SAAS
USA Facts

Making hard facts easier to find.

Water is wet. The sky is blue. And the internet is full of information. But as anyone with a connection can attest, the quality of that information is often suspect. Search long enough, and you’ll find that water is in fact dry, and the sky is seafoam green.

In an era of mistrust and misinformation, USAFacts has a not-so-simple mission: provide a free, factual, and non-partisan portrait of America — sourced from government records. No judgments. No policy positions. Just the facts, presented in a way we can all understand.

CHALLENGE

Achieve a 4x increase in user growth by the end of 2020.

SOLUTIONS

To hit USAFact’s growth goals, we defined two target audiences: demand acquisition and demand generation. In other words, people who were already searching for data and people who should know the data. From there, we took a multi-pronged approach to growth — including content optimization, display, paid social, as well as organic and paid search.

GIVING HEART TO HARD NUMBERS 

As part of our demand generation strategy, we created and tested new creative across Facebook and Twitter. In conjunction with native content, we generated over 100 million impressions for the USAFacts brand.

ADDING KEY CONTEXT

During our content audit, we found that many of the charts didn’t have context for why changes were happening. As the old adage goes, “Numbers don’t lie. But liars use numbers.” To better serve USAFact’s mission, and avoid the kind of cherry-picking rampant in online discourse, we suggested adding greater context to the charts — which helped both users and search engine bots better understand the pages.

TIMING FOR TRAFFIC

At certain times of the year, there are fairly predictable spikes in demand for data. For example, audience interest in things like unemployment and wage growth statistics typically spike during and after a State of the Union address — when a president is touting numbers and accomplishments. It’s an excellent opportunity to get USAFact’s data-first message out front.

CAPTURING COVID INTEREST EARLY

Some events fall on a calendar. Others force their way in. Case in point: the COVID-19 pandemic. With so much information flying around from the CDC, local governments, and hospitals, there was a big opportunity to aggregate the data into one easy-to-understand product. In collaboration with the USAFacts team, we did just that. By March of 2020, we were capturing a huge segment of those searching for COVID information — and continue to do so.

THE RESULT

  • Surpassed projections by 3.6x
  • Outpaced previous year by 12x
  • Acquisition rate of $0.11 per new user

By the end of 2020, we’d not only gotten within reach of our growth goals — we did it with just 80% of the original spend budget.

Let us know what you’re pushing towards. Get in touch for more information on our case studies or marketing framework resources.

Justin Watkins

Justin Watkins
CEO — Founder jwatkins@nativedigital.com