Rethinking How We Evaluate The New York Times Subscription Performance

The New York Times

“The New York Times digital subscription offering is a complex service that has evolved significantly since we started selling digital subscriptions in 2011. Moving to a bundle-first subscription strategy across all products made it more challenging to differentiate where subscriptions were originating from. We needed a deeper and more nuanced understanding of where and how users were subscribing, one that was compatible with the many variations of the user journey. The path to subscribing depends heavily on how a user gets to the site, the pages they interact with during their session, whether they’re logged in, and even more granular factors. To make sense of these paths, we had to align on several key aspects — how we defined attribution, how we organized our data, how we tracked our events, and how we mapped the data.”