Building reader-first CTAs at The Texas Tribune
At The Texas Tribune in summer 2026, I worked on bringing readers back to our reporting in two ways: helping readers find the Tribune more often in Google, and turning readers into newsletter subscribers. In both, I put the reader experience first through targeted asks to the readers most likely to act on them.
Google's Preferred Sources
Google's Preferred Sources feature lets people choose outlets to see more often in search results. To support the product team's search traffic OKR, I promoted that option to Tribune readers.
Google doesn't share Preferred Sources data with publishers, so I developed two metrics we could measure: the percentage of readers who clicked each CTA, and the percentage of those readers who returned within a week.
I set a benchmark for each CTA from past performance and worked with our data product manager to implement the tracking. I then wrote the PRD and scoped four placements: a pop-up, an inline CTA within articles, and callouts in our newsletter and welcome series. I built the on-site CTAs in Newspack, a CMS I learned on the job, refining them in discussions I set up with my manager and the Tribune's engineering, design, and marketing teams.
The pop-up needed the most attention to the reading experience. After discussions with our audience team, I showed it only to readers on their second article or later so first-time visitors could read without interruption.
The data supported the choice to prioritize the reader experience and focus on readers most likely to convert. The pop-up converted 83% above our benchmark, and readers who clicked either on-site CTA were 6.6 times as likely as new visitors to return within a week.
Newsletter signup CTAs
I brought the same targeting to two signup CTAs for The Brief, the Tribune's flagship newsletter.
Our homepage had the highest share of returning readers, so I placed the first CTA there. To help it stand out, I built a new full-width, animated format. It converted at 4.8 times the site average.
After studying newsletter CTAs at dozens of news organizations, I wanted to test whether a CTA tailored to one coverage area and one reader need would outperform a general one.
Our audience research pointed to politics. In an internal survey with the News Revenue Hub, 29.5% of respondents named politics as the most important area of Tribune coverage. The Tribune's organization-wide audience needs research also identified a large group of readers who want to follow politics but feel too overwhelmed to know where to start.
The second CTA, placed on our Congress coverage, pitched The Brief as an easy way to keep up with the 2026 midterms. I designed an editorial illustration of the candidates in a high-profile Senate race to draw in readers who care about the election but haven't followed the campaign closely. It converted 54% above our target for articles.
I documented the setup for both CTAs so the team can reuse the formats and apply the same targeting to other coverage areas.
