In 2020 Unbounce's content team shipped a Conversion Benchmark Report, launched it on Product Hunt, and then did the thing almost nobody does: followed the downloads through to trials and revenue. The editor's count was 8,229 downloads, 5,219 leads, 206 trials and US$13,293 in monthly recurring revenue in five months. The count lives on her own website. Here is the machine behind it, and what that tells you about who owns the number.
The Content Machine is a column about startups and scaleups that run content as a system: what they make, how often, how it is reused, where it goes, who makes it, how it is measured and what it moves for the business. Unbounce is here for a single piece of accounting that I have not seen a company do in public before, and for the detail that the company did not publish it. Its editor did. Every figure here is attributed to the person who gave it.
The premise
Unbounce sells landing page software: a builder, testing, and the conversion tooling around it. It was founded in Vancouver in 2009 by Rick Perreault and five co-founders, launched its blog alongside the product in 2010, took a US$52 million financing in 2020 that gave Crest Rock Partners a controlling stake, bought the attribution company LeadsRx around the start of 2022 and the CRM Insightly in 2024, and has had two chief executives since, Felicia Bochicchio and, from January 2024, Steve Oriola. It cut 47 people, a fifth of its staff, in August 2022.
The machine, in one paragraph. For most of its first decade Unbounce's marketing was its blog, fronted by co-founder Oli Gardner, who became the industry's landing page explainer; a conference called Call to Action that ran from 2014; ebooks and tools around conversion; and, from 2017, a Conversion Benchmark Report built from the behaviour on tens of millions of landing pages the product hosts. The 2020 edition is the one with the receipts. The current report, the 2024 edition, is the piece to look at: the overview is public and the full report sits behind a form, which is the whole method in one page.
How it started
Georgiana Laudi, Unbounce's vice president of marketing from 2012 to early 2017, said on a podcast in 2016 that a large part of the company's acquisition "was largely coming from our content marketing and largely from the blog itself". That is the company-side statement of the era, qualitative, and it matches the record: a blog posting two or three times a week by 2016, a co-founder who spoke at every conversion conference going, and ebooks that worked as lead magnets. Gardner's own recollection, given to Databox in 2021, is that one early ebook of 101 landing page tips drew "like 1,200 leads initially". Recollection, labelled as such.
The blog itself was a machine by then. By 2016 it was publishing two or three posts a week and the team was testing five, with Gardner as the face and the conference as the stage: Call to Action ran in Vancouver from 2014, with the 2016 event its third, and gave the blog's readers a room and the company's speakers a reason to be good. Laudi's description of acquisition coming largely from the blog belongs to this period, when the operation was editorial and the measure was the blog as a whole.
The report came later and from a different idea: that a company hosting millions of landing pages had data nobody else had, and that the data was worth more as a published benchmark than as a feature. The first edition shipped in 2017. The 2020 edition is the one Jennifer Pepper, who edited it, wrote up afterwards with the numbers attached.
How the machine works
A named team of six, for one report. Pepper's account lists the 2020 crew: herself as editor, Colin Loughran as writer, Ceci Martinez as designer, James Thomson as art director, Nicole Wright as data analyst, and a distribution team under Rachel Scott. Her own project ran from October 2019 to May 2020. Seven months from brief to launch, for one piece of content, is the production reality of a research report, and most companies budget it as a blog post.
The data is the product's. Conversion rates by industry, built from the pages Unbounce hosts. The 2024 edition describes its base as more than 57 million conversions, 41,000 landing pages and 464 million visitors. The company cannot be out-researched on its own data, which is the reason to publish it.
Launch on a platform that counts. The 2020 report went out on Product Hunt on 28 May 2020, with the overview public and the full report gated behind a form. Product Hunt gave it a launch day; the gate gave it leads. The 2024 edition keeps the same shape, overview open and report gated, which suggests the company learned the lesson even if it stopped publishing the arithmetic.
Follow the lead to the trial to the dollar. This is the part that earned the instalment. Pepper's count: "In just 4 months after launch we'd secured 8229 downloads of the report and 5219 new leads." Then: "From May 28-Oct 17, 2020 (about 5 months), 206 new trials of Unbounce could be directly attributed to the report", "contributing a total of $13,293 USD in MRR". And: "The Report became the third most visited page on our site." The attribution is first-payment monthly revenue, directly attributed, which is the narrowest honest version of the number. Downloads and leads are different counts of different things, and she does not add them.
The number lives with the person, not the company. Pepper's write-up is on her own site. Unbounce's pages carry the report and its reach, not its revenue. I have no reason to think the company disputes her figures; the point is that the only attributed content-to-revenue number in Unbounce's record was published by an employee about her own project. When the person leaves, the number goes with them, which is precisely what happened.
One more detail belongs here. In early 2022 Unbounce bought LeadsRx, a marketing attribution company. A business that had just had its content attributed to the dollar by its own editor then bought the tooling to do it at scale. Whether it did so for its own content, the record does not say.
What the record does not show after 2020: who runs content now, whether the report's later editions were measured the same way, and what became of the blog's cadence through the layoffs and two changes of chief executive. Stefanie Grieser, an early Unbounce marketer, has said the ebook-and-email-blast approach of that era is over, and nothing in the current record contradicts her.
What it moves for the business
The attributed figures, all Pepper's: 8,229 downloads and 5,219 leads in four months; 206 trials directly attributed in about five months; US$13,293 in monthly recurring revenue from those trials; the third most visited page on the site. The company-side statements: Laudi in 2016 on acquisition coming largely from the blog, Gardner in 2021 on 1,200 leads from one ebook.
The limits are plain. One edition, one five-month window, one person's count. US$13,293 a month is a small number against a company that raised US$52 million the same year, and it was the first-payment figure, not lifetime value. The report's later editions have published reach, not revenue. The company's own trajectory since, layoffs, a controlling investor, a pivot towards a broader sales and marketing platform through the Insightly purchase, is a story about the landing page market, not about the report.
Why it is here anyway: because the accounting is the lesson. Most content teams report downloads. Some report leads. Pepper reported trials and revenue, with the window and the method, and the number was small enough to be believable. If more teams did that, this column would be easier to write.
What to steal
Publish the data only you have. Unbounce's benchmark came from the pages it hosts. Find the dataset your product produces and publish it before a competitor publishes theirs.
Staff a report like a product, not a post. Six named people and seven months. If you budget a research report as an article, you will ship an article.
Gate the full report, not the finding. The overview is public and earns the search and the press; the form earns the lead. Both halves are needed.
Trace one piece all the way to revenue, once. Downloads, leads, trials, first-payment revenue, with the window. One honest trace teaches more than a year of download counts.
Get the number onto the company's own pages. Pepper's count survives because she published it. Put the next one where the company owns it, before the person who counted it moves on.
