Analytics

1. Analytics

2. What are website analytics? Website analytics are generally referred to as the measurement, analysis and reporting of Internet activity in order to understand and optimize your website. To put this simply, it is data on: • Who visits your website • What they did once they landed there and how long they stayed • Where they went afterward • How your visitors found your website - this is very important for determining which of your efforts are paying off. It shows if visitors found your site directly, through a referral (ex: Twitter, Facebook), or from search engines. • Web browsers used by your visitors - knowing which web browsers your visitors use allows you to know which browsers you should be focusing on. • What keywords were used by visitors in the search engines to get to your website

3. Why these are important for media professionals? • Whether your goal is to tailor the website to the user's needs or to get users to change their behavior or simply to inform, what's important is to know how the users use the website right now. • Editors at The Wall Street Journal, like those at other large newspapers, follow the Web traffic metrics closely. The paper’s top editors begin their morning news meetings with a rundown of data points, including the most popular search terms on WSJ.com, which articles are generating the most traffic and what posts are generating buzz on Twitter. • Newspapers won't be able to build a better business model until they look more closely at their product. What's working? What isn't? What do people want? What don't they want? What patterns can be discerned from comparing popular articles and not-so-popular articles? • In many cases, analytics can answer some of these questions. And analytics can serve as the basis for a business driven more by objective data than subjective editorial whims (more of this later).

4. Google analytics is a popular option (many others like Chartbeat) • Basically Google puts tracking code on your site. Based on the information collected, they can provide you with information that can be useful.

5. Each time you log in to Google Analytics, you will be taken to your Audience Overview report

6. You can hover over a variety of areas on your Google Analytics reports to get more information. For example, in the Audience Overview, hovering over the line on the graph will give you the number of sessions for a particular day. Hovering over the metrics beneath the graph will tell you what each one means. A session is whatever a user does on your website before they leave. Bounce rate is percentageof visitors who navigate away after viewing one page

7. You can click on the dates to change the date range of the data you are viewing. You can also check the Compare box to compare your data from one date range (such as this month) to a previous date range (such as last month) to view your data.

8. Then you can go to your dashboard and see the information in various forms/reports (there are over 50 available)

9. So an overview of demographics for a site:

10. Or if you click on country and U.S. Session: Reminder: What a user does on a website(browse, download, buy) before they leave is a session

11. You can even run your own analyses (so country + device)

12. Automated insights is recent • Automated Insightsaims to highlight relevant fluctuations and changes in your Google Analytics data to help keep you on top of all the important measurements.

13. Google has added natural language queries to analytics

15. Types of reports available Audience reports • These reports tell you everything you want to know about your visitors. In them, you will find detailed reports for your visitors' age and gender (Demographics), what their general interests are (Interests), where they come from (Geo > Location) and what language they speak (Geo > Language), how often they visit your website (Behavior), and the technology they use to view your website (Technology and Mobile). Acquisition reports • These reports will tell you everything you want to know about what drove visitors to your website (including SEO, including Long-tail keywords are longer and more specific keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they’re more serious or when they're using voice search) Behavior reports • These reports will tell you everything you want to know about your content like top pages on your website, etc.

16. Wordpress.com has built-in analytics (not nearly as extensive)

17. When data drives the news • “In the traditional print world, despite the prevalence of “reader surveys,” it was difficult to ascertain whether anybody was actually reading specific content. And editors traditionally viewed their responsibilities as including the ability to decide, on behalf of readers, what was important. Raju Narisetti of the Washington Postsays it’s often difficult for those editors to suddenly accept that there is a lot of data and that the data says something about engagement, about what readers care about, what readers don’t care about, and to accept that you have to be able to use a mix of this data and your own news judgement to determine content priorities.”

18. Is there a danger in relying on the data? • Of course, some purists will argue that analytics-driven decision making will unduly influence editorial. If editors are looking for 'likes' and 'retweets', for instance, will they compromise their standards, ignoring stories that need to be told in favor of developing stories that consumers would rather read?

