Analytics For Data Driven Publishing : Transcribed
Rashmi :
Hi everyone. We have here with us today Ritu Kapoor. She's the co-founder and managing director of Quint Digital Media Limited. Ritu has spent over 2 decades in broadcast as a founder of network18, she has won various awards, one of them being for a docudrama series - Power and for the citizen journalist show - Among others. She's currently on the Advisory Board of Oxford University's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism as well. One of her key tasks on a day-to-day basis is looking after The Quint, an independent news site, a key aspect of that is basically looking at analytics and helping drive growth on the Quint. She's also involved with BQ prime to some extent. So let's start off with discussing how analytics helps drive growth on digital media sites. I'm sure Rita was going to have a ton of information that's going to be helpful for us for today. Welcome, Ritu!
Ritu:
Thanks, thanks for having me here. I'm guessing everybody here already knows pretty much what I know, but I'm happy to have the conversation.
Rashmi :
Yeah, let's get started. So let's just jump into this straight. So my first question to you is how are publishers like the Quint and let's say the BQ prime as well, using analytics today? And when I say that, I mean, like, if you sort of divide that segment into the key metrics that you use versus, you know, the peripheral metrics that you do track to sort of you know, maybe not as regularly as the vital metrics.
Ritu :
Okay. Uh, so I don't handle the BQ prime on an everyday basis, I just sort of, second hand, I just bask in the reflected glory there. But largely the metrics that we're looking at which I guess would be similar for most publishers today is most immediately we look at real time analytics which is the basis for which we decide of, you know since news is evolving through the day, it's prime time all the time on digital, what's what's working, what needs to be re looked at, what is the kind of story that is actually. You know, driving a lot of user interest right now. What in what format? Is it? The text? Is the video, is it audio? So for that we use Chartbeat. Chartbeat is our real time. Analysis Platform, which also, you know, chatbeat has also evolved over time, so through chat, but we're also looking at where is the traffic coming from real time, is it coming from referral, is it coming from social, is it coming from search.We look a little more carefully at GA real time, but GA is since we are not on Google 360, we know we're mindful of the fact that this is sample data so you allow it to inform editorial decisions.
But I think in a lot of ways, editorial decisions also inform the analytics because you can't be blindly driven by that. Since we are an ad revenue driven website, I mean BQ prime has a very strong and robust subscription model, but we at the Quint, we have a membership model which is really more of a participatory and contributory sort of relationship with our readers. We look at the other metrics that are important for us therefore is, in our sales gets the two kinds of metrics that you're looking for. One is of course for all the display, display ad content that there is there, which is either programmatic or it's direct displacement or teams that our direct sales team has got. For which of course for us, for those impressions. Yeah, driven by the ad industry, you know, we're hoping to evangelize other metrics with them, but largely it is impressions. The other aspect of sales metrics is we do a lot of branded content. So, and that's a little akin to looking at pageviews.
Increasingly we're seeing some shifts from page views to uniques, the unique visitors. And again, it's largely in the form of MAU’s (monthly active users) that brands or clients or agencies look at what we are hoping to push. As a metric, which we think is important is looking at various metrics of engagement. So those, I mean that's, I mean we can talk a little more about what kind of engagement. So that's on the site. Then of course there is closely tracking on various social media platforms, YouTube, which is of course both a search and a social platform. So we look at those metrics carefully in terms of how many video views. But increasingly for us the metric that is becoming important from a content and editorial point of view is watch time. You know what percentage of the total minutes of a video was watched? Why did people fall off when they fell off? And of course the behavior was the behavior is completely different on a platform like YouTube versus a platform like Facebook.
Facebook is obviously a much more snacky, much more entertainment oriented, you know, trending content, whereas, the far more people engaged in it's also an audience coming through search with the intent is much more there. So therefore watch time is becoming more important as a metric for us on YouTube versus say Facebook. But you know that it's the discovery of what's popping up on your feet and therefore the first 5 seconds of a video becomes far more important for us on Facebook. Increasingly to interesting platform for us of course is Instagram. That's really interesting.
Rashmi :
So you mentioned social media and you mentioned using Google Analytics as well as Chartbeat on your main site, right? How much of your traffic do you attribute to social media versus your main site?
Ritu :
So there'd be a month where almost 40% of our audience would have come to us through social media platforms and there would be, you know, the very next month where almost 60% of the traffic would come through search. I think that's sort of cyclical. It depends on what's happening in the news cycle.
