Big Data is “an umbrella term for a variety of strategies and tactics that involve massive data sets, and technologies that make sense out of these mindboggling reams of data”. The report explains that the media industry can think of Big Data as “the Four Vs, including:

• volume of data;
• velocity of data, meaning it needs to be analysed quickly;
• in a variety of structured and increasingly unstructured data formats;
• which all have potential value in terms of high quality journalism and business insights and revenue.”

Media companies can use Big Data analysis to improve many aspects of their business performance, such as understanding their audience and better targeting customers, crunching huge data sets to uncover stories, directing campaigns, improving decision-making and creating business efficiencies.

The report provides detailed examples from several leading media companies using Big Data to develop their audience and business, including:

• Huffington Post, which “uses Big Data to optimise content, authenticate comments, ensure efficacy of native advertising, regulate advertising placement and create passive personalisation”.
• BuzzFeed, which uses Big Data pre-publication to predict the virality of articles by identifying “characteristics with predictive relationship to virality”, and post-publication to “optimise the article’s promotion”.
• The Financial Times, which uses registration data collected through its metered paywall “to serve the customer better, create targeted advertising campaigns and create new products based on information collected on background and areas of interest to its readers”.

The report also examines training data journalists and data-driven automation in journalism, as well as lessons from beyond the media sector.

Attention measurement (the time spent actively engaging with a page) seems to be a hint of real innovation in this cluttered space of online advertising. If this will change how publishers measure and reward meaningful content rather than just chase after raw clicks and impressions, then not only advertisers are getting a better deal, but also publishers are motivated  to focus on high quality, engaging content rather than volume of content and appealing titles.

A similar effort was initiated in 2012 by IAB to define a “viewable impression” metric. However, attention-based measurement of both content and advertising can be a game changer – both for publishers and advertisers. The Financial Times has already started experimenting with a new way of selling ads based on time spent rather than impressions.

Read more:

Is Digital Advertising Ready to Ditch the Click?

Chartbeat Aims To Move Publishers’ Attention Away From Page Views

Outside Voices: Online Ad Viewability Not Ready For Prime-Time

IAB Viewable Impression Measurement Guidelines

As is usually the case though, the most effective and helpful tool – or rather a technique from those mentioned above – is the one that also costs the least. Have you done usability testing yet? No? In that case, if you’re going to do one single thing, throw away all the other tools and techniques and start doing usability tests – they will take your website the farthest.

In this article, we’ll take a look at what you need to do and what you should know before you start testing.

What we’ll need

A usability test is nothing more than tracking a user during the time he or she is using your site. Really, that’s it. No measuring of eye movement, level of stress or anything else that needs hi-tech tracking – just a simple recorded (shot of the computer screen they’re sitting behind and their voice) dialogue between you and them. And of course the tasks you request them to do on your website.

So, no measurable indicators – CTR, time spent on site, etc.? Precisely! Questionnaires or Google Analytics will provide you with lots of data, but it doesn’t get much better than seeing the person in action with the possibility of asking what they think. I guarantee that after a usability test, you’ll know right away what needs to be done even without knowing exact percentages or having data to feed into a graph.

Like with any cooking recipe, we too will start with the ingredients we’ll need. There isn’t much of it, yet it’s still a good thing to specify them.

• A quiet room – it may sound strange but if there is something that can ruin the result of a usability test, it’s having someone disturb you. Are you in an open space office? If so, forget right away that you would do a usability test at your work station. An ideal place for a usability test is a small room, two chairs and a desk – no disturbing elements. Let people know not to disturb you during the time of the test. Turn off your phone.

• A standard computer and browser – although the object of testing during the usability test will be your website, people you’ll be working with will have a feeling you are testing them. Despite being told otherwise, they will not get rid of this feeling. Don’t add to their stress by making them learn to use your gaming mouse or keyboard with different characters. Use the most standard computer most people are used to. In the author’s country, this would be a laptop with Windows, a plain mouse and Chrome browser. Have more browsers prepared and let the participant choose which to use. The more they feel at ease and as if working with their own computer, the better for them and you too.

• Microphone and a program for recording your computer screen – During the test, you will record what the participant is saying as well as the browser window they’ll be surfing in. This is important because you won’t have time to take notes and will not remember all the issues that will come up. Laptops, as well as desktops, often have built-in microphones; however, it has proven useful to the author of this text to have an external microphone. A simple cheap mic for Skyping will do very well.

Selection of a recording program may be something of an obstacle as there aren’t many good quality solutions. For us, a good choice proved to be Camtasia Studio. It can record the screen as well as sound and later allows the recording to be cut, highlight parts of the video such as a mouse click, rolling over an element, etc. The program is not exactly cheap but has a 30-day trial version, so you can start with tests for free and later decide whether investing in the software is worth it.

What will we test?

Question “What will we test?” may sound ridiculous to you. You probably already know about the weak spots on your website – perhaps you were notified by email from users, or you’ve seen something in the statistics. Maybe you’ve asked yourself already why no one clicks on the Editorial Team link at the bottom of the page, while at the same time you get asked by users whether you’ve considered having one.

If you haven’t done usability tests before, I would guess the first ones you do will be of a very general character. You will want to look at your website as it is and its key functions, and find out whether users know how to use them or if they have a problem using them, and last but not least, how you could improve and simplify the way your website is used.

Later, you will probably concentrate more on in-depth issues and usability tests will focus on only one of the sections or just an individual function of your website. Either way, your task now is to transform all intentions into assignments for the participants in your test. How do you go about it?

