Are new visitors scrolling your news website daily? Are your stories making waves or barely causing a ripple?
Imagine fishing in a vast ocean without a sharp hook and the perfect bait (crystal-clear audience data). You are just casting into the abyss. To reel in fresh readers and keep them hooked, you need to know,
Who is tuning in?
What makes them engaging?
What keeps them returning for more?
This article discusses analytics in news media, methods to increase traffic using analytics, and the functionality of Quintype CMS's inbuilt analytics tool.
Editorial analytics includes gathering, analyzing, and interpreting audience data and metrics to empower and guide editorial decision-making.
Editorial analytics helps news organizations develop distinct data sets tailored to their priorities and organizational imperatives, such as content performance analysis, audience engagement tracking, and editorial decision support.
Editorial analytics is crucial for news organizations to stay competitive in a constantly changing media environment.
If newsrooms have the right analytics, they can craft more personalized stories and content. Valuable content impacts loyal readers, making them feel part of an exclusive club.
Top media giants like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times heavily rely on audience data to refine and refocus their content strategies.
News analytics has matured from simple metrics to advanced data analysis, incorporating natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) techniques.
Most news organizations are now developing various forms of analytics to collect actionable insights to assist their editorial priorities. With a sea of metrics out there, it can feel like trying to drink from a firehose. The ones that matter most to your newsroom depend on three things
Niche
Targeted audience
Location
We are not here to drown you in data. Instead, let’s cut through the noise and focus on the essentials to get a clear picture without getting overwhelmed. Let's break it down to give you a broad idea of what really counts.
1. Attention Time
What It Is: Attention time measures how long readers stay on a page. It is the time they are actively engaging with the content. It goes beyond clicks and page views by revealing how deeply the audience interacts with your story.
How To Find It: Analytics tools provide this data, focusing on how long readers spend on a particular article by observing whether users scroll, click, or engage with the page.
Why It Matters: Comprehending how much time readers spend on your content tells you whether they are hooked or skimming. It can disclose whether an article reverberates or if people bounce off quickly, perhaps anticipating something different.
2. Referral Traffic
What It Is: Referral traffic shows where your readers are coming from—whether it is social media, search engines, or direct links. It gives insight into which channels are driving the most engagement.
How To Find It: Most analytics tools provide a breakdown of referral sources. These tools let you track which social platforms or external sites send readers your way.
Why It Matters: Understanding referral traffic helps you to decide on your content promotion. It assists in understanding which headlines and social media posts work best, allowing them to tweak content promotion.
3. Bounce Rate
What It Is: Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who exit your site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate might indicate that your content needs to be more engaging or need to tweak as per reader expectation.
How to Find It: Tools like Google Analytics (GA) and Chartbeat can easily track bounce rates across your website's different pages.
Why It Matters: Reducing the bounce rate and keeping readers on your site is essential. By analyzing which pages have higher bounce rates, editors can identify problem areas and make necessary adjustments.
4. Social Shares and Engagement
What It Is: The simple count of the number of shares on your social media post and the number of engagements—through likes, comments, and retweets.
How to Find It: Tools like NewsWhip give detailed insights into how stories perform on social media. They show which content is being shared the most and by whom.
Why It Matters: Social shares indicate how well your content works for the audience. More shares mean better exposure, but analyzing whether those shares lead to meaningful engagement or just superficial clicks is important.
5. Geographical Data
What It Is: Geographical data shows where your audience is located, providing insights into regional interests and engagement patterns.
How to Find It: Analytical tools track and offer information about where your audience comes from and their locations, helping you determine which stories appeal in different regions.
Why It Matters: Geographical insights help you create content for specific audiences. You can check and validate the efficiency of your strategies and ensure that the stories are making the impact they deserve.
Reach, recirculation, entry rate, conversion rate, engaged time, concurrent visit, conversion rate, click-through rate, page views per visit, and unique users are other metrics besides the rudimentary approach.
How do You Connect Metrics with Measurement?
Connecting metrics and measurements is like finding the perfect rhythm in a song—it helps you understand how your audience is grooving to your content.
When journalists are bombarded with raw numbers, they might shrug them off or need more time to investigate the data deeply to inform their decisions.
That is where a good analytics tool steps in. It should turn those intimidating numbers into clear, digestible visuals. Think of infographics as translators, turning complex data into something easy to understand at a glance.
However, it's not just about pretty charts—there needs to be a solid connection between metrics and measurements to show how these numbers influence the daily grind.
Reach
What is the point of breaking news if it can't break beyond your newsroom? Reach is the king. Metrics like unique users, sessions, and impressions are your go-to for gauging the reach of an article.
Engagement
It is time to separate the wheat from the chaff and see who is reading, not just passing by. Look at session time, engagement time, and how long readers spend on your app or specific stories.
Loyalty
Loyalty is like love letters from your audience. If you are curious about loyalty, keep an eye on frequency, returning visitors, and repeat subscriptions.
Campaign results, subscriber count, letters to editors, and emails will tell you how much impact your content makes.