So for instance, clearly when the unfortunate episode of Aryan Khan's arrest happened, our search traffic or organic traffic skyrocketed. But if it's it's not a big news month then you might get a slightly higher traffic from social media. And again, it's important to see social because social is of course traffic that's coming to you from social. But we equally keep in mind and factor in natively consumed content on the platforms because that's equally important. I mean we respect that audience as much as we do respect the audience that's engaging with us so. Then what's important for us is the degree of engagement.
So if on social, if you're getting the traffic of content consumption on social natively itself, but the degree of engagement is very deep, then that's something that we look at carefully and we also look at the nature of engagement, whether it's commenting, whether it's sharing. You know it's all, it's the. The amount of time that was spent on that piece of content. OK, interesting.
Rashmi :
So you're basically saying that pretty much 50% of importance is paid to social media traffic and 50% to your site traffic. And in terms of analytics tools for social media, you have to leverage the native analytics tools?
Ritu :
Yes, because you’re aware they don't open up their API. For I mean there are third party tools, which give you I mean similar web will showcase what you know about your traffic from socialist but that's. Or this is very approximate and not very accurate.
Rashmi :
So that leads me to my next question. We talked about content being different on each of these social media sites as well as on your native site, right? So how much do these analytics data sort of feed into what you do on a day-to-day basis in terms of the content you might create, the type of content you write and how does it affect your editorial staff on a day-to-day basis?
Ritu :
In our morning meeting, there is no conversation or almost no conversation about traffic. Because that is really driven by. I don't think we relay day on day analytics or week on week analytics to influence our editorial decisions because you can go very wrong with that. But month on month, we look at broad trends. For example, we've seen a clear trend. Let's go back to from when we were born to now, on video. When you were born It was almost a sin for a video to go beyond 45 seconds to 46 seconds. It was like somehow cutting that one second down. You know nobody is going to stay beyond 45 seconds then if it's 30 seconds, that's fabulous. But we were the first The Quint was the first news site which was creating videos for digital only consumption, so crafted for digital platforms for mobile for at that time there was largely. You know, 16:9 aspect ratio. So it wasn't really sort of vertical videos weren't the thing at that point and we. You know, decided to push the envelope a little bit, not just go by what the trend was. And we decide and we started discovering that people were engaging with videos.
We experimented with that further and we took the two documentaries. Initially our documentaries would be about 10 minutes to 12 minutes. We stretched it to 20 minutes and we discovered that those videos were doing really, really well. So we took the lead there. So then it was the metrics following content as against, you know, content following metrics. But what we have seen is sort of coming full circle. You know, TikTok came and skewed the consumer behavior especially in the US market, all platforms therefore they treat their algos to shots on YouTube, reels on Facebook and Instagram has its use of course whatever. Facebook has its own short format and now we are finding that you have behavior itself has changed, so people are wanting content, you know shorter format and move out of it. So we are now using shorter formats to lure creating much shorter formats than we were. But we are luring those who viewed, the audiences, to give them a reason to come to the longer format. So, yeah, so I think that's for a new site, I think that's important. I think you can go very wrong if you just look at the metrics. And then say, yesterday's video did really well, so let's make more of those videos. Which will not happen. And I believe that's the learning.
Rashmi :
I think as publishers moved to digital there was this whole trend of following metrics and making sure you have more traffic. Was there anything that sort of helped you switch or was it gradual, was it something in the analytics data that you saw?
Ritu :
I think what was in the analytics data, I think we've had both successes and failures. I think what the analytics data showed us is that some experiments get rewarded, that the audience is an interested audience. And it's also an audience that's getting bored with templated formats. And that's definitely a learning experience for us. If we keep making our videos in the exact same way that we made even six months ago, you start finding that there is. Fatigue, for instance, a recent analysis that we did was that we found that when we were putting out quick news videos or something, which is sort of the top news of the day.
We would get huge audiences on the video and then. It would, you know, that wave would receive very quickly within, you know, less than 24 hours. So clearly what is, you know, you got to constantly keep an eye on the landscape. So what is, how is the landscape changed between what we did with videos six years ago and what we're doing is what's happened is that large legacy organizations, largely broadcasters. With their OB vans and their you know, like views etcetera. They're now being able to put out those news videos very, very quickly and they're now all. All catering as much as us to digital audiences. And we no longer have the, you know, free play that we had with our audiences and now we're competing with them. So clearly that's too much for us. We obviously cannot put out a news video as fast as a broadcast channel can, which means we're putting in that much more minutes.
