing will cover the results of WBUR Guides and prospects for the future of affiliate marketing within WBUR and public media.

If you haven’t already, check out our first blog post in this series: Exploring the Potential of Affiliate Marketing: The Challenge

[I’m Sarah Barden, a BizLab Summer Fellow investigating revenue streams for WBUR CitySpace. I just graduated from a dual degree program between Wellesley College and Olin College studying mathematics, engineering, and user experience design, and I am starting a Master’s in Engineering Management at Dartmouth this fall.]

What is WBUR CitySpace?

Since opening five months ago, WBUR CitySpace has held 80+ events, including WBUR programming and partner programming with organizations like The Wilbur (a local, independently-owned venue focused on live comedy) and The Moth (a non-profit holding theme-based storytelling events). The space can seat up to 270 people in a flexible space that includes an open lobby. Exterior glass walls invite curious pedestrians to watch the events and listen on the benches while live audio is streamed outside.

Potential Revenue Ideas

When I arrived at the beginning of June, CitySpace had launched its events and the team was looking for insights into making more revenue. Ticket sales were currently the only audience revenue stream, so the team wanted to explore options beyond ticket sales. I proposed several different areas for exploration this summer: asking for donations from the audience, adjusting ticket prices, membership options for CitySpace, and selling merchandise. 

Understanding the CitySpace audience

First, however, we needed to understand the CitySpace audience to help properly set up experiments. The team had ticket buyer data available for events through our ticketing system, OvationTix (this data doesn’t include any partner events where they handle their own ticketing). I also created a survey to capture more data than the ticket sales from OvationTix. Some of the survey data is shared below, but the next post will go into detail on our survey results! I analyzed these two sources of data to understand:

Is the audience loyal to WBUR or not? Are they donors? Listeners? Not aware of WBUR?

• If the audience already donates to WBUR, are they be willing to donate also to CitySpace?
• If the audience is made up of WBUR listeners who do not donate, will attending CitySpace events encourage them to donate to WBUR or CitySpace? 
• If the audience is unfamiliar with WBUR, could a separate CitySpace events membership make most sense for serving this unique audience.

Do people like CitySpace events? Are they returning to multiple events?

• Can we increase the number of repeat attendees with a paid events membership?
• How can we encourage people to buy tickets to future events with ticket packages and come back?

Are event attendees public radio donors?

On average, we found that 70% of ticket buyers are not WBUR donors. While some events attracted loyal WBUR listeners, many events were attracting outside audiences. With just qualitative observations to reflect on previously, this 70% number was surprising to the team. While they expected a large number of non-donors, they didn’t realize that almost three-quarters of ticket buyers were not “loyal” to WBUR.

WBUR has different membership levels for those who donate to the station: (1) Major donor, a one time gift more than $1,500, (2) Sustainer, a monthly donation of any amount, and (3) Member, a one time donor of any amount less than $1,500.

Although the average is 70%, this percentage varies depending on the type of event. Knowing which events attract which types of audiences can help set audience and attendance goals. For example, is your event for engaging and interacting with donors, or is it to attract new general public audiences? Ticket pricing and marketing should align to these goals. Events like our The Handmaid’s Aria attracted many WBUR donors than average because the team targeted marketing efforts at donors and the topic aligned to our listeners’ interest in the author Margaret Atwood. We knew the event would sell out quickly, so took this strong match of interest from our existing donors as an opportunity to charge a higher ticket price ($50). For the event Tackling Gun Violence, our goal was to attract a diverse, community-focused audience, so we kept ticket prices low ($10) and marketed broadly across the city, without specifically targeting donors in our marketing. The resulting audience reflects this with few donors in attendance. 

Are event attendees public radio listeners? 

In our post-event survey, we asked “Had you heard of WBUR before today?” and we found that 46% of the survey respondents are WBUR listeners, but not donors. This showed that although most attendees are not donors, many of them are still listeners (42% + 46% = 88%). The survey showed a slight difference in non-donor numbers: 58% of survey respondents were non-donors as opposed to 74% non-donors from the ticket data. 

Do event attendees come to multiple events?

To sense if people are enjoying the new WBUR event space, I used our OvationTix ticket buyer data to see how many people bought tickets to multiple, different events and then if they attended them.

Of all ticket buyers, 420 bought tickets to 2+ events, but only 215 of those ticket buyers attended 2+ events. This means that 11.3% of ticket buyers bought tickets to at least two event and 8.8% of ticket buyers have attended at least two events.

