Google's "first click free" for subscription content

[janharders]

Has anyone here set up google's first click free-thingy on non-news-sites? we thought we'd try it, giving users coming from regular serps a glimpse (medical q&a, free registration) before having them register. understandibly, registrations dropped by 90%. That's, of course, making it hard to defend first click free.
I still feel one should use it to get into the light grey area of cloaking, showing full content to google and requiring a registration from users. I know of a few publishers who serve full text articles to google, showing users just an abstract, obviously IP-based cloaking.
Has anyone used it and would like to share some thoughts?

[tedster]

understandibly, registrations dropped by 90%

I don't understand why that is understandable ;) If you required registration to view the content before, what about the first-click-free program makes registration more problematic than it used to be?

[janharders]

Oh, totally lost track of this thread.
it's understandable, because most people come from serps for a specific question. with fcf, they get the answer, are satisfied and leave. Without fcf, they have to register to get the answer they came for - we'd probably have to add other incentives to keep registrations up when using fcf.

Actually, I was amazed that the site is generating registrations at all, the questions and answers are pretty short and I thought people would just bounce away at a much higher rate...

[tedster]

Ah, now I get it - I didn't have my best analytical thinking in gear when I posted.

[g1smd]

Another metric, which you haven't supplied, is "what percentage of visitors previously registered", and "what percentage went away with viewing nothing"?

Are the traffic levels the same, then and now, or are you getting more visitors?

[janharders]

Before enabling fcf, 7 - 10% of the users registered, with leaves the bounce rate somewhere around 90 - 93% -- which isn't great, but it's ok for that site (newsletter is sent out every 2 weeks which spikes the traffic, registered users return) and it's way better than 99.93% ;)

traffic is the same, we've played around a bit and just enabled and disabled fcf on a weekly basis to control the findings.

[g1smd]

So, when registration was required 90% of visitors went away disappointed having seen nothing, and now a full 100% at least get to see one page for free.

However, your registrations have gone down from 10% to 1% (you said they had dropped by 90%).

Question is, when registrations were at 10%, how many of those that registered looked at one or two pages, then baled never to return?

[janharders]

Once people registered, they were pretty happy to just browse through (as they were when neither registration nor fcf was done, e.g. everything was free to view) and watched an average of 5 pages. that's still more or less the same for registered users (3.8 on average, without those pages necessary for registration, e.g. form and validation, we use double opt-in, of course), which is, by the way, another interesting thing, because the site is designed to show you a random q&a each time you click "next", it's a test-site for a few things.
I don't see users return on their own, although I see some traffic spikes when the newsletter (5 new questions, teasered in the newsletter) is sent out (about 10% of the registered users return and look at questions (though when they came through the newsletter, they don't tend to browse). We have a visible "Take me off this list"-Link at the bottom of each newsletter and provide an easy way to get out on the page, both aren't used in significant numbers.

I totally agree that the whole concept isn't very userfriendly and, in that, isn't great, because the incentives for users to register are very small (opposed to adult or premium content), but like I said, it's a test balloon and brought us some insight on the average german user.