Don't put that video out for getting much less time for the audience who's already and now what the audience also is telling us. Again, this is based on analysis, is them coming to us when we are adding value to our writing and videos, we are bringing in an external perspective or somebody on the ground and we've got a perspective which nobody else has. You know, there has to be a value add, so it's also, in a sense, not the optimal use of our resources. I mean you read the metrics and you also watch metrics, but don't get blindly led by that. You have to be able to analyze.
Rashmi :
So what you're saying is basically watch the analytics data for that trend instead of just diving into a day-to-day thing. And that seems to be working for the terms of creating deeper content and sort of waiting for the audience to react to it.
For your video, you mentioned how users sort of consume a certain duration of the way you use specific tools for getting data on how your video content is consumed?
Ritu :
I mean the platforms provide it now or are beginning to.
Rashmi :
Okay and then switching gears a little bit. So in terms of insights into the content that you're writing, does the data, the analytics data feed into like let's say the sentiment of the content you're writing and all. Does it sort of inform your editorial staff that yes this is the kind of content that you know the quint reader sort of prefer to use, is that at all being used?
Ritu :
Again, again, broad trends, yes, we see. That opinion pieces get and. And again, Chartbeat is an important tool for us there because. We 95% of our audience is coming on mobile now that is an important metric that governs how we create the content. Or, you know, we actually talk in terms of what's in the first roll, what's in the second scroll, what's in the third scroll. We're also mindful that you mustn't clutter the first scroll with too many ads or too much other information because, you know, you're. The other very important metric that we look at is bounce rate and that's an important metric for us. So we definitely look at what's there. You know, for instance, it's very clear to us that the first scroll on an article should give the reader a reason for why they must read this article, which they could have got similar content on other sites. What is the unique insight or fact that we have? Which for which you should stay on and read the rest of the article and then we track the chart quite closely to see what was the depth, scroll that scroll depth that that that user spent on that article.
Again, you know, when you were born, the trend was that it's a 300 word or a 400 word article that, you know, look at. And then shorts came along and sort of proved the rule. But again, we chose not to be blindly led by that. I think what we said was we have to make sure that a story is compelling enough. For the user to stay and that in some instances we've seen younger audiences you know, it's also believed that younger audiences don't read deep and they want quick and they're distracted and potentially calling me and you know the passwords that you're familiar with. But we've seen that a well written compelling unique offering does get fairly deep engagement and we've seen that engagement go four years ago.
I would find that halfway through the article we would be down to about 20% of the audience left reading it now that metric has gone deeper. So yeah, I think what you have to learn from analytics is what you can be doing better rather than what you should be doing more of. I don't think audiences anymore are looking for more. I think it is a mistake that there are a lot of in our newsroom make a mistake of which, you know people are liking X. Let's do more of X. I think the important thing is to understand why they are liking X and what was there in that particular piece of content that compelled people. And what should you be therefore mindful of when you pick up another story altogether.
Rashmi :
That's interesting. So yeah, it's actually a very hard thing to see. There's a move from quantity to quality as well in terms of content. Does that sort of lead you into sort of a Paywall for content as well? I know the Quint doesn't have a paywall, but BQ prime does. So I just want to understand how analytics drives a paywall content subscription content.
Ritu:
We don't have a paywall, but we do have a membership relationship with our audience and I think the similarity between what BQ does and what we do is we track, we use metrics and you know various data layering or you know Google has these goals and events kind of mapping that you can do to really study user journey and to be very careful of which content did the conversion happen. And sometimes they're real surprises over there now. Sometimes it's predictable. For instance, in BQ's case, they discovered that they're very in-depth research reports. Well, it's leading to conversion. So what they did as a strategy was that they opened up for a certain period of time, they opened up their research reports as free. And then they strategized to get people to sample those free reports, understand the value of that and then get them to convert to a one year to year plan. So it's also the whole debate that they had over years on how many pieces does an audience get free before they come to the paywall and what kind of content do they get free before they encounter the paywall and that's when you know, they also experimented with the micro payments and they discovered that there was a bad strategy because people would come and just consume that one story, but not necessarily feel compelled to spent or have a deeper engagement thereafter, but if I paid up for a year, then I want my money's worth out of it. So that leads to just deeper engagement on the side.
