Data: The Good, The Bad and the Confusing
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Site analytics can provide publishers with valuable insights into how users interact with their content online. It can show how users find and engage with content, which can help inform business and content strategies. While data provides opportunities, it also has limitations - metrics don't reflect all factors and changes can have complex causes. Proper implementation and regular analysis of trends is needed to effectively use analytics.
Data: The Good, The Bad and the Confusing
- 1. { Data: The Good, The Bad and the Confusing Sherri Horton, Data Analyst at GateHouse Media
- 2. Data Analyst & SEO Manager for GateHouse Media Over 400 digital newspaper sites and growing Experience doing SEO, Social Media, Content Marketing and Analysis for publication, e-commerce and lead gen companies 7 years in the Digital Marketing Industry Google Analytics Certified About Me
- 3. Intro to Site Analytics The Good What site analytics can do for you and your business strategy The Bad Data isn’t everything The Confusing Terminology, specialty implementations Wrap Up Session Overview
- 4. Site analytics is the collection, measurement, analysis and reporting of data for purposes of understanding and optimizing site usage. Intro to Site Analytics
- 7. Publishers, specifically, can use analytics as a resource to help understand how people find, consume and interact with your content online. This can help direct your business, content and marketing strategies. With good analytics, you should be able to see a users entire journey How they got there What they consumed and interacted with Where they left from Intro to Site Analytics
- 8. Site Analytics can give you Insight into your content performance Insight into the design and user experience of your website Traffic data to drive & inform content and sales strategies More visibility into your customers and how they interact with your site The Good
- 9. We can use it to bring in more REVENUE!!! The Good
- 10. The KPIs that impact your bottom line Unique Visitors or Users; this is the total number of visitors to the site in a time period (People Metric) Visits or Sessions; which is the total number of visits to the site in a time period (How many times people come to your site) Pageviews; how many pages are seen by users or visitors (How much the people visiting your site consume) Impressions; the number of ads you serve to your audience (How many ads the people visiting your site consuming content see) The Good
- 11. “Your Users are people who Visit your site to View Pages where ads live to Impress them.” The Good
- 12. 3 key performance questions that you can answer with data Are we growing? Unique visitors coming to the site Do readers like the site and trust our brand? Visits/Unique Visitor or how many times the user comes back to the site, related content hits, social likes on Facebook, etc. How do readers engage with our content? Engagement Metrics; pages/visit, social shares, time on site, scroll percentage, event tracking, any commenting or interactive pieces of the site being trafficked The Good
- 13. $$$ Growth (UVs) Engagement (PVs/Visits) Loyalty (Visits/UVs) Impressions (Impressions/PVs) The Good
- 14. The Good Steps to creating a data strategy Set up Tracking Articulate KPIs Collect baseline data Know your benchmarks Set up practical goals Build out reports to measure success or failure Run product or test Analyze Take action based on your analysis
- 15. Ratio Benchmarking Galleries drop due to a tracking anomaly involving apostrophes
- 16. The Good Steps to creating a data strategy Set up Tracking Articulate KPIs Collect baseline data Know your benchmarks Set up practical goals Build out reports to measure success or failure Run product or test Analyze Take action based on your analysis
- 17. Problem: We don’t have enough users clicking through to secondary articles. Goal: Increase article views per visitor from an avg of 2 to 2.5 by the end of Q4. Hypothesis: I believe if we redesign our article page template by moving calls to action higher up on the page, we’ll increase pvs/visitor. (Story Strip) Metrics: article pageviews/visitor, page scroll depth, article entrance rate, article exit rate Example Test Plan
- 18. Analytics is a way to spot site trends and build a broader story about your sites and your readers This isn’t always a clear and direct reflection of how your site is doing business-wise; there are a ton of factors If you don’t understand what you are seeing or tracking, your reports are next steps marketing wise can become misguided Its good to see numeric goals in terms of users, sessions and pageviews rise but you shouldn’t just shoot for high numbers. Quality of traffic and heightened engagement are what we aim for; unfortunately, that’s harder to quantify Things to Be Aware of
- 19. Seasonality and day of the week can cause trouble looking at month over month or year over year data. When a story goes viral it can make it harder to pin-point behavior trends over a period of time The Confusing: Time Metrics
- 20. How often should I be looking at my data? Daily Weekly Monthly Quarterly Yearly The Confusing: Trend Spotting
- 22. How do you pin point the cause of data volatility? The Confusing: Volatility
- 25. Viral Story
- 26. Bot Attack
- 27. Special implementation can often be necessary to get granular details Event Tracking and Custom Dimensions The Confusing: Special Tracking
- 28. Why is measuring by device so important? Quality vs. Quantity The Confusing: Device
- 29. Entrance (from Facebook) Content Consumed (sports article, news section front, news article) Exit (left from news article) The Confusing: Users Journey/Behavior Flow
- 30. New Products Syphoning Revenue Facebook Instant Articles Facebook Live/Video Google AMP The Confusing: Off Site Analysis
- 31. Users Dilemma The Confusing: Users Dilemma
- 32. Consumer Marketing vs. Site Analytics vs. Product vs. Development vs. Csuite vs. Editors vs. Newsrooms vs. Reporters The Confusing: Work as a Team
- 33. Data Analysis can be hard and time consuming. Wrap Up
- 34. If you aren’t using a data driven strategy or employing data analysis as a tool in your digital strategies it might be something you want to look into further Use data to back up your guttural instincts when it comes to the newsroom Use data to pitch new content ideas to your staff Use data to sell ad positions on your sites Site metrics + Demographic information Scroll depth data Use custom dimensions to track groupings of your site Take Aways
- 35. Know the metrics you can impact Growth, Loyalty and Engagement! Experiment with your content and user experience Measure your performance data Monitor impacts of changes whether good or bad Learn from the data “Trust your instincts but don’t act solely on them. Test your ideas and gauge the impact. Having good data to back up your decisions can only help drive future strategy and help raise your bottom line.” Take Aways
- 36. Thank you!