Close your eyes and imagine all the key functions that make up your website. You can forget about the details for now – the most important elements will do for now. Imagine an average person and what he or she actually does on your website. Usually arrives, looks at the homepage, clicks on an article. Then what? Perhaps he wants to enter the discussion? Or maybe he wants to sign into your system email and read messages? Obviously, it’s different for every website but you should always keep in mind the most frequent and concrete scenarios of your website’s visitors.

Once you have them, you can start turning these scenarios into a story with assignments, ideally with some update theme. Set up concrete and fun assignments.

For example: “You’ve seen on TV that the government wants to increase taxes for people with higher income. You missed some parts of this information, therefore you decided to visit our website and confirm the missing details. Where would you look for this information on our website? Find out the percentage of this planned tax increase and the date the tax law should become effective”.

Notice that I haven’t used in this assignment the name of the section (go to section Economy, in the left-side menu click item xxx). This is exactly the method you should use too, as normally a user doesn’t know where things are. Since nobody tells users on the homepage where to find the information they are looking for, they have to find it on their own. Effectively, the user will now test your site for you and whether you have developed it well. Following the user’s path to finding the right link will show you how to make your website better.

Prepare about ten assignments in a similar manner. For each of them, try to create a specific situation and make it interesting or fun so as not to bore the participant. Be sure to make it clear exactly when the given assignment can be considered finished.

Are you testing one specific part of your website? It’s good to have the first two assignments of a different kind – “to trick” a little, but also for loosening up the user. When testing a specific thing, I personally try to hide it by breaking it into a number of different assignments so I don’t give away my intention. Ideally, at the end of the test, the participant shouldn’t really know what the main purpose of the whole test was.

Ready for some inspiration? A complete usability test can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QckIzHC99Xc

Selecting participants

How many people need to take the test in order to reach the optimal results? It may come as a shock to you, but 6-7 people will be enough.

Are you wondering why so few are needed when for any A/B testing questionnaire you need to have at least a few hundred participants to consider the data reliable? The answer is that when it comes to usability issues, we are all very much alike. You will find this out as soon as you start testing: the second participant will have very similar problems with your website as the first one, and this will repeat until you get to the last one. Using, say, 20 people instead of ten of course means finding slightly more issues on your website, but I guarantee that testing 6-7 people is absolutely sufficient for finding the most significant ones.

Which people to choose? You may be tempted to strictly adhere to demographic distribution, so here is my tip – don’t take it too seriously. (In the end, it will be hard to stick to a demographic distribution of users in a sample of 6-7 people.) Include men and women, younger and older, but the best thing you can do is to call on users that could potentially have a problem with your site.  If you call on a programmer to take part, he’ll probably be able to manage almost anything, but how about a user who isn’t so good with computers in the first place? You are better off choosing participants that will show you as many deficiencies as possible.

An important rule: never invite someone who is a “heavy user” of your site – a member of your editorial team for example, if you have a news website. Of course, there are exceptions when this rule does not apply (e.g. intranet testing), but for the majority of websites, inviting outside people – strangers not familiar with your website – is crucial. Ideally, of course, you would call on people that do not know your site at all. This, however, cannot be done in all cases – if your website targets brokers, an ordinary person won’t be able to help you much.

Another thing to consider is the question of payment for taking the test. You’ll find out in US literature that you should. My personal experience is to invite people without the promise of remuneration but rewarding them at the end anyhow (usually not with money though, but rather in the form of a small gift such as a book).

You may now have a good idea of who to invite. If not, here are a few tips from practice:

• Create a site with a simple questionnaire for people who would like to help with website development and link to it from your site. In a few hours, you are sure to have perhaps hundreds of contacts for willing people.

• If there is a place where users come, e.g. the reception area of a newspaper office where they renew subscriptions, position yourself there and ask directly whether they have time to take the usability test. Another way to do this is for the person on the desk in reception to ask and take the interested users directly to your office.

• Place an ad in the classifieds or post it on your Facebook page.

If you don’t want to do any of the above? We all have friends and acquaintances who don’t even know where we work or have never visited our websites – use them. Just one rule to keep in mind: never, never invite the same person for tests twice, especially if it’s the same test!

Carrying out a usability test

You have a quiet room, you have a computer ready (you’ve tested the recording and mic functionality), you have people coming and you have the assignments ready for them. What now? It’s time to carry out the usability test.

At the beginning of the test, you have to tell people what awaits them. In order not to influence the results, it’s ideal to tell everyone the same thing – that is, read the same text to all of them. You don’t have to come up with the wording on your own; usability expert Steve Krug has done it for you already, so don’t worry. You can download the English version of it here.

The text describes what will happen during the usability test and also includes a printable form of agreement for making sound and video recording. So now you can smoothly begin your assignments.

Now comes the most important part. You could have done everything perfectly up to now, but this is the point when everything can go wrong – your communication during the test. The following are the three most fatal mistakes. Avoiding them and sticking to the following method can make usability testing a brilliant tool.

• Do not help. Do you remember how you deliberately didn’t include specific instructions about what to do? This is exactly what you shouldn’t do either while the test is in process. Let’s say a participant has a problem with completing your assignment (can’t find a link to a page or has forgotten her password). Do not help her under any circumstances. You can try a formulation such as, “Try thinking about it some more”, “What would you do if I were not here?”, or “Unfortunately I can’t help you but as soon as the test is over, I’ll answer any of your questions”. If the participant cannot complete the assignment for a long time, end it. It is difficult not to help a person who is obviously in trouble. I personally managed to “fail” a few times when I administered my first usability test. While it is difficult, it is very important because if you help the participant, you may as well throw the results away because you can’t be sure that you didn’t bring the user somewhere she wouldn’t otherwise have got to on her own. There of course are situations when you can help – for example if a strange window, not relevant to your website, pops up, or the mouse is disconnected, etc. – but don’t ever say, “And why don’t you try clicking here?”

