How gated content grew our daily leads by 79%

Today’s tactic is one that always stirs up strong feelings, but it also stirs up 132% higher conversion rates.

Luckily, today’s expert can help you boost conversion without testing your reader’s patience. I know her own patience is endless… she used to manage me. (Hi, Pam!)

Below, the creator of HubSpot Media’s original data program shares how gating select content turns loyal readers into qualified leads — plus, when and how to try it yourself.

Good gates make good neighbors.

Since its birth, the HubSpot Blog’s main KPI has always been traffic. That reflects the team’s education-first mission to generate brand awareness, goodwill, and warm fuzzies for HubSpot.

But that focus was put to the test in 2024, when shifting search algorithms put a major crunch on the HubSpot blog's organic rankings. Adapting to those changes meant finding new sources of traffic — and that often meant playing by new rules.

"A lot of the distribution channels or teams we worked with wanted to see lead gen ROI to get us the real estate we needed to be visible," says Pam Pam, head of the Premium Insights & Influencer Monetization team. “But the blog content we were releasing was free, so the data was just out there. People would click, but it wouldn’t pull in many leads unless it had a really good, related CTA.”

To solve for this, Pam’s team pitched a test of partially gated content: a lead form would appear near the top of select, high-value blogs. If successful, the test wouldn’t just give the team the proof they needed, it would also help to make the most of the traffic they already had.

“Every view you get, you want to convert more people.”

Risks and rewards.

The experiment was simple, but fraught with risk. How would readers react? What would happen to already-tenuous search rankings?

But Pam knew that big wins require bold bets. So when our Web Strategy team mocked up a gate module, she immediately applied it to 20 high-value pieces of content.

The test targets were high-traffic, evergreen pillar blogs, and updating them annually with new original research and data historically provided reliable and predictable traffic boosts. This was a marked shift in strategy.

The payoff was nearly immediate: A 79% increase in average daily leads and an overall lift of 132% in lead-submission conversion rate.

And fears of reader backlash never materialized. “I think people understand that when you’re offering an extra exclusive, they may have to do an extra step.”

Pam notes that about half of the test blogs did see an initial impact to search performance, as bots didn’t reliably crawl past the gates, but this was easily fixed. A quick addition of structured data schema for paywalled content allowed Google to recognize the “hidden” content and restore its place on the SERPs.

Gated Content Tips

I asked Pam how readers could make the most of this tactic — and how they can avoid painful missteps along the way. She shared some of the most important things her team learned.

1. The juice has to be worth the squeeze.

“If your content is something easily duplicable — say basic tips or a template, something that any person can replicate — people might see that it’s gated and just go find the GPT version of it.”

In other words, if your audience is going to bother filling out a form, your content has to offer value that they can’t get from a competitor or an LLM.

“Original data is good, because it’s exclusive. You can’t get it elsewhere. So original data and thought leadership, specifically, were the [blogs] that were go-to for us.”

2. Find your editorial sweet spot.

Pam’s team focuses on what they call “hybrid content.” Topics that have enough search volume to satisfy your SEO team, but are trendy enough to thrill your social media coordinator.

“You want something that’s searchable, but at the same time you want something that’s clickable,” she says. A tricky balance, but she recommends exploring the changing trends within the unchanging pillars of your industry.

“Consumer trends. Marketing trends. AI trends. Data reports. But also thought leadership from your VP to executive-level leaders.”

3. Balance the free and the premium.

To convince people to fill out a form, you gotta get ’em reading in the first place.

“We would make sure to have an extra zesty introduction, then a handful of data, and then an explanation of why this content is important to dig into,” she explains. “We might put two or three hot stats, and then note that in the next section, we’ll dig into this.”

But it’s just as important that what follows the teaser lives up to the tease.

“Behind the gates, you’ll see the full list of tips, the thought leadership, data on this and that, and an explanation of the data points.”

4. Build your distribution plan before you publish.

“You want to have strong distribution for your content. Even though it can gather SEO performance, the content with the biggest growth has some sort of distribution on top,” Pam explains. “We use newsletters, and also work with the monetization team to access some of their native ad slots.”

As a pro tip, she shares that viewers were more likely to complete the form submission when the content was promoted as editorial, as opposed to an ad.

“Audiences were kind of alienated by offer-style content, but a promotional spot that gave an editorial-feeling preview [performed better].”

5. Don’t overdo it.

Though our audience responded positively to the content gates, Pam suspects that there is a limit to how much people will accept. And she’s not interested in testing it.

“When we share gated content, there will be maybe one other ad or offer per newsletter max. And it’s clear why we were gating it. It would say ‘exclusive data’ or ‘new report.’”

6. Think campaign scale, not content level.

This tactic works best when coordinated pieces of content align with social media campaigns, newsletter blasts, paid ads, podcast appearances, etc., etc.

Pam gives the example of HubSpot’s annual State of Marketing report. After the full report has run its course, it will feed numerous smaller pieces of content throughout the year to come. That way, the original content always receives a fresh stream of potential leads.

7. Watch your KPIs closely.

“[The early version of the gate module] wasn’t as SEO optimized as it could have been, so some blogs did see slight dips in traffic, despite higher leads.”

Since Pam’s team was watching the numbers closely, they were able to find a solution quickly. So, beyond conversion rate, keep an eye on numbers like views, time on page, SEO rankings, etc.

And, while Pam says it’s still too early to tell how gated content impacts AEO visibility, she notes that the kind of content that works best for this tactic is exactly what answer engines seek out.