(This only counts ticket buyers and does not count their guests, since we don’t know who their guests are each time. If we add in ticket buyers’ guests, the 215 attendees would increase, but we can’t know for sure that ticket buyers bring the same guests every time.)

Now that CitySpace is reaching its sixth month of operation, the number of repeat attendees should begin to increase, and these percentages will be continued to be tracked. In the first few months, the low number of repeat attendees was promising in terms of new audience building. CitySpace was reaching new people with each event and building a large email list to increase awareness.

Summary

Overall, this analysis revealed several potential revenue opportunities to test for WBUR CitySpace: 

1. With 70% of event attendees being non-donors, CitySpace can explore ways to convince these audience members to donate to WBUR CitySpace programming, supporting future events.
2. For the 12% of event attendees who are not listeners or haven’t even heard of WBUR, there are fresh opportunities for increasing WBUR’s brand awareness, which can increase later ticket sales, listening audience, and donations to WBUR and CitySpace.
3. With few repeat attendees, CitySpace can test different membership models now to encourage buying more tickets, through ticket packages or topic-based memberships.
4. Collecting and tracking this data on a repeat basis can help set goals for CitySpace, for example raising repeat attendees to a certain percent, or setting a revenue goal.

Understanding your audience is an important step to identifying potential revenue streams. Factors that influence why people come to events affect how many people buy tickets, if they will come back and buy more tickets, or if they will consider donating. Are they coming because of your station? Do they care about supporting the station? Or are they coming for the topic or performer and wouldn’t care who hosted it? If you have information like audience data, donor data, emailing lists, or ticket sales, understanding your audience is the first step toward brainstorming potential revenue streams.

Affiliate Marketing Overview

In an affiliate marketing model, online retailers pay commission on traffic or sales referrals from third-party websites like ours. When readers click affiliate links and subsequently make purchases, the affiliate site earns a commission on the sales. Commission rates typically range between 2-10% of the purchase price. 

In publishing, a prominent example of this is The Wirecutter, a New York Times company which highlights various product categories for review and comparison, all with links to purchase on external sites. Nationally-known media organizations like CNN, USA Today, and TIME all engage with affiliate marketing models.

A report from BusinessInsider.com describes how affiliate marketing has been generating increasing revenue in recent years and now drives as many e-commerce orders in the US as email marketing.  Each of those channels accounts for 16% of all US e-commerce orders. Moreover, approximately 15% of the digital media industry’s revenue now comes from affiliate marketing.

As the use of affiliate marketing has continued to grow and become more prominent with many major publishers engaging in this space, BizLab decided to explore the potential of affiliate marketing within WBUR, with grant support from The Lenfest Institute.

WBUR’s initial exploration into affiliate marketing came in the form of book links.  Anytime a book is mentioned on-air and ends up in an article, affiliate links direct users to those books on Amazon for purchase. WBUR has been participating in Amazon’s Affiliate Program for many years. 

An example of an affiliate revenue generating page is the article “These Are The Best Cookbooks Of 2018, According To Chef Kathy Gunst,” by Here & Now resident Chef Kathy Gunst, spotlighting the best cookbooks of 2018. This single page generated over $1000 in affiliate revenue commissions. Book links led to approximately $10,000 in annual revenue in fiscal year 2019.

These results from book linking spurred continued exploration of opportunities with affiliate marketing at WBUR in the BizLab.

Affiliate Marketing Platforms

Our exploration into affiliate marketing led us to CJ Affiliate and Amazon’s Affiliate Program, two of the largest affiliate platforms available to marketers.  To use an analogy, you can think of CJ Affiliate as a matchmaker. The platform connects brands to advertisers in order to facilitate the relationships underlying the affiliate marketing model and provide the mechanics for tracking performance of affiliate marketing efforts and awarding commissions. When we link to products with CJ, we link to products found on individual brand and commerce websites, not to CJ.com. 

CJ’s affiliate network generally offers higher commissions than Amazon’s Affiliate Program, but the opportunities are more niche as they are tied to specific brands.

On the other hand, although Amazon’s Affiliate Program generally offers lower commissions, there is a very broad opportunity to earn affiliate commissions through nearly all of Amazon’s vast array of products.  An additional benefit of Amazon’s Affiliate Program is that affiliate marketers are credited and receive commissions for any purchase their outbound traffic makes on Amazon, not just products reviewed or linked to originally by the affiliate marketers content.

To clarify, if an individual visitor to an affiliate marketing site clicked on a product link to Amazon but then instead navigated to and purchased another product unrelated to the original product linked to, the affiliate which sent the visitor to Amazon would still be credited with a commission on that sale regardless of whether the item purchased was linked to by the affiliate or not.

