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Telling the story of metrics within your organization

How to help your colleagues

care about and act on data

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Who am I?

Ryan Sholin

New Role TBA

Past affiliations include: Chalkbeat, Gannett, Publish2, GateHouse Media, Santa Cruz Sentinel, �Oakland Tribune, San José State University, New York University

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Follow along

bit.ly/storyofmetrics17

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The Story of Metrics

CHAPTER ONE: �Which metrics matter?�
CHAPTER TWO:�Making metrics useful�
CHAPTER THREE:�Report smarter, �not harder

Pageviews, probably

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Which metrics matter?

CHAPTER ONE

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Wait, which metrics matter?

users	pageviews	sessions	mobile users	email open rates
new users	referral source	frequency	bounce rate	most popular
local users	non-local users	search queries	email subscribers	categories, tags, series
facebook shares	tweets	email shares	click events	story type
email clickthrough rates	pageviews per session	sessions per user	next page	facebook page likes

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OK. Which metrics matter to us?

users	pageviews	sessions	mobile users	email open rates
new users	referral source	frequency	bounce rate	most popular
local users	non-local users	search queries	email subscribers	categories, tags, series
facebook shares	tweets	email shares	click events	story type
email clickthrough rates	pageviews per session	sessions per user	next page	facebook page likes

Interested in audience growth? �Increasing user loyalty?

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Why we’re still talking about pageviews

A humble formula:

Pageviews do not happen in a vacuum! ��Do the math and move the right metrics.

PV = U * S/U * PV/S

Pageviews = � Users (Your Audience) x � Sessions per User (Their Loyalty) x� Pageviews per Session (Engagement)

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Making metrics useful

CHAPTER TWO

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AN INTERESTING REACTION, BUT WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

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Move from metrics to actionable insights

Quantitative metrics	Actionable insights
Pageviews increased by 25% in October 2017 compared to September 2017, but they were down 10% from October 2016.	Most of our pageview growth this month came from new users reading our Steph Curry story that went viral on Facebook, with triple our usual shares. A KQED page posted it, too, with a ton of engagement in the comments. (BTW, last year this month, local election coverage was through the roof; we were expecting a YoY dip.)� Takeaways:�-- Contact the KQED page admins to say thanks, get an email address to send them relevant stories. -- Our reporter should reply to some comments and questions in the thread on the KQED post. -- Follow ups on Steph?

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Move from metrics to actionable insights

Quantitative metrics	Actionable insights
Email subscribers increased by 565 in October 2017, up 50% from September 2017, and up 75% over this month last year.	We had a nice uptick in email subscribers this month compared to our average for the past year. Our stories about local education issues in particular are driving twice as many readers to subscribe compared to any other topic.� Takeaways:�-- Let’s make sure the reporters and editors working on education stories hear about this! -- Send a special welcome email to recent subscribers who came through an education story, including links to our education archives.

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Move from metrics to actionable insights

Quantitative metrics	Actionable insights
Pageviews per visit were down 28% in October 2017 compared to last month, and down 17% compared to October 2016.	Thanks to a ton of single-page traffic on our great list of “11 things you need to know about ACA open enrollment for 2018,” our site engagement numbers look a little low, but overall pageviews were way up. Hopefully we can bring some of these readers back for more stories about healthcare!� Takeaways:�-- Was it the “list” structure of this post that worked so well? Let’s find some others in the archive and find out how they performed. -- Run a Facebook promotion with our next three healthcare stories to these readers using our Facebook audience pixel.

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Move from metrics to actionable insights

Include context with quantitative data
Takeaways, takeaways, takeaways
Know your (internal) audience

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Report smarter, �not harder

CHAPTER THREE

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A LIVE LOOK IN AT THE ANALYST THE NIGHT BEFORE THE METRICS REPORT IS DUE

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Three principles for smarter metrics reporting

No resources are spent on copy/paste
Automate what you can, plan roles and responsibilities to include time for developing insights.
The right people get the right data at the right time.

I’m tempted to make you all raise your right hand and take a pledge to end copy/pastism in your news organizations within 30 days. If the analysts or people responsible for analysis in your organization are spending their time copying and pasting numbers from an analytics system like GA or Omniture to some other report, that’s a waste of valuable time they could be spending on developing actionable insights, instead.
So we come to automation. Automated, regularly scheduled metrics reports (of the metrics that matter to the internal audiences you’re serving) require a significant amount of up-front effort. Reader, they are worth it. Whether you’re populating a shared spreadsheet, firing off a scheduled email of a PDF report, or routing key metrics into Slack channels, getting the quantitative data in front of people with as little repeated effort as possible will make your life easier.
Does your revenue team need to know about your top 10 stories of the month? Does your editorial team need to know which email newsletter signup form is working best today? Does your executive team need to know what color subscribe button is winning the A/B test you’re running? (The answer is probably no to all of these questions.) Yes, be transparent enough with metrics so that everyone in the organization can find them if they need them, but don’t present a wall of data to everyone who comes asking. Be selective, and give the right people the right data, as often as it’s -- useful! Ask yourself, is this report actionable, for this audience, at this frequency.

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Automate Google Analytics to Google Sheets

The Google Analytics Spreadsheet Add-on will allow you to schedule clean quantitative reports in Google Sheets, keeping executives and senior editors out of Google Analytics.

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Automate Google Analytics Custom Reports

Google Analytics Custom Reports let you ask more complicated questions and route the answers on a regular basis to stakeholder inboxes.

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Build and Share Google Analytics Dashboards

Google Analytics Dashboards can be customized as much as you like and shared with the rest of your organization. Build one for executives, one for editors, and one for the product team.

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Reporting tools

All of these tools are intended to get you, the analyst, out of copypasteland and into a routine of developing the actionable insights your organization needs to grow and succeed.

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Google Analytics+Sheets Add-On
GA Custom Reports
GA Dashboards
Chartbeat, Parsely
Sprout, Hootsuite, Buffer
UTM codes
IFTTT, Zapier
Slack integrations!

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