Here is the kicker: when you create a metric in your analytics tool, you must set it up with the correct pattern that ties it to meaningful measurements. This way, the journalists clearly understand when, where, and how to tweak their work for maximum impact.
Best practices in editorial analytics include defining clear goals and objectives, using advanced analytics tools, and providing training and resources for data scientists and analysts.
News organizations should also use quantitative and qualitative methods to understand their audience better.
Regularly reviewing and adjusting the editorial analytics strategy is also crucial for success.
Examples
The Guardian have an in-house analytics tool called Ophan. The mission is to make data easy to understand and act on.
Ophan offers minute-by-minute data on individual articles with detailed insights. It is like watching your article’s performance in real-time, which can be exciting—or terrifying, depending on the day.
Ophan is browser-based, mobile-friendly, and accessible with the Guardian email and password. So, yes, they can check their stats even during the coffee break.
Orphan doesn’t stop at the basics. It goes deeper, showing how readers found your story, which devices they use, and even bounce rates and session times. It is your content detective, finding all the clues to help you understand what is working and what is not.
The Financial Times and BBC News are also heavy hitters regarding analytics. They are about turning user data into actionable insights that help their editorial teams make more intelligent, informed decisions. So, while analytics might seem like a bunch of numbers, they are the secret sauce behind creating content that genuinely connects with readers.
Imagine you are sitting on a goldmine of essential stories, and you don't have to run to a third-party vendor whenever you need analytics. What if your CMS could give you everything you need at your fingertips?
Yes, that's what Quintype's BOLD CMS offers. It brings the inbuilt story and author analytics to your dashboard, saving you time, effort, and the hassle of dealing with external vendors.
Once you are migrated and set up with BOLD CMS, accessing essential analytics becomes a breeze—just a few clicks away, and you are ready to dive into data-driven decisions. Here is a sneak peek at what BOLD's inbuilt analytics tool can do for you:
Inside BOLD is a button named "Analytics" that opens up a world of insights for your newsroom. BOLD provides three main types of analytics:
Story Analytics
Section Analytics
Author Analytics
Each section allows you to customize your data range, whether you want to focus on a specific day or set up a custom range. You can even compare two different periods to spot trends. Now, let's break down what each part offers:
Story Analytics gives you a clear snapshot of how individual stories are performing. Choosing a daily range provides a graph of page views from yesterday and today, color-coded in green and blue, respectively.
The tool also provides a graph displaying the total number of stories that received page views. It lists the top 50 stories based on page views, helping you quickly spot your high-performing content and strategize better promotion across various channels.
Section Analytics provides the top 50 sections from the previous day. The beauty of this feature lies in its ability to pinpoint which sections of your newspaper resonate most with readers.
Using this data, you can take two key actions:
Promote your top-performing sections to capitalize on their success.
Give extra attention to underperforming sections to help them improve.
Author Analytics shows which authors have received the most page views over the past day. Like the other tools, it highlights the top 50 authors based on performance.
This feature is especially beneficial because, unlike GA4, which doesn't store author-specific data, BOLD provides detailed author performance reports. This way, you can recognize standout contributors and ensure everyone's efforts are aligned with the newsroom's goals.
How are we providing accurate reports?
At its core, all this data is pulled from GA4, but BOLD offers instant reporting, giving newsrooms the power to make quick decisions without the wait and avoid the hassle of deriving information from GA4.
How can you combine collection with analytics?
BOLD has a neat and useful feature called "Collections," where you can group stories. With the help of analytics, you can create a collection of top-performing authors and track their performance. You can even create separate collections for your best stories to keep tabs on them.
A handy "Manage" option within BOLD lets you set page view limits. This is particularly useful when you have identified that your sponsored content has reached its desired exposure.
By setting a cap, you can ensure that the page views won't increase beyond the set limit, giving you full control. You can use it for any piece of content where you want to manage its reach and distribution.
BOLD is designed with practicality in mind, ensuring the inbuilt analytics reports are integrated into the CMS system. This is where real-time data meets usability. By generating reports on the go, we save our clients the hassle of hunting down external vendors for analytics.
As technology evolves, so does the art of storytelling. With AI, machine learning, and social media analytics leading the way, newsrooms are better equipped to connect with their audiences, create impactful content, and ride the wave of the digital age.
Emerging trends and technologies in editorial analytics include artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing. Social media analytics is becoming increasingly important for news organisations to understand their audience and create engaging content.
Editorial analytics is the backbone of modern journalism, enabling newsrooms to move beyond guesswork and craft content that resonates deeply with their audience.
The key is gathering data and transforming it into actionable insights that shape content strategies and drive engagement. As technology continues to evolve, so must our approach to storytelling—guided by the pulse of real-time data.
Now more than ever, the future of journalism belongs to those who can harness the power of editorial analytics effectively. With Quintype's BOLD CMS, you are not simply crunching numbers—you are crafting narratives with precision, guided by real-time insights.
Imagine turning every editorial decision into a calculated move, where your stories aren’t just published but strategically placed for maximum impact.If you are ready to elevate your editorial game and let data drive your success, it’s time to schedule a demo with Quintype.