Optimise Google Analytics For Newsrooms Through NCI And NTG

Written by: Shantha

“San Francisco Chronicle improves mobile subscriptions rate by 54% with help from News Consumer Insights” A Case Study: February 2021

“The New Yorker: How data became the collaboration backbone leading the way for consumer revenue growth” A Case Study: March, 2019

“Dainik Jagran improved engagement during India’s General Election by Taking advantage of a cultural moment” A Case Study: March 2020

Do you ever look at these headlines and wonder what everyone is upto? Right from the global New Yorker to India’s very own Dainik Jagran? It probably sets your mind ticking about how they’ve gotten themselves into these headlines and more importantly, what tools they’re using to drive such ingenious solutions and results.

You’re not alone.

For the past few years, news organisations have been swamped with data. The digital boom and transformation has led to large amounts of online content consumption which has led to large volumes of data being collected. The struggle, however, has been in identifying metrics that actually matter to one’s business. How does one turn all this data into actionable insights that further revenue goals?

Here’s where Google Analytics comes in handy. It’s well established that equipped with a free account and an understanding of what you’re after, implementing Google Analytics will allow you to measure and track your business’ traffic and prove the ROI (Return on Investment) of your digital presence. Having said that, what if there was a way to optimise analytics to collect better data and unlock new insights to help grow reader engagement and reader revenue?

Since its introduction, Google has introduced a few handy products that help optimise Google Analytics to build stronger growth strategies. Here’s a quick look at two.

News Consumer Insights (NCI)

Designed to help publishers make more profits by growing their audience, NCI played a crucial role in helping drive results for all three media houses we discussed earlier. What it does is provide personalised recommendations based on your Google Analytics so you can build deeper relationships with your readers.

To ensure you build a sustainable digital business, NCI can help in the following ways:

1. Make data-driven decisions by optimising your user funnel with better insights

2. Receive personalised, actionable recommendations so you don’t have to analyse the insights

3. Grow your overall performance through new insights. For example: maximise video content consumption

4. Derive deep insights about your ad revenue and Ad Revenue per User (ARPU)

By June 2020, NCI had already helped thousands of organisations in more than 100 countries grow reader loyalty and increase profitability.

News Tagging Guide (NTG)

Google took it a step further by introducing the News Tagging Guide (NTG) — a feature to help identify the engagement metrics that matter for audience and revenue growth, in just a couple of clicks. It essentially helps collect data under three broad categories—video analytics, user engagements, and reader revenue—by selecting the category and the type of data you want to track.

In your efforts to identify what reader behaviours you should be measuring, NTG will help:

1. Easily generate tags for your site to collect better data and generate new insights

2. Identify the metrics you should be capturing from your readers

3. Simplify technical implementation with ready copy-paste tags

4. Amplify the kind of insights you’ll obtain from NCI and RCI (Realtime Content Insights)

Whether you want to develop a refined newsletter strategy, better understand your audience, improve subscriptions or reader engagement, these handy features and tools are here to help optimise what you get from Google Analytics.

Data is a publisher's gold mine, we’re here to help you learn how to extract it from the mines and sell it further.