• Ask what they’re thinking about – keep on prompting the participant to say what he’s thinking about, to verbalize what he’s trying to do as much as possible. The instruction to do so was already included in the introductory text you read out at the beginning, however, some participants will tend to forget – you should do all you can to make sure there isn’t silence in the room and the participant speaks as much as possible. That is the key to improving your website – every one of the participant’s thoughts will move you forward.

• Praise and eat humble pie – many people you invite will say, “I’m not smart enough for this” and when they can’t do something, they will repeat the phrase. Participants will constantly feel as if you are testing their abilities. Use every opportunity to disagree with them: “I’m not sure where to click?” “Thank you – you have just found a huge shortcoming in our website. Actually, you’re doing it right, and it’s us who developed the website who got it wrong because you can’t find what you’re looking for.” After the test is over, tell them again how much they have helped you. You can even show them the right solution to their task.

After the test

The first thing that shows you’ve done the usability test right is that the results are absolutely horrible. Users had problems finishing your tasks, you’ve noticed mistakes you made in planning the site, users do things in a very different way than you thought when building the site. These are the results you’re looking for. If you, the website developer, feel miserable, be assured that this is exactly the kind of feeling you needed to reach.

In order to transform the usability test results into a better website, do the following:

• Share the results with everyone – Do not keep, under any circumstance, the test results just to yourself. Let as many colleagues as possible see the video recorded during the test. Definitely show it to designers, project managers and programmers. Don’t be shy to show it to other people who worked on the development of the site. Practically anyone from the team can learn something from a usability test. Before you show them the video, give them a pen and paper and ask them to take notes with ideas on what to change on the web in order to prevent some of the problems the next time around. I’ll bet everyone will have a paper full of various thoughts. Are you all too busy to watch a 5- or 6-hour long recording? Cut the usability test video – leave out the parts where participants succeed in their tasks and pick out the “cherries on the top”.

• Have a discussion and make a list of changes. After watching the video, compare your lists and write the problems on a big board. A huge discussion is surely to arise. A long list will be created. Set a priority for each item – mark the issues according to how big they are.

You will notice as you go along how the view of the web changes in the team. At the beginning of the exercise, someone may say something like, “Are these users completely stupid?” And then, when they see that every test participant had a problem with the same thing, they will go quiet. You will notice the effect of a usability test on the work of the team in the future. A programmer will try to simplify everything as much as possible right in the beginning. A project manager may want to run a usability test during the design stage. The owner will approve a budget for usability tests.

The possibility of seeing users utilizing your site in real time is something that will completely change the way you work.

How to solve issues discovered

One of the things that happens to you after a usability test is that you suddenly get a feeling that you completely need to change your website. You’ll probably feel that it’s badly designed; programmers may arrive with an idea to re-program the whole site. One of the worst things you could do, though, would be succumbing to these temptations.

Any usability issue found can be resolved in two ways: the complex way (total redesign) or the dilettante/superficial way (do the absolute minimum in order to remove the problem). Based on a number of years of experience, I recommend choosing the second option.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at the following list:

Dilettante solution vs. complex solution

• Much less people will be affected by the issue / No one or almost no one will be affected by the error
• Easily implemented / Requires much effort to implement
• Finished in a few minutes, a day the most / Can take a month or two, and may actually never be finished

Complex solutions seem to be clean and thorough. In reality though, it means you are starting from zero. In the end, the fact that you have done it over again doesn’t mean that you have not made the mistakes again or haven’t created new ones. On the contrary, if you redo something completely, you will end up facing a dilemma at the end what to do with the new issues.

Usability expert Steve Krug introduced a rule he calls “Do as little as possible”. Always look for the fastest solution to fix an issue. Only when that doesn’t work, use something more complex.

Here is an overview of Krug’s points:

Do not redesign, tweak (Krug’s No. 1 rule of successful mistake correction)

• Everybody hates redesigns, so if you suggest a wholly new solution, they will complain anyway.
• You may solve your problem with a redesign, however, it’s almost certain you will make at least five other, perhaps more serious, mistakes.
• Do the smallest changes possible – tweak until the problem is solved. If that doesn’t help, revert to a more serious solution.
• It often means that you want to increase the font, change the background color of a message or something along those lines.

Do not add, removing something is much better (Krug’s No. 2 rule of successful mistake correction)

• People usually feel that adding something will work better, let’s say a new notice or phrase. Often, it’s much better to remove something. Most mistakes are actually caused by organization on the site being so complicated that it becomes chaotic. This is a very frequent reason for mistakes.
• Always consider the list of issues in relation to effectiveness. If there are small issues which affect only a few users and would take too long to fix, don’t bother with them. There are probably ten larger issues that can be addressed quickly. Focus on these first and then on the others.

How do you find out whether you have improved the product? Simple, run the same usability test again … with different participants, of course.

Now you know everything important about usability tests. If you’d like to know more, I recommend two of Steve Krug’s books: Don’t make me think and Rocket surgery made easy. They are short, funny and will tell you everything you need to know.

Mr Haile said: “We’ve found effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading.” Chartbeat, which measures real-time traffic for many online publishers,  later clarified that he was talking specifically about tweets, though they expect research to show the same pattern for Facebook.

Some industry leaders have been calling for online publishers to move beyond measuring simple user numbers and to start measuring engagement instead, through indicators such as social media shares and likes. They argue that this gives publishers and advertisers a better insight into how relevant consumers find their content: people would only share an article they like.