19. Valid concerns, but usually overblown • "Rather than corrupt news judgment by causing editors to pander to the most base reader interests, the availability of this technology so far seems to be leading to more surgical decisions about how to cover a topic so it becomes more appealing to an online audience."

20. In actuality, it has other uses for publications • Analytics data is helping editors determine how, where and for how long content should be displayed. • Raju Narisetti of the Washington Post, explained how The Post uses analytics data to determine the best way to cover a particular story. "Can we do podcasts? Can we do a photo gallery? Can we do any kind of user-generated content?"

21. Google Analytics Academy is free if you’d like to really learn more.

22. Social media analytics • In addition to your website analytics, you need to keep a regular eye on your social media analytics as well.

23. Facebook Page Insights Dashboard (for businesses only) First is the overview. Each section thenoffers more detail if you want.

24. Graphs and information provided for these: • Likes: People who actually clicked like • Reach: People who might have seen the post. Post reach and page reach, for example, are different and have different weight. Post reach is the number of people who saw a specific post in their news feed. Page reach is the number of people who saw any of your post content during a given period of time (daily, weekly or monthly). Can be organic (Organic reach measures the number of users who saw your content (post, photo, video, etc.) of their own accord. It includes views on users’ newsfeeds, as well as ones from your page itself. This metric also takes into account the number of users who see your content thanks to a like, comment or share by someone else, viral (someone else created a story about it) or paid. • Engagement: Facebook defines engagement as including all clicks, not only comments, likes and shares • Visits: What tabs on your Page have been visited the most. That can be your timeline, the info tab or the videos tab, for instance. Most of the time it’s your timeline. • Posts: About content. Starts with a nice graph about when people are online. Post types gives you valuable numbers on impressions per post and engagement per post. Use this to analyze what (type of) posts work best for your organization. • Source

25. Metrics can be seen in overview or down to post level • Facebook Page Insights provides some more insights on that, by the way. If you go to Insights › Posts › All posts published › click the video post you want to check › Post details › Video, you’ll find this.

26. Finally the people tab shows you about your fans, people reached and people engaged

27. Below overview is a handy last five posts information • This is a nice, clean overview. It tells you: • the post type (e.g. video, link or image); • if you are targeting a specific audience; • the post reach; • the engagement (clicks, likes).

28. So here is a sample report from BLSC social media manager • What can you surmise from this report?

29. Here is a link to a fantastic graphic that explains Facebook Insights in detail

30. If you don’t have access to the page analytics, LikeAlyzer • A simple, free-to-use tool that allows you enter any Facebook page without authorization to measure and analyze its performance. • It gives the page a grade out of 100, and compares this with other pages in the industry. This means you can have a sneaky peek at your competitors’ pages too.

31. I did the BLSC

33. And Natalie’s Second Chance shelter

35. Twitter Analytics: You can find your Twitter Analytics dashboard at analytics.twitter.com. It starts with a summary of the last 28 days: How many unique Twitter accountsthe tweet COULD have reached

36. Twitter analytics Both overview …. Impressions: How many times tweetshowed up in someone’s feed. Engagement: Retweets, etc.

37. And tweet level

38. If you’re goal is to build your audience, ‘Tweets & replies’ gives you a nice overview of what happens in terms of replies and favorites. Clicking the tweet itself gives you some more information as well:

39. Instagram analytics are only available on business accounts

41. The debate is over what metrics matter • Reach vs. Engagement • No. of followers • Traffic by day vs. Traffic by post • The latest big one: Quantity of visitors vs. Quality of visitors An article by Tony Haile at Time.com is a touchstone for this discussion. As the CEO of Chartbeat—a real-time analytics tool—he sees just how fleeting the average page visit can be. According to his data, 55 percent—the majority—of visitors spend fewer than 15 seconds actively on a page.

42. Here are some sample reach and engagement metrics

43. Facebook’s new algorithm is going to make it harder for mass communicators “…over the coming weeks, we will begin implementing stricter demotions for Pages that systematically and repeatedly use engagement bait to artificially gain reach in News Feed. We will roll out this Page-level demotion over the course of several weeks to give publishers time to adapt and avoid inadvertently using engagement bait in their posts.”