Rashmi :
That's very interesting. Yeah, that bit about the micro payments because we heard various publishers wanting to experiment with micro payments as well. So interestingly what you're sort of driving to is that content as sort of the analytics into the type of content that the audience is consuming is helping you drive your engagement much more, right. So Speaking of which, does the Quint sort of use, you know, AIML is sort of the other buzzwords out there. Are there certain aspects of you know like recommendations to the audience to in order to increase engagement or user session time etcetera, sort of more adopted probably let's say in the US and such? Are we also looking at that kind of an adoption at our end? Do you guys have any sort of implications that help you drive user engagement through recommendations of personalization?
Ritu :
We use AI for to increase internal circulation, we have a recommendation engine which studies user behavior on the side. And therefore, you know either within the article you'll see these also reads and at the bottom of the articles there will be something called more reads or more news. So also reads are put in by reporters and editors by the editorial team, what we think anybody consuming that piece of content would do so. So basically there's a mix of serendipity and machine learning, whereas the more news is recommendations by a machine that has studied your behavior and is therefore recommending more content pieces as per your behavior. Now that's a logic that we have experimented with. You know, if I come in for a sports story, do I only want to consume more sports stories or should? Um, the recommendation engine recommend just most sports stories we see. Perhaps not. We feel we should be able to look. You know, the better learning will be if initially the machine offers. Slight diverse but like minded content. Maybe from the entertainment section or from, you know, our citizen journalist section. And then see how, and then let the machine learn from that. Rather than pre-program the learning too much.
Rashmi :
Okay, interesting. And what kind of analytics, so this engine you integrate, does that offer you data on how well the recommendations are doing and are you looking for specific metrics there?
Ritu :
We're hoping to increase pages per session. We track two metrics. We track which we get from the tool itself on how many page views were there on the recommendations. But what we looked at for the broader trends is pages per session from Quintype and on chartbeat you get to see immediately where the internal circulation will start. Every article tells you where they went from where you can go ahead and check, but that gives you real time, whereas GA gives it to you sort of for the day. If you're the sort of broader numbers, so yeah, so we do a mix of the metrics that the tool itself is offering and the other metrics that we have.
Rashmi :
And are you seeing any trends of increased page views having used the recommendations tools through these analysis from these tools?
Ritu :
Yeah. Yes we are.
Rashmi :
Awesome. Uh, so sort of moving on to my next question here. You mentioned using all of these various tools, right chartbeat for sort of a deeper learning of how your audience is consuming content, GMO, superficial, etcetera. What would your ideal analytics toolkit look like?
Ritu:
Well, ideal would be one that gives me one dashboard, it gives me one dashboard, which gives me, you see, because there's a lot of learning between metrics which are catering to ad revenue versus metrics that are catering to, editorial content versus metrics that are looking at conversion to payments on the site now. They are all reflective of user behavior. So, you know, it would be really helpful if one could look at user behavior across other than look at user behavior and silence. So you know one dashboard which gives me.
You know what Google item management gives me through, you know, through the impressions it gives me, of course, everything that gives me in terms of what you know, time, possession, pages, possession, you know, all the all the metrics that they gave me. But one that can also get me my social media metrics which is - How was the behavior of the traffic that came from social media to the site versus the behavior of the traffic that came directly to the site? And therefore, what are the learnings for me? Others are the same things being consumed. And if the same thing if they it would give me the user journey because I think that we don't give enough importance to the user journey because you know that should then feed your UI UX as well. You know, sometimes people are bouncing off not because they were not just in your content. They might be bouncing off because of a tech glitch.
They might be bouncing off because you placed your pop up for, you know, driving subscriptions to your newsletter at the wrong place, you're actually pissing people off where you think you're actually trying to ensnare people into, you know, subscribing to your newsletter. So the user journey is a metric that I really really think so. I mean and then ideal world, I want my social, my user journey, my you know, ad management.
You know, for instance it's it's interesting for us to learn that some of our membership conversions, I mean you would imagine that we use our documentaries in our deep dive investigations and to drive our membership saying this is what the kind of journalism we believe in, in this is what you should pay for and support etcetera. But it's interesting for us to see that a lot of the conversions that are coming to us are coming to us through entertainment content. Or even more interestingly, some of the content is coming to us through some of our branded content, which is overtly, transparently labeled. As you know, this is sponsored content, but people came there for whatever reason, they found value in that content and then they actually converted.
Rashmi :
Okay and which part of the funnel is most important here for you, the part where it converts from a social media channel to coming in versus sort of retaining those customers once they are in on their website?