But if it’s true that there is no correlation between social shares and genuine engagement, the industry may have to think again about the next step in understanding how to measure the real value of content.

So what is A/B testing? Simply said, A/B testing is a method which allows you to measure the effect of changes to your website on the visitors without actually making them.

Imagine as an example a web page with an article to which you make a small change – let’s say you move a picture from its current place in the right column into the center. Now comes the trick: you display the new layout version to a very small portion of your visitors. What will happen? Will visitors stay on the page for a longer or shorter time? Will a smaller or a larger percentage of readers finish reading the article?

After a few thousand views of both versions, you will be able to neatly and relatively exactly compare and determine whether the change is – or is not – an improvement. If indeed it is, you know what to do – change the picture position for everyone. If not, no problem – you can test some more.

You can test any changes this way – always on a small percentage of visitors and find out whether something works even before widely implementing it. And what is important, you are not limited to testing just one change but for example five different options. Using the same example as above, you can test positioning the photo in various places (left column, right column, top, center…) and by trial, find out where its positioning works the best.

Simply speaking, A/B testing gives you a luxury that we would probably welcome in all parts of life – the possibility of not having to make a decision every time we want to do something and then wait and worry whether we have made the right decision.

Instead, thanks to A/B testing, you have the option to choose the best solution from the multiple possibilities before making it available to all your readers.

Why should we run A/B tests?

A/B testing is one of the most practical tools for improving your website, primarily for the following reasons:

• Low cost, quick start: one of the best things about A/B testing is that, unlike using questionnaires or usability tests, you can start immediately. And if you decide to use one of the free services that are available, you won’t even incur any costs. No complicated searches for participants or long preparation times. One test idea and an observation of certain rules discussed below and you can be on your way. You don’t have to hire an expert. You can easily do it just with this article.

• The right sample: With a survey or questionnaire, you will always face questions such as “do we have the right sample of people?” or whether the group of people surveyed had been “representative”. There are no such questions in A/B testing – you know 100 percent that you have the right sample. It’s the people that come to your website, exactly those that you are improving your site for. There is no need to look for anyone elsewhere.

• Very practical: Standard questionnaire surveys often bring theoretical findings, such as people are more interested in sports news or perhaps that they would welcome more videos in articles. But what should an ideal piece of sports news look like? Where exactly should the video be in the article? A/B testing, together with usability tests, offer very practical findings, which are – as a bonus – all immediately applicable. They not only provide you with information about what to do but also how exactly to do it.

Getting started with A/B testing

So how do we do A/B testing?

1. Hypothesis. At the beginning of each test, having a “hypothesis”, i.e. a question you want answered by the test, is very important. For example – “Would visitors click more on an article if it had a larger headline?” Any new function you would like to implement on the website is also a hypothesis – e.g. will the function bring a better reaction from the visitors? You probably already have a number of ideas as to what to test. You can also find some tips below.
2. Alternate versions. The second step is the proposal of changes with which we will verify the hypothesis – let’s say the creation of alternative versions of the original website with new functionality or design. At this point, it is important not to limit yourself to just one alternative to your current site. You can come up with as many versions as you would like. This way, you can be sure that you have not missed the best solution possible. For example, if you are testing a larger headline for your article, why not include various fonts, colors and/or size? The test will let you know the best solution.
3. Test variables. Often, defining the test variables is a much underestimated step. A test variable is anything you can measure and which allows you to objectively determine which page is better. It could be the number of clicks on a certain link, the time spent on a page or even whether a visitor had completed a certain operation (confirmation of a subscription payment). People frequently measure the number of clicks, but is that always the best? Always consider carefully what to measure and test more variables. That way you can see whether your new version won’t do more harm than good (e.g. the change forces more readers to click but they leave the page immediately because they hadn’t found what they were looking for).

Which tools to use for A/B testing?

Once you have done all three things listed above, only one thing remains – deploy the test. Let’s look closely at how to do it.

Ideally, you would use one of the ready-made solutions available. There are plenty of them and some are even for free. And it is certainly simpler than having the A/B testing tool custom programmed directly for your website – a solution which is possible, but definitely not simple.

When choosing, look mainly for simple implementation (do you have a programmer at hand or will the tests be administered by someone who knows programming?). Of course, the price is also crucial. Paid tools often offer free tutorials or assistance, so free does not always equal the best.

Here is a list of some of the best known A/B testing tools:

Google Analytics is among the best known A/B testing tools. One of its main advantages when compared to competing products is the fact that it’s free. And it works in a simple way: basically, you create and add all versions of your web page to the server – if the current page is at article.php, you create article1.php, article2.php, etc.

What follows is an easy step-by-step process of implementation:

If you do not have an account in Google Analytics, create one and after registering, click “Experiments” in the “Behavior” section of your website profile. Click on “Create experiment”.

Type in the URL of the website you want to test (in our example, it’s article.php) and select the measured variable – for example average visit duration, revenue, etc. Decide the percentage of your users you want to include in the experiment – determine the number according to the number of users that usually visit your site – if you have a lot of visitors, you can test the page on 1% of your visitors. If, however, you have few visitors, you could wait for the results from a 1% sample for a long time.

Then you just add the URLs of the changed pages to be tested. The last step is to add a special JavaScript code to each one. The code will determine which page is shown to which user.

And that’s all. You can find more details on how to do A/B testing with Google Analytics here.

