In this week’s Five on Friday, Sitepoint shares three SaaS metrics that matter and how to improve them, PageFair identifies the demographics of people who are mostly likely to block ads, and Hubspot offers a character count guide for content marketing for blog posts, videos, tweets and more. We’ll also tell you about Huffington Post’s redesign and new branding and how PayPal is succeeding in attracting new users and growing on mobile.

Three SaaS Metrics That Matter (and How to Improve Them)

Earlier this week Sitepoint posted a great article on SaaS metrics that we want to share with you. The article points out that there are many opinions about what SaaS metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) you should measure and why. Sitepoint breaks it down into the top three metrics that really matter and how you can improve them.

1. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): This metric tracks the cost of acquiring a new customer. This helps the company and investors determine profitability by comparing the difference between how much it costs to acquire a customer and how much money they will make from that customer. When acquisition costs go down, profitability goes up. To better understand your users to improve CAC, try using heatmaps and session tracking on your website. If you find that customers fail to complete checkout, try retargeting.
2. Customer Lifetime Value: Calculate a customer’s lifetime value by multiplying the average value of a sale by the number of repeat transactions and average retention time in months or years of a typical customer. To improve your customer lifetime value, focus on customer loyalty and retention.
3. Churn: You can measure churn by customer counts or in terms of revenue. Sitepoint says that considering churn in terms of revenue is the preferred approach, and your target is to receive more revenue from your customer base over time. You can fight churn by surveying or interviewing customers to find out how to improve your subscription product.

For more on SaaS metrics and how to improve these three items, read the original Sitepoint article here.

PageFair Ad Blocking Report: Demographics

In last week’s Five on Friday, we shared some key statistics from PageFair’s 2017 ad block report*. This week we are sharing demographic data gleaned from PageFair’s research.

• Men are 34 percent more likely than women to use ad block software on desktop and laptop computers.
• Approximately 20 percent of men in the U.S. use ad block software.
• Approximately 15 percent of women in the U.S. use ad block software.
• The highest use of ad block software occurs in the 25-34 age range with 22 percent as the overall average, 23 percent usage by men and 21 percent by women.
• The lowest use of ad block software occurs in the 65+ age group with 15 percent as the overall average, 16 percent usage by men and 13 percent by women.
• Suburban and urban internet users are 17 percent more likely to use desktop ad block software than those in rural areas.

In next week’s Five on Friday, we’ll explore the motivations for using ad block software. In the meantime, you can read PageFair’s full report here.

*In November 2016, PageFair surveyed 4,625 internet users in the U.S. They were screened specifically to find ad block software users.

Huffington Post Gets Redesign and New Name

Earlier this week Huffington Post unveiled its new name and brand. After 12 years as the Huffington Post, the digital media outlet has renamed itself HuffPost (one word, no space). It also unveiled a new app design, website design and logo.

“Once we started looking at new designs, it was clear we needed a new logo to usher in our new era. We wanted something bolder and cooler to kick off this new chapter, but we also wanted to pay tribute to our past. Becoming the first digital-native news brand to reach this scale, to win a Pulitzer Prize and to serve dedicated daily audiences is a history worth celebrating,” say Julia Belzer and Alison Zack for HuffPost.

“Today marks a big step forward for our design evolution, but it’s just the beginning. We plan to improve on the new design for our web and mobile products, to extend it to more corners of the site and to our global editions over the next several months,” they added.

Read more about the rebrand at HuffPost.com.

Hubspot: Content Marketing Character Count Guide

Unless you are a full-time marketer, it is hard to stay on top of all of the optimal lengths for Facebook posts, tweets, Instagram posts, blogs, videos and more. And the standards and optimal lengths sometimes change. With that in mind, Hubspot put together a character count guide to make it easier for you to remember the best length for each platform.

Here are some of Hubspot’s recommendations for ideal character count:

• Blog posts should be about 2,100 words. The title should be under 60 characters and the meta description should be less than 155 characters.
• The ideal length for Facebook status updates is 40 characters. The maximum is 63,206 characters (yikes!)
• If you are uploading videos to Facebook, the best length is two minutes. The maximum is 120 minutes, or two hours.
• Tweets must be no more than 140 characters, including images, videos and URLs. Hubspot said the ideal length is 120 to 130 characters, and you should use no more than two hashtags. Uploading a video? The maximum length is two minutes and 20 seconds.
• If you are publishing an article to LinkedIn, the post headline should be about 100 characters. The post body should be 40,000 characters.
• The ideal length for captions on Instagram posts is under 125 characters. Bios should be no more than 150 characters, and 30 is the max number of hashtags.

For more character counts for platforms including Snapchat and YouTube, read the original article on Hubspot here.

PayPal’s 203 Million Users Drive More Frequency

Earlier this week PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL) reported its first quarter 2017 financial and operational results and, based on those results, raised its guidance for the full year. Highlights for the quarter include revenue of $2.975 billion, a 17 percent increase; the addition of 6.0 million active customer accounts; a total of 203 million active customer accounts, including 16 million merchant accounts; and 1.7 billion payment transactions, an increase of 23 percent.

“With another quarter of strong financial results, we continue to deliver on our vision to democratize financial services for our consumers and drive the global transition from cash to digital payments,” said Dan Schulman, President and CEO of PayPal. “We are deepening our merchant offerings and relationships, and expanding our network of strategic partnerships to make PayPal more available in new contexts and new markets.”

In addition to its strong financials, PayPal announced that it was expanding its relationship with Google which means PayPal will be available in the Android Pay wallet in the U.S. PayPal also reported that its mobile-first approach is driving engagement. In the first quarter, 32 percent of payments came through a mobile device and mobile payment volume grew to $32 billion, a 51 percent increase year-over-year.

On the operational side, PayPal said it would acquire TIO Networks Corp., a multi-channel bill payment processor, for approximately $233 million. This will allow PayPal to expand its capabilities. The sale should close in the second half of 2017.

Thank You

We hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s edition of Five on Friday. For more subscription news, visit our Industry News page. For insider tips and insights, visit our Features, How-To and Best Practice pages.

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