Ritu :
I mean ideally somebody who came to us by referral or social media and then if that same person's behavior changed coming directly to the site because that is ultimately your right to be able to get as many people to convert on the home page. Also, it's interesting for us to see, you know, get much higher traffic on story pages and on the home page. And we have now used some analysis of our metrics to actually increase footfall on the home page. By just studying metrics and strangely we were tracking user behavior to look at conversions for our membership model and that actually gave us insights on. What will drive more traffic on the home page? And then you were able to see that the significant number of conversions to membership are coming from a widget on the home page itself. So it's a. Some of it, to be honest, is guess work and some of it is data. It has to be a marriage of listening, not just to metrics but listening to social media conversations, to comments. We have very engaged audiences who write to us directly on our e-mail. We get tons of emails every day, so there's a lot of insight for us there itself. So it's a mix.
Rashmi :
Do you run any form of newsletters as well?
Ritu :
Yeah, we have a daily newsletter and we have a separate membership newsletter and we have a fairly deep engagement with our members. We do regular what we call tube brainstorms where we invite all our Members. Come and tell us what we are, what we are doing that they don't agree with. What is it that you're missing that we should be doing more of or a particular story? As also you know before any of our documentaries or our special projects is maybe actually doing something called blue screening, we invite all our Members. To come in, watch the editors cut of the documentary or the Special Project and very often we get some insights from our members and also. We then use that so there's a, so your feedback is coming in.
Rashmi :
And any specific tools you use to analyze data on how your newsletters are consumed?
Ritu:
Oh yeah we run our newsletter on MailChimp and we get fairly effective data from MailChimp itself. Now for us what's important is open rate but also click rate, more so. We have reformatted our newsletter several times over to see what works to drive. Better click through rates, because the purpose of our newsletter as it is right now is to drive traffic to the site rather than the newsletter itself.
Rashmi :
Alright, so that brings me sort of towards my last question. You know you use Quinttype as your CMS today. Do you have any specific asks that the CMS from the CMS that you know would sort of help fulfill your analytics needs?
Ritu :
You know, ideally if we could get complete analytics from the CMS because like I said, we're, depending on sample data on Google Analytics, which is just a percentage, is an average data based on. A portion of the content whereas analytics on the site which we know had right in the beginning when Quintype was born was it would give us fairly deep insight into. Ohh everything. Everything on our side. From which author was being read more to, you know, what percentage of traffic went to a particular format, Were there video views coming on the site or were they coming largely. You know, people were just consuming the written piece and they were not in videos. I mean the big difference for us is that. And as you know all of us are now moving towards building first party data and somewhere or the other and you know I think CMS, analytics on your CMS would be so instrumental towards making sense of that first party data.
Rashmi :
And as you write content, is there anything that the CMS can do while your staff creates content rights, content in terms of providing you more data, anything contextual?
Ritu :
You know so much about writing content, but I think definitely in terms of ranking. For instance, once I have my stories and they are all on the sorter. What story should be ranked where if, on the sorter itself, I could see what kind of traffic each story is driving? I might actually want to push up a story that's not driving enough traffic because it's maybe not being not has doesn't have the discoverability that the other stories have on the other hand. Or another day I might want to push more of the kind of content that a certain story is getting. So, so immediately I'm getting to see. Uh, which currently we go to chart leaves for. Right. Is it for multiple windows open? But if it's there on your sorter, it's even a new story that has just come in. And how well that is doing on your soul. Yeah. And also on the left side, you might have a story that is two or three days old, but there might be a renewed interest in that story. So there might be a reason for you to go in and update that story and repost it because the sorter is giving you the analytics to tell you that.
Rashmi :
Yeah, cool. Yeah, feedback taken. Anything else you want to sort of talk to an audience about in terms of advice and you should follow analytics, not follow analytics, et cetera.
Ritu :
I just feel as an industry all of us should come together and really, really push for retention and engagement data as more critical metrics and the breadth of you know go for depth of analytics rather than breadth of analytics and rather than only look at page views and video views. Because I feel that that is maybe coming in the way of innovation because sometimes, I mean we are going to do a lot of experimenting with formats, interactives etc etera. For instance, we did a very deep, immersive graphic novel on the farmers protest. So I will not get millions of people coming there. But what was meaningful for me was those who came. How deep did they go? And that that becomes the cue for me to do more or less of such content. But I was as an industry if you're able to go to market with the metrics of depth of consumption and engagement and retention. Because I think that everything being page views is just too shallow. It's just too shallow a metric.
Rashi :
Yeah. And it's good to see, I mean the switch to the graduate switch to richer content is to happen and it's good to see that it is happening and people are more interested based on what data is showing you. All right, thank you.