Optimizely.com is one of the best known paid tools for A/B testing. Other paid tools mentioned below all work in a similar way. Compared to Google Analytics, they all have one significant advantage – you do not need a programmer to run the test – it’s enough to include in the page one very simple JavaScript code. Everything else can be “clicked” and selected without needing to know the source code. It’s almost as if you were editing text in Word or some other text editor – you can play around and change the text, the font size, anything. You choose the percentage of visitors to which you’ll display the tested version and select the measured variables. The tool saves the changes and, after starting the test, it will display your altered pages to random visitors.

Other popular A/B testing tools include Unbounce.com or VisualWebsiteOptimizer.com. Choose the one that suits you best. An overview of the best known tools is here.

Understanding the results

Most of the split testing tools offer results as you go along and even calculate which version has the highest chance of winning the test. At the same time, the tool helps to determine the right sample. At this point in the process, you don’t need to do anything else.

This, however, can become a double-edged sword. Despite the simplicity of A/B testing, it can be spoiled (just like anything in life). Watch out for these common mistakes:

• One variable, one hypothesis – one of the most common mistakes in A/B testing is that we want to test too many things at the same time. An example would be two completely different article visuals (each has a completely different layout, ordering, as well as elements). Remember: one A/B test, one hypothesis you are testing, one change. This is a way to avoid potential problems of not being able to understand what actually brought the change when reading the test result. Was it the background color? Or omission of a large ad space? Always change only one thing. Then test it.

• Attention – sample size too small. The second most common error is impatience. Frequently, one of the tested versions can have much better results very early on. Do not stop the test! Continue to the end of the test – it can often have very different results at the end than it seemed at the beginning. Contemporary A/B testing tools contain a function which automatically calculates the number of users you need to test in order to ensure the test is right. Here you can find a calculator which helps you to find out the approximate sample size even before running the test. If you are testing a large number of versions, it pays off to wait a little longer for results. Also, you may want to repeat the test one more time – test fewer versions the second time (e.g. original vs. winner and runner-up from the first test).

• Poorly chosen metrics. Even if you manage all of the above well, there is still a chance you are failing in the selection of the metrics with which you’ll be measuring the effect of your changes. Is the version that gets more clicks really better for you? Or are you more interested in whether visitors, after they click, subscribe to your publication? Number of clicks tends to be an alpha and omega for online media so pay attention to other criteria that may prove significant for you.

Testing tips

You surely have many ideas on what to test. A/B testing is practical any time you want to introduce something new and you discuss in your team how to proceed the best way. Don’t limit yourself to new functions you’d like to add to your site though. Think about things already present on your site, especially:

• Things that seem self-evident to you (if you hear someone say “people love xxx”, “the best way to do this is xxx” without having A/B test results to prove it, don’t just believe the statement – try it).

• Things on your site you think are done really well (this link has many clicks, the ad in the right corner works beautifully) – what if these things can be done even better? Don’t forget that every hundredth of a conversion counts!

• Things you think don’t matter (font color, font size, or moving an ad box 10 px more to the right). If you test a lot, you’ll find out that many of the results may not make much sense to you, yet they work. Do not rely on your rational criteria only and do not think that minute details don’t matter. They do – test everything.

Here are a few tips for tests you can run right now:

• A correct looking lead on the home page – is a smaller headline, full-width photo and no lead, or a larger headline, smaller photo and more text better? Or should it be altogether different? Come up with all different possibilities and find out what users prefer.

• Ad formats – you know that when there are too many, they don’t work; when there are only a few, conversion is higher but revenue smaller – so what is the right ratio? Try out different ad distribution on your page and select the best one.

• Homepage layout – there’s an everlasting fight within online media about the homepage. Each service, each journalist wants to see his or her article there, yet they cannot all be there. What is the right number of articles for visitors to still click? Which section is better suited for the right column and which will do better in the middle? The simplest way to find out is trying it.

• Test the wording of all buttons on your page. Compare “Enter the article discussion” to “Discuss the article now” for example. Test what works best and you may be surprised.

You can find lots of ideas and inspiration for A/B testing at www.abtests.com. It includes a number of case studies, so you can see the findings right away. Many of you may be surprised by them.

Still not enough? Suggested reading about A/B testing includes Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer. Although recommendations related to the implementation of Google Analytics experiments (the tool was formerly known as Website Optimizer) have become obsolete, the book offers hundreds of ideas and ways to improve your web site.
So what are you waiting for? Dive into A/B testing now!

How all kinds of data is helping newspaper companies go after more and more subscribers? Read more: The newsonomics of “Little Data,” data scientists, and conversion specialists by Ken Doctor

Russia has seen some of the fastest growth in digital advertising in recent years. Even though the torrid rate of growth proved to be unsustainable last year, digital advertising is capturing more advertising revenue, and the opportunity has attracted international investment in the classified advertising market.

News organisations, both print and broadcast, will need to monitor these fast-moving developments to develop an effective strategy to compete for digital advertising revenue with a range of new competitors.

Digital growth outpaces other media

Advertising continued to grow across most media in Russia in 2012, but while the rate of digital growth slowed, its impressive 35 percent rise year-on-year outpaced other media, according to the Russian Association of Communication Agencies.

Both print and television advertising continued to grow in 2012, but their respective growth rates of 2 and 9 percent was dwarfed by the growth in internet advertising, according to a report in East-West Digital News.

Internet display advertising only grew 17 percent. The real growth in digital advertising was driven by contextual advertising, which includes search advertising. It grew an impressive 45 percent.

In three to four years, it is predicted that digital advertising will capture a third of the advertising spend in Russia, according to a report in Vedomosti.ru. The rise of digital advertising comes at a cost for other forms of advertising. It is predicted that television’s share of advertising will decline from 48 percent to 46.4 percent this year, and print advertising will decline from 13.9 percent to 12.6 percent, according to the Vedomosti report.