One of the benefits of engaging with both CJ Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate Program is more diverse brand affiliations. In instances where all of products promoted in an article link to Amazon, we have received feedback from readers indicating distaste towards driving traffic solely to Amazon, so CJ’s platform allow us to diversify the sites we link users to, offering them more options.

Challenge

Initial discussions at WBUR with editorial staff highlighted a conflict of interest between the affiliate marketing experiment and the preservation of WBUR’s journalistic integrity.  The existence and importance of the ‘Editorial Firewall’ within WBUR stems from editorial concerns regarding journalistic integrity, so project guardrails were quickly defined early on.  WBUR’s news and editorial leadership was mainly concerned with ensuring that audience members would not perceive the affiliate marketing content as WBUR journalism. Other concerns at the station focused on being transparent with WBUR’s audience and avoid the perception of ‘pushing products.’

With that in mind, we agreed to the following:

• We would call our affiliate content “WBUR Guides” instead of “WBUR Recommends” to avoid the sense that we are guaranteeing or backing products. 
• Our content creators would be referred to as “Outside Contributors” rather than “Authors.” This avoids the perception that they are journalists. For the same reason, we refer to each individual piece as a “Guide” rather than an “Article.”
• To ensure transparency, each guide would include a disclaimer noting that the station may earn an affiliate commission from their purchases and including a link to learn more.
• WBUR Guides would have its own web domain, guides.wbur.org.
• We would only link to Guides through these approved methods:
  • On www.wbur.org, unsold banner ad space. 
  • On www.wbur.org, using text blocks with links within news articles reporting on closely related topics.
  • On Twitter, via @WBURExtra, not the main newsroom Twitter account @WBUR.

A critical component we integrated on the site was the disclaimer within every guide.  This disclaimer was meant to protect WBUR and tied back into the notion of preserving journalistic integrity by being transparent with WBUR’s audience about the potential for earning a commission off purchases made through our links.

What happened?

For anyone interested in testing an affiliate marketing model within their organization (or for those just plain interested!), be sure to check out our other blog posts in this series.  Additional posts will cover the strategy of building and promoting the affiliate marketing website, the numbers in terms of conversions down our marketing funnel and revenue generated, and the future examining ways in which affiliate marketing can continue to grow within the organization.

Background

WBUR’s iLab produces a variety of critically-acclaimed podcasts, but we’ve never asked our podcast listeners for donations. Our traditional on-air pledge drives have been limited to the region covered by our radio towers. In contrast, our podcasts are downloaded by listeners from around in the world; asking these listeners for donations could provide a new revenue stream from an untapped, global audience.

We identified three challenges for this experiment, primarily stemming from the inherent difference in mediums between broadcast radio and podcast downloads.

1. Podcasts are on-demand, so we won’t have the traditional advantage of a captive radio audience. While a commuter may remain tuned in for the length of a radio donation ask, a podcast listener can advance the audio using the built-in ‘advance 15/30 seconds’ buttons available in podcast apps.
2. We’ve never asked for donations through a podcast before, meaning we’ll need to experiment to determine what messaging, donation amount, and premium offer are most effective at activating the audience and persuading them to follow through with their donation.
3. Podcasts are primarily a mobile experience, and our standard donation form is not what mobile users have come to expect from payment processors. It asks potential donors to fill in far too many fields on their cell phone keyboard, and a lot of those fields are not necessary to process a donation or identify the donor. To make it as easy as possible for mobile donors to give, we need to make this a more seamless experience by taking advantage of mobile payment processing technologies.

First Experiment: Circle Round – Coloring Book

Planning

Circle Round is a storytelling podcast aimed at young children and families. For our first experiment, we offered a pledge gift of a Circle Round coloring book in return for a donation of $5 per month or $60 for a year. The coloring book tied into episodes so children could color along while listening. However, this value was not effectively demonstrated by our donation page – there was no way to view the coloring book at this point in the process.

In this experiment, we placed the call-to-action in the podcast’s midroll. Listen to an example of our Circle Round coloring book mid-roll:

Metrics

• Activation Rate (downloads to attempted gifts): 0.17% (452 users activated out of 262,260 downloads)
• Conversion Rate (attempted to successful gifts): 11.5% (52 users donated out of 452 users activated)
• Effective Conversion Rate (downloads to successful gifts): 0.02% (52 users donated out of 262,260 downloads)

Second Experiment: Endless Thread – Six-Second Song

Planning

Endless Thread explores stories found in Reddit threads and interviews the people involved, as well as experts on the subject. We offered a customized 6-second song written and recorded by the hosts in return for a $10 donation. We went this low in our ask amount in an attempt to make this an ‘impulse purchase’ and get a larger portion of the audience interested. Instead of relying only on a web donation form, we used a text-to-donate platform, with a web form as a fallback. Successful donors were routed to a form that collected their information and preferences for their custom song. As we approached the end of the campaign, we updated the pre-roll to enhance the urgency of the request, and to provide examples of the six-second songs.

