A5: AUDIENCE MEASUREMENT

Understanding your online readers

Introduction to A5 Audience Measurement

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For a multimedia introduction to this session, please click on the “play” button on the left or on the audio file above.

Table of Contents

SECTION 1: The basics of audience measurement

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• 1st, 2nd and 3rd party data

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• Tools for tracking (paid and free): Google

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STOP AND THINK: Are you familiar with any of the tools discussed?

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SECTION 2: Editorial analytics

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• An easy glossary of terms

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• Editorial analytics and dashboarding

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• Social, newsletter, advertising measurements

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STOP AND THINK: Is your newsroom open to using dashboards and tracking analytics?

SECTION 3: Engagement, funnel and metrics

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• The engagement funnel

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• Keeping readers interested

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STOP AND THINK: Is your newsroom open to using dashboards and tracking analytics?

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INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT: What information is circulated in your company?

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INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT: Do a gap analysis on what is missing in your audience measurement.

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SECTION 1

THE BASICS OF AUDIENCE MEASUREMENT

The basics of audience measurement: 3rd party data

• As you know by now, audiences are most often measured on websites by “cookies” - little bits of invisible data that identify individual users as they move around your site, and the internet in general
• When you enter a website you may be asked to accept cookies, and when you do, you are tracked
• The data collected by cookies is usually called 3rd-party data: the user is almost always anonymous, and the cookie provides information mainly on their movements and behaviour
• (More information on this in A7: Reader Revenue, as well as on registration and logged-in users)

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First- and second-party data

• A first-party cookie is dropped by the publisher or website owner on readers: this type of cookie helps define user experience, and will remember preferences for personalising content for example.
• When we talk about data collection on your web users, what we are talking about is “reading” the behaviour of users through the cookies we have dropped on them.
• Second-party data is data bought from another supplier (eg car dealers or estate agents) to overlay and enrich owned data sets. The purpose would be to more closely target users with advertisers.
• This is not something that publishers do very often, but agencies would do this regularly.

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Listen and Learn: Types of data and tools

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The difference between first, second and third-party data collection.

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Data collected by publishers is very sought after by advertisers who may ask to “tag up” your publisher sites. Proceed with caution! Your data is valuable!

Tools for tracking

• One of the easiest and most effective ways to collect data on publishing sites is through Google Analytics
• GA is free until you pass a certain usage level at which point charges kick in, but it is perfect for smaller sites with lower traffic
• Chartbeat is also a very popular news site tool - but more to use within the newsroom to track readers, and it does charge quite a lot in licence fees
• There are other tools available for free, or for smaller fees: do some research, but Clicky gets good reviews

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Most important metrics to know:

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Audience tracking tools give you information on:

• Traffic to the site
• Most popular / most read stories
• Pageviews (PVs)
• Unique browsers / viewers (UBs / UVs)
• Device tracking (mobile, desktop etc)
• Usage Patterns over day / month / year
• Per story stats
• Dwell time (how long a reader spent)
• Total time spent on visit
• Scroll depth (how far did reader read?)
• Frequency per visitor
• Geography / basic demographics

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They also provide information such as:

• Heat maps (show you on a homepage which areas are getting the most traffic or movement - so you can move stories around)
• Bounce rate (how quickly reader leaves)
• App stats
• Social referral stats (how many readers came to that story from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc)
• Sharing stats - how often it was shared
• Recirculation (how much of your traffic is recirculated on the site from links to your own articles - “inbound” links)
• Engagement - how “sticky” a story is

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Stop & Think

^{Let’s stop and think for a moment:}

• ^{Do you know about any of the tools mentioned thus far? Are any of them used in your newsrooms?}
• ^{First-party data is very valuable when bought (in bulk) by advertisers. Have a look at this calculator built by the Financial Times - and see what your personal data is worth.}

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SECTION 2

EDITORIAL ANALYTICS & DASHBOARDS

Listen and Learn: Editorial dashboards and measurements

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Editorial analytics and dashboard