Print advertising growth declined from 6 percent in 2011 to only 2 percent, but much of the coverage of the report focused on how internet advertising was cutting into television revenue.

Stanislav Povolotsky, RBC media holding’s commercial director, said that advertisers that had traditionally used television to reach consumers were now shifting to internet advertising, according to East-West Digital News.

In a widely reported sign of the shift from television to the internet, search engine Yandex almost overtook state-owned TV station Channel One in advertising revenue. In 2012, Yandex brought in 28.1 bn rubles, while Channel One earned 28.2 bn in advertising earnings, according to the Wall Street Journal. Of course, Yandex earns one out of every two rubles spent on online advertising in Russia, according to Immanuel Simonsen.

New advertising technologies such as real-time bidding are helping to fuel internet advertising growth in Russia, according to Michael Voschinsky, the managing director of Aegis Media.

Rise in digital ads attracts investment

With Russia offering such promising growth opportunities in terms of digital advertising, the market is attracting foreign investment.

In March, South African media house Naspers, struck a $570m deal to merge two Russian classified sites it owns, Slando.ru and OLX.ru, with their larger competitor, Avito.ru.

According to the Financial Times, the deal would create the fifth most popular website in Russia, with more than 100m page views per day, and the third largest classified advertising site in the world.

The move was seen as the beginning of consolidation in Russia’s online classified market, according to Ventures Africa.

Russia continues to experience rapid internet growth, with the number of internet users growing by a third every year, and the market is developing very rapidly. News organisations, especially print groups, will need to develop strategies to compete for internet advertising revenue or they may face stagnating revenues at best.

News groups will need to invest in audience intelligence in order to deliver better targeted advertising to compete with the contextual offerings of Yandex and the major social networks. Yandex poses a particular challenge to regional and local media as many of its advertisers are small and medium businesses rather than large national or international advertisers, and consolidation in online classified companies will put pressure on local media by chipping away at this lucrative source of revenue.

While search engines and online classified companies might not seem like competitors to news organisations, they will compete head-on with news groups for internet advertising revenue. News groups will need to develop strategies to face these new and growing sources of competition.

Search engines and social networks might not be in the journalism business, but they compete with news organisations for advertisers. And it’s not just new competitors that are challenging news groups for advertising revenue, it is also about an ever-changing landscape of technology and techniques, such as ad networks, re-targeting and now real-time bidding, which is also known as ‘programmatic’ buying and selling.

What is real-time bidding?

So what is real-time bidding? Online publishing data company Crowd Science explains real-time bidding like this:

Real-time bidding (RTB) is a relatively new advertising technology that allows online advertising to be purchased and served on the fly. Instead of reserving prepaid advertising space, advertisers bid on each ad impression as it is served. The impression goes to the highest bidder and their ad is served on the page.

RTB is an evolution of how ad exchanges used to sell remnant inventory, though it can seem challenging at first because of the alphabet soup of acronyms used to describe different parts of the marketplace. Here’s how it works: To facilitate the real-time bidding process, RTB exchanges buy data, often via tracking cookies, from across the web, and the data used across the process is managed by companies selling data-management platform (DMP) services. Supply-side platforms (SSPs) allow publishers to sell their inventory, and demand-side platforms (DSPs) allow advertisers and agencies to bid on the inventory. DSPs aggregate the inventory from multiple exchanges and, as Hollis Thomases explains on Clickz, “DSPs eliminate the need for another cumbersome buying step, the request for proposal (RFP) process”.

To simplify the process even further, Eric Picard of iMedia Connection broke down the RTB process from advertiser to consumer in this graphic.

For a more in-depth overview of the platforms, acronyms and technology behind digital ad exchanges and the programmatic buying and selling eco-system, we’ve written a brief primer to help you make sense of the jargon.

Here is another short explanation of RTB. The explanation is brief and useful, but the presenter speaks a bit quickly.

What is the opportunity of RTB?

RTB is relatively new and still makes up only a small part of the display advertising market, even in the most developed digital markets. Last year, RTB made up 13 percent of the US display market, but that figure was triple what it was the year before, according to eMarketer. The group estimates that the figure will rise to 19 percent this year, adding:

Research firms estimate US RTB digital display ad spending will total between $1.1 billion and $2.1 billion this year, driven by improvements in RTB technology and increased investment from both media buyers and publishers.

With the current downward pressure on CPMs (cost per thousand impressions), some publishers are concerned that RTB-powered ad exchanges will simply add to this pressure. Publishers also fear that they will lose control over how ads are displayed on their site and that this complex, technical system will require too many resources to adapt, according to Alex Gardner of MediaPost. However, RTB is not being driven to reduce already low CPMs. It is being driven by one thing only: increasing the efficiency of digital ad buying and selling.

Right now, there is too much friction and too much cost in digital ad buying. The process is complicated, time-consuming and expensive. Advertisers ask for request-for-proposals (RFPs) from publishers. After some analysis, the advertiser or agency chooses a couple of publishers based on some of their campaign goals. They create an insertion order, and send it out. Next the ad is created and agreed upon. “Somehow that all has to get delivered and measured,” Rodney Mayers, chief revenue officer of digital content data company Proximic, said in an interview with Knowledge Bridge.

The main impetus behind RTB isn’t that advertisers want cheaper inventory, Mayers said, adding:

I don’t as a buyer have the time nor does the client, the actual advertiser, want to bear the cost of all that friction. … The thesis behind programmatic buying, at least, is that I want to do the same thing. I just want to do it faster, and I want to do it right now. If your supply is in the system, and your audience data is in the system, your pricing is in the system, I don’t need to actually send you anything. I just need to buy it.