We placed the call-to-action in the preroll and varied it week-by-week. Listen to an example of an Endless Thread pre-roll, including a six-second song:

Metrics

• Activation Rate (downloads to attempted gifts): 0.11% (471 users activated out of 433,447 downloads)
• Conversion Rate (attempted to successful gifts): 49.47% (233 users donated out of 471 users activated)
• Effective Conversion Rate (downloads to successful gifts): 0.05% (233 users donated out of 433,447 downloads)

Third Experiment: Circle Round – Summer Camp Sweepstakes

Planning

The text-to-donate tool used in the second experiment showed a high failure rate, so we wanted to try an alternative mobile payment system called Give Lively. This tool allows non-profits to quickly create mobile-friendly fundraising pages. Critically, it also functions with Apple Pay or Google Pay, largely eliminating the cumbersome process of filling out those fields with a mobile device’s keyboard. Give Lively doesn’t use the donor’s cell phone bill to process the payments, a significant advantage because it eliminates issues around cell phone providers declining donation attempts.

We conducted a third experiment, again using the Circle Round podcast audience. This time, we offered entrance to a summer camp sweepstakes in return for a $25 donation made using our Give Lively-powered donation page.

Initially, we did not feature the voice of the host in the pre or mid-roll noting the sweepstakes, and very few users were activated to visit the page, let alone donate. Activation and conversion rates improved when we added a host message as a mid-roll. Another factor is that the sweepstakes offer had numerous eligibility restrictions, including the requirement that a winning camper be between the ages of 8 and 11.

Listen to an example of a Circle Round sweepstakes creative mid-roll, before we added audio in the host’s voice:

…and after we added a message from the host; this addition improved our activation and conversion rates for the campaign:

Metrics

• Activation Rate (downloads to attempted gifts): 0.07% (375 users activated out of 504,460 downloads)
• Conversion Rate (attempted to successful gifts): 8.00% (30 users donated out of 375 users activated)
• Effective Conversion Rate (downloads to successful gifts): 0.01% (30 users donated out of 504,460 downloads)

Conclusions

Payment Methods

• Our conversion rate suffered when we relied on the traditional donation form in the first experiment. Compare its 11.5% conversion-rate to the 49.47% we achieved in the second experiment by adding text-to-donate.
  • This likely a result of a) the cumbersome mobile experience offered by our traditional donation form and b) the absence of a coloring book image on the donation form.
• Text-to-donate platforms that charge to donor’s cell phone bills is not an ideal solution; 55% of attempts failed. 13% was due to technical failure (the donor’s cell phone bill would not accept the charge) and the remaining 42% did not send a second text to confirm their donation. Additionally, with these platforms we are not permitted to re-market to contacts acquired through text-to-donate, and recurring donations are not an option.
• Give Lively did not offer the marked improvement in the conversion rate that we’d been hoping for. However, we attribute that to the low level of interest in the sweepstakes offer. We plan to try this tool again with a more broadly appealing offer.

Donation Amounts

• We recommend asking for at least $20 for a one-time donation or at least $5 for a per-month donation. Lowering our ask for Endless Thread to $10 for the six-second song did give us the impulse purchase volume we’d expected, but our avid listeners voluntarily donated more, averaging $20.
  • The Endless Thread donors who used the web form could choose their donation amounts. When users made their donation via the web form, 25% chose to donate more than the suggested $10; one even donated $100.  This suggests we could have easily doubled the Endless Thread ask to $20 without losing many donors.

Donation Messaging

• The audio clips where we made our asks were quite short, and we’ve begun to hear success stories indicating that a longer ask is more effective at activating the listeners.
• To effectively activate the audience, the ask must come from the host, it must convey a sense of urgency, and it should be placed in the pre-roll.

If you’re interested in learning more about these experiments, as well as others from NHPR and WNYC, please register for our upcoming Greater Public Webinar, Podcasting Donation Experiments With NHPR, WBUR and WNYC by Greater Public (must be part of a Greater Public member station to register) or view our free Bizlab webinar on this subject, Podcast Donation Experiments with NHPR & WBUR.