• Editorial can benefit greatly from having information on the stories they produce
• However, the introduction of data in newsrooms has been controversial: journalists worry that they will be measured on audience reaction, that they will be commissioned to write “click-bait” kinds of stories
• The defence from editors and managers is often: “We are data-informed rather than data-led.”
• Understanding the movements of readers is incredibly powerful and can lead to immense efficiencies in a newsroom: for example, if you are producing a lot of stories on municipal meetings, and your data shows that readers are not engaging, you may want to move your resources to sport instead

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Editorial analytics and dashboard

• Your job is to entertain, inform and delight your readers, and audience data can help you to do that
• Editorial dashboards generally include metrics like “Most Read”, and would include almost instant feedback on popular stories, stories that are converting to subs, most shared, and site traffic.
• Scroll depth (how far down an article a reader reads, eg 30%) can indicate how engaging a story is
• Some good reads: Reuters Report from 2016 on Editorial Analytics, this Nieman Lab piece on The Guardian’s analytics system, Ophan and this on why Google Analytics is good for your newsroom.

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The Guardian’s Ophan analytics tool for journalists

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The editorial dashboard for The Guardian will show journalists the page views on a story, how people read a story, where they found it and from where it was being read. ��This information can be used to make further editorial decisions, such as promoting the article on Facebook, commissioning follow-ups or interviews etc that will add value for readers. This is vital, especially in paid environments.

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“A lot changes a lot the time, and it can be quite unpredictable. Things do well that we don’t predict, things do badly that we think will do well, and you’re not really in the day unless you know what’s going on.”

KATHERINE VINER�Editor-in-Chief of The Guardian

Social metrics

• Social is a very important metric to judge from where your traffic or audience is coming
• Social traffic is often not “quality” traffic in that readers may drop in and out of your site very fast when they come from social
• We can see this by the “referrer” which will be the social site, and then a high “bounce rate”
• Many publishers rely very heavily on - and often pay for - Facebook to send them traffic.
• When Facebook makes a change to their algorithms - as they do at will - publishers suffer the consequences. See this article from CNN for more information.
• See Slate’s experience in the graph, and read this piece about their experience

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Why social metrics are important

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Every time a consumer likes or follows a news organisation’s Facebook page, they will see news posted to that page. If a post is compelling enough, readers will click through to the news site - resulting in traffic, and ads being viewed, and the reader’s attention

Similarly by following a news Twitter feed, the reader is more likely to click through to the site, bringing traffic direct to site

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Followers for The Herald in Zimbabwe on X (Formerly Twitter) are 657k as at Apr 2025.

Likes & follows for The Star, Kenya’s Facebook page, are at 1.5million as at Apr 2025.

Don’t forget about good old newsletters ...

• Newsletters are an essential part of your engagement arsenal.
• To measure the success of newsletters, the metrics are usually open rates (how many of your sent emails were opened), and click through rates (how many people actually clicked through from the newsletter).
• Open rates for Media newsletters (says Mailchimp) are an average open rate of 22.15% and an average click rate of 4.62% (higher than most industries).
• The Reuters Report 2020 has a whole section on newsletters: read it here.
• You can also read more here about how The New York Times has successfully used newsletters to grow and retain their subscribers. As at May 2023, they had about 100 newsletters.

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How to WIN: Women are a key demographic for newsletters

• When the Financial Times measured the size of its female audience in 2016, it found it was relatively small and disengaged.
• Viewed as both a concern and a business opportunity, this realisation brought about several projects aimed at changing women subscribers’ perception of the brand, increasing women’s engagement and driving internal cultural change
• The FT has also launched several content-related initiatives to boost engagement among women subscribers, such as Women in Business reports, Women at The Top and various live conferences and events aimed at women, such as the Women in Business Forum
• At the Financial Times, a newsletter aimed at women achieved higher open rates on average than the publication’s other newsletters

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How to WIN: Financial Times case study (cont.)