For publishers, RTB exchanges deliver greater flexibility to manage ad yield, Mayers said. Publishers can dynamically manage how much inventory they place into the exchange. He gave the following example:

This week my sales guys are selling kind of low. I am going to put 70 percent of my inventory in the exchange. Wait a second, a buy just came in. I can cut that 20 percent because I need to deliver for this $300,000 campaign. Next week, my sales guys are through the roof. I only need to put 10 percent in the exchange.

As for some publishers’ fears of lower CPMs, Mayers says that the more efficient process doesn’t just benefit advertisers and agencies but publishers as well. “Would you prefer a lower dollar CPM at a 2 percent margin because of everything that went into selling and winning, or would you prefer a $2 CPM or a $6 CPM at a 98 percent margin?” he asked, using hypothetical figures for the margins to prove a point.

The key for publishers is to effectively manage your advertising mix to the get the most digital revenue for your news organisation. He said:

It’s not a zero sum game. … It’s about balancing and managing yield so that … instead of one $200,000 buy, you end up with $250,000 where the 50 grand came basically came from exposing your inventory to everybody that wants to buy it.

How to shift your organisation’s thinking

The challenge of RTB, specifically, and digital advertising, in general, is not just technical. It also challenges much of the thinking and culture of media ad sales. How? “We’re seduced by big buys,” Mayers says. When one of your ad sales staff closes a big deal, it’s not just a jolt of adrenaline. “We feel special if we get one $300,000 buy. It reinforces everything that we believe about ourselves,” he says.

Programmatic buying takes away that rush and that affirmation. “(T)o get $300,000 automatically or through mechanised means or programmes, it seems a bit inhuman,” he concedes.

In the analysis of how news organisations have struggled and often failed to adapt to the changes of digital media, most of the focus has been on the newsrooms and on journalists and editors. However, little time has been spent on how the changes brought by the digital transition have affected the commercial side of news organisations. Mayers has put his finger on one of the reasons why traditional media sales teams have often failed to embrace some of the opportunities of digital advertising: selling thousands of impressions at $2 CPM just doesn’t feel as good.

In what he admits might sound a bit cryptic, Mayers says, “Do not underestimate the power of aggregated demand.” Sure, aggregating thousands of automated sales will not be as powerful as a big sell, but he urges publishers not to sit on the sidelines while this market develops.

Controlling Your Reports

One important feature to note is that you can add an “annotation” to any line graph by double clicking on a certain date and then entering a note into the pop-up text box.  This can be very useful if multiple people are viewing this profile and you want to indicate that a significant editorial or technical event happened on a certain day that could account for significant changes in metrics.

When viewing a report in the standard table mode, you can change the column that it sorts by, by clicking on the column label. The arrow beside the metric name will indicate which variable it is sorting on.

Standard reports automatically select a primary dimension, but in some cases it is possible to change the primary dimension, and usually it is also possible to add a secondary dimension. For example, click on Demographics > Location. By default, the primary dimension of this report is Country / Territory.  Across the top you can change this to City, Continent, etc. You can also add in a secondary dimension to further break down your metrics. For example, we could choose Medium. This would result in each row representing a combination of the country and medium the visitor came from.

When viewing a report, the default view is usually a line graph or map at the top, and a table of values at the bottom. These views can also be changed.

For example, with some reports, such as New vs. Returning, you can switch the graph view to a motion bubble chart by clicking on the toggle button at the top of the graph. This could be useful if you wanted to view a graph with more than 2 variables, since you can include size of the bubble as one of the metrics.  You can also “play” the graph to see how the values change over time.

More powerful, though, is if you scroll down to the table on the top left hand side, beside the link “advanced”, you can switch the view.

If you click the second button you will see a pie chart beside the table. You can change what the pie chart shows your report relative to. In this example, it shows each Source/Medium as a percentage of the total visits, but you can change that to a percentage of the total Pageviews, Bounces, etc.

The third button shows you a performance bar chart, which simply adds a horizontal histogram to your metrics. The fourth button is very useful – it gives you a bar chart comparing each value to the site average. You can also change which metric it graphs.

The last button shows you a pivot table of the report. In the pivot view, the primary dimension will appear as row headers. You can select different columns by selecting the drop-down beside “Pivot by”. You can also select what metrics appear in the table. In this example, I’ve shown the number of visits for each Source/Medium, based on the language of the visitor:

Advanced Segments

Advanced Segments are a critical tool to be able to use Google Analytics effectively.  Often you want to observe, or compare, what specific types of users are doing on your website. At the top of a report, beneath the date selection, click the button Advanced Segments.

Here you see a list of default segments to select from. For example, we can select “Direct traffic” and “Search traffic” if we want to see how they differ in their interactions with your website. Now, any report you select will show a comparison between the behaviour of direct traffic and search traffic.

To get rid of the segmenting, simply click the x’s beside the segments at the top of your report.

Even more powerful, is the ability to create custom segments. Let’s say we want to see the behaviour of all the people that searched for some version of our website. First click the Advanced Segment button, and then click “+New Custom Segment” in the bottom right-hand corner. My website is called Ganesha’s Scarf so I want to include people who came to the site by searching “Ganesha” or “Scarf”

First create a name for the segment. Then, under the first option, make sure “Include” is selected.  Find Keyword from the Dimension dropdown, which refers to the search keyword. And then we can use “Contains” Ganesha. We could also use exact match if we wanted those that searched just for “Ganesha”.

Then, under OR, select to add another option.  Repeat the same steps as the statement, but this time use contains “Scarf”. Now we will be including anyone who’s searched anything with the word Ganesha in it, or the word Scarf.  You can test or preview the segment before you save it.

