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How to design a KPI framework that prevents unintended trade-offs

Katie Ruane from Mather Economics explains why siloed optimisation creates short-term wins and delayed trade-offs, and how connecting web, app, onboarding, paywalls, pricing, and retention makes performance clearer and growth more durable.

4th February 2026

When designing a KPI framework, publishers should be aware of unintended trade-offs

At Pugpig Consulting, we work with customers to optimise their mobile apps, improving conversion, reducing churn, increasing ARPU and driving engagement. But while each of these metrics can tell a compelling story on its own, they don’t always reflect the full picture. For example, a publisher might see an increase in conversion, but a decrease in total user engagement hurts advertising revenue. Another might see push notification opt-ins rise while engagement declines, because their push opt-in strategy wasn’t coordinated with the content they are delivering. These aren’t isolated metric issues; they’re symptoms of misalignment.

This is a challenge many of the publishers we speak to face: how to measure KPIs accurately across the website, app and other properties, so that improving one indicator of success doesn’t inadvertently damage another. To help tackle that question, we’ve asked Katie Ruane from Mather Economics to share her perspective. In today’s Pugpig Media Bulletin, Katie explores why subscription growth demands a systems-level approach and what that means for how publishers should think about metrics and product decisions.

Rethinking subscription growth as a system, not a KPI set

Subscription growth has become harder and less forgiving of missteps than it was even a few years ago. Competition for reader attention and content subscriptions is intense. Online discovery is weaker, audience behavior is more volatile, and pricing and retention decisions now carry greater consequences. In this environment, small misalignments can erase gains that once compounded more easily. 

Many publishers continue to cope by fixing individual KPIs – conversion, churn, ARPU, engagement – only to encounter mixed results. The reason is increasingly clear: subscription performance doesn’t behave like a set of independent KPIs, but as a single system driven by the tight linkage of acquisition, engagement, retention, paywalls, pricing, and onboarding. 

That shift has real implications for how publishers understand results and where they choose to focus next.

Why subscription results are tough to interpret now

Publishers have more data than ever, but interpreting it has become harder as KPIs move in different directions. Engagement may hold steady while traffic declines. Conversion can improve even as churn rises later, or revenue may appear stable while subscriber growth stalls. Each metric tells only part of the story, and confusion emerges when signals don’t align.

Recent North American benchmarks reinforce this unevenness. Unique visitors and pageviews have declined year over year across many segments, even as visit frequency and depth remain more resilient. Larger brands have tended to absorb this volatility more easily, while smaller and mid-sized publishers face more sustained pressure.

That complexity is amplified when performance is spread across platforms and formats. Web, apps, newsletters, and third-party channels surface different engagement and conversion signals – often measured in different environments. Apps, in particular, concentrate high-intent, logged-in behavior in a single, controlled space. This makes them especially valuable for understanding how engagement, conversion, and retention interact, but only when app data is connected to the broader subscription system rather than evaluated in isolation.

Where pressure is shifting in the subscription model

As discovery becomes less reliable, more pressure is shifting downstream in the subscription model. Traffic declines and volatile referral patterns mean fewer opportunities to acquire new subscribers at the top of the funnel. In response, paywalls, pricing discipline, onboarding, and retention decisions play a larger role in determining overall performance.

This pressure is not evenly distributed. Smaller and micro publishers are experiencing sustained declines, while larger brands tend to absorb volatility more easily without the same degree of structural erosion. At the same time, performance is not uniformly negative. Some publishers continue to achieve year-over-year growth, even in a soft market.

Engagement and loyalty signals, such as visit frequency and depth, have proven more resilient than raw traffic across many segments. These patterns highlight where leverage increasingly sits: not just in attracting audiences, but in how existing readers are converted, priced, and retained. For product and audience teams, this shows up in how paywalls, onboarding, app, and renewal experiences are designed and connected.

Why fixing one subscription KPI at a time doesn’t work

Subscription KPIs do not operate independently. Conversion, churn, ARPU, engagement, and acquisition are linked through the subscription model, and fixes in one area can create downstream problems elsewhere.

A common pattern keeps surfacing: a publisher improves conversion by tightening the paywall or refining offers. Subscriptions rise in the near term, but churn increases months later as newer subscribers encounter pricing or onboarding experiences that don’t match expectations. The initial gain is real – but it doesn’t hold.

In practice, single-KPI fixes tend to produce:

None of this means KPIs don’t matter. They do. The problem is treating them as levers that can be pulled in isolation when outcomes are shaped by how the system fits together.

What a system-level subscription model makes clear

Viewing subscription performance at a system level clarifies where publishers can extract more value across the full lifecycle. Instead of asking whether a single metric is up or down, leaders begin to see how acquisition, engagement, conversion, retention, and revenue interact – and where misalignment erodes results.

Paywalls and pricing are not standalone decisions. Paywall exposure forms expectations before a reader ever sees a price. Pricing outcomes depend on when that price is introduced and how the reader’s relationship with the product has developed. Retention, in turn, reflects decisions made much earlier in the lifecycle, including initial offers, onboarding experiences and early engagement.

System-level approaches surface the limits of static rules and the value of adaptive decisioning. Rather than applying the same thresholds, offers, or price changes across all readers, they respond to signals about behavior, tenure, and engagement – supporting more dynamic pricing, smarter promotions, and adaptive paywall strategies.

Some publishers use composite frameworks to evaluate subscription health across the lifecycle rather than by individual metrics. For example, by aligning paywall decisions with user behavior, pricing sensitivity, and retention, The Philadelphia Inquirer increased digital subscription conversions by 35% and supported a 20% compound annual growth rate over three years – driven by coordinated decisions across the subscription model rather than optimization of any single metric.

The bottom line

For publishers, the stakes are high. Subscription growth is harder than it used to be and less forgiving of misalignment. In a volatile environment, gains that once compounded can disappear quickly when decisions across the subscription model aren’t coordinated.

Viewing performance through a system-level lens doesn’t eliminate tradeoffs – but it makes them visible. And as growth becomes harder to achieve, that clarity separates publishers that stabilize from those that struggle. (Explore Mather’s latest playbook focused on applying this approach in practice).

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