• With its Long Story Short newsletter, the FT targets women subscribers with stories that interest them in a personalised format that they have said they enjoy.
• So far it has proved successful among the FT’s female audience, while also engaging male readers. Data from the third quarter of 2019 showed that it has a bigger audience among women than the FT average, and has higher open and click through rates, up 3.5 percentage points year on year and 1.8 percentage points, respectively.
• Overall progress was a 1.2 percentage point increase between Q1 2017 and Q3 2019, in active women subscribers and 3 percentage point increase between 2017 and 2019 year-on-year of average percentage of women readers for an FT story. It has a highly engaged audience that is more female than the FT average
• It has 8.2 percentage points more women readers than the average FT newsletter
• Average open rate is 3.5 percentage points higher
• Average clickthrough rate is 1.8 percentage points higher
• It has a month-on-month growth in subscriber base since launch in early 2018

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Proportion of Newsletter Users that get Different Types of Email

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Advertising metrics

The most important metrics for advertisers, which they usually require in campaign reporting

Page traffic - how many people visit your site?�Impressions - how many times is the ad served (not seen, just served)�CPM - cost per mille (one thousand) impressions, or ECPM (average CPM)�CTR - click through rate (how many times somebody clicks on an ad)�CPV - Cost-per-view on video advertising�Viewability - How long the ad was in view�ROAS - Return on advertising spend �Viewability - at least 50% of the creative must display on screen for more than one second

For Online Display Advertising Metrics for publishers, click here

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Stop & Think

^{Let’s stop and think for a moment:}

• ^{Have you had any discussions in your newsroom about sharing dashboards - or are you doing it already?}
• ^{Are your journalists amenable to sharing open stats about story performance, and if not, why is that?}

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SECTION 3

ENGAGEMENT: FUNNEL AND METRICS

Listen and Learn: The Engagement Funnel

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The engagement funnel… customer lifecycle

• Tracking audiences happens as they interact with your website
• Readers come in at the top of the funnel, or customer lifecycle, as anonymous users, and are tracked by cookies.
• This can help segment users into types, and de-anonymise them to a degree, prior to registration
• Readers then engage with content
• By registering, they become “known users” and your data pool becomes deeper, especially if they are active commenters or sharers
• By subscribing (converting), these users are now prized, and their behaviour should be closely monitored, as you want to keep their business!
• https://moz.com/learn/seo/metrics-for-creating-successful-content

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Keeping readers interested

• Engagement - or keeping readers interested through a variety of touchpoints - is vital in digital
• Analytics tools allow us to measure engagement through the customer journey of the funnel
• Engaging readers begins with bringing them to your site in the first place - and to do this you would use tactics such as social, recommended reads and hyperlinks to recirculate traffic on your own site, newsletters, push notifications, paid marketing such as page like campaigns on Facebook, and through reporters’ actions on Twitter for example

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The importance of engagement

• Examples of engagement activity include:
• E-mail alerts
• Sharing stories
• Consumption level and intensity
• Time spent reading
• Attending events
• App downloads
• Facebook likes
• Reader comments
• A huge driver of engagement is site speed: fractions of a second can translate into a lot of revenue lost, as ads don’t serve and readers leave in frustration
• Ultimately, the longer you can keep a reader onsite (just one more click...), the better for your brand, and for revenue - whether ad revenue, or subscription

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Individual �Assignment

Please take some time to think about the following, and write a short homework submission (min 350 words) in the textbox in the lesson so you can proceed to the next lesson.

• Please do a simple gap analysis (template on next slide for you to copy and use if you wish) of what you have and what is missing in terms of knowing your audience: covering skills, tools, etc and also what you would need or would have to do in order to improve
• Optional: Speak to your sales team, and ask them what advertisers require in terms of reports for digital campaigns, if any.

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Please note: You need to write the assignment text in the text box (quiz) before you can proceed to the next lesson

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Individual �Quiz

Please complete the short online quiz to test what you have learnt.

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You must score at least 80% in order to progress to the next module.

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Audience tracking Gap Analysis template

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Current state

Desired state

Gap

Actions to �close gap

What happens with audience measurement?

Where is Problem?

When is it done?

Who can access data?

How is it collected?

What should it �look like?

What needs to change?

When will it change?

Who should be able to access it?

How should it be collected?

What needs work?

Where will it be different?

When are the differences needed?

Who will identify �the gap?

How will the gap be improved?

What will be done to address the gap?

Where will it be addressed?

When it will be addressed?

Who will make the decision?

How will it be �rolled out?

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END OF LESSON FIVE