Now whenever you click “Advanced Segment”, on the Custom Segments side you will see the segment you just created.  Selecting this will show us whether people who are searching for our website are actually finding what they were looking for, or is their bounce rate high.

Custom Reports

Lastly, for reports, we will look at custom reports. You may often find that the standard reports are not including the metrics you are interested in. In those cases, you can easily build a custom report. Click on the Custom Report heading, and then the “+New Custom Report” button. In this example, let’s say we want to know how many unique visitors visit our website from different countries. The standard Location report gives us the number of visits, but not the number of unique visitors.

First name your report. Then name your report tab – a custom report can have multiple tabs.  Add in the metrics we would like to see in our report. In this case, we want to include “Unique visitors”. You can include multiple metrics to that particular group such as visits, pageviews, etc. We can also create a second metrics group which will appear as a toggle link on the top of our report and could contain a different set of metrics.  Lastly, select the dimension – in this case “Country”.

Once you’ve saved your custom report, it will always appear when you click the “Custom Reports” button on the menu, as well as in the sidebar when you are viewing any Custom Reports.

Enabling AdSense

AdSense is the Google Ad network that allows you to get revenue on your website by showing your users relevant ads and being paid each time they click on them. It’s important to maximize your revenue by understanding when, where, and why users click on your ads and, over time, optimize the way you display ads. The best way to do that is to incorporate your AdSense data into your Google Analytics account.

To connect your existing AdSense account to your Google Analytics, first go to the Admin panel and select the account you want to connect.

Next, click the Data Sources tab.

Click the AdSense tab and click to Link Accounts.

You will be asked which property in that account is the primary one that contains your AdSense ads. Once you select the appropriate web property, your AdSense statistics starting that day will be available in your Google Analytics reports.

In brief, you can see your AdSense report summary under the standard reports in Content > AdSense. You will also now see that in any of the standard Demographics report, there is a toggle link to see AdSense for the report. For example, if you click on Location, and then click the AdSense link at the top of your location report, you can see what country’s visitors brought you the most Ad revenue.

Enabling AdWords

AdWords is the opposite end of the ad network spectrum – it allows you to display ads on other websites which are part of the Google ad network.

To enable AdWords in your Google Analytics account, you need to first login to your Google AdWords account. Note that the Google AdWords account must be setup with the same login as your Google Analytics account.

Under “Tools and Analysis” select “Google Analytics”.

This will bring you to a list of Accounts in your Google Analytics account.  Click the Admin button in the top left corner.

Select the Account you want to link to AdWords – the one you are using AdWords to drive traffic to.

Click on the Data Sources tab. You will see the sentence: “The AdWords account for xxxxx@gmail.com (601-133-1259) will be linked to www.youraccount.com” and below that a button to “Link Accounts”.

Click Link Accounts, and make sure to select “Auto-tag my links”. Select the drop down and select which profiles you want to link AdWords to.

Then you will see all the linked profiles in the table.

In Google Analytics, you can now see several standard reports under Advertising > AdWords. You can get an in-depth analysis of what ad word campaigns are working for you by seeing not only who is clicking onto your site, but their bounce rate, the pages they visit, etc. This will help you understand whether the money you are spending is resulting in quality visitors, as opposed to just an increase in traffic. For example, if you find the bounce rate is very high, then it might mean your ad needs to be reworded, or perhaps you should be linking to a different landing page.

EXERCISES

• Compared to the average, what percentage of visits to your site were from your target region/country?
• Show a pie chart of what Medium people came to your site from who were using mobile devices.
• What are the top 5 landing pages for people that came through your site through a search, but who did not search directly for the name of your website or news organization?
• Create a custom report that shows you the number of unique visitors that visited different pages on your site.
• Create a word cloud view of search terms that people come to your site using. Now create the same word cloud, but removing the top 3 search terms.
• If you have AdWords – see what times of the day people are most likely to come to your website.
• If you have AdWords – see what the bounce rate is like for people that come to your site through your campaign, and are new visitors.
• If you have AdSense – what pages on your site resulted in the most AdSense ads viewed? The highest revenue?
• If you have AdSense – show a pie chart showing the amount of revenue that new visitors result in versus returning visitors and another for the country visitors come from.

Here we explain how Google Analytics works, how to set it up on your website and share it with your staff, what the definition of “metrics” and “dimensions” are, and where some of the most common standard reports can be found. Lastly there are some exercises so you can try what you’ve learned.

What is Google Analytics and how does it work?

In order for a website to use Google Analytics, it must carry a small piece of tracking code which runs when a person visits that site. The tracking code either creates or modifies Google Analytics cookies (a little snippet of information that a website stores in your browser to identity you), sending this cookie data to the Google Analytics server.

Two things can stop this from working properly: if first-party cookies are blocked (not third-party), or if Javascript is disabled. Some estimates say less than 5% of internet users have blocked first-party cookies.

One last note is that if the code doesn’t load in time – for example the page is loading very slowly – then it is possible the visit will not be recorded. However, Google recently changed their tracking code to an “asynchronous” code.  Amongst other advantages, this code is put in the header of a website instead of the footer, so it is more likely that the code will be run, even if there are issues with the entire page loading.

Accounts, Properties and Profiles

Before you create an account, it is useful to understand the hierarchy of Google Analytics.

An account is the topmost level of organisation for Google Analytics. It allows you to manage multiple web properties (usually a website), which can have different profiles.

The default profile should always be the entire web property (for example, the entire website or the entire domain), but you can also make other profiles which filter the data to look at a subsection of your audience, or look at specific subdomains of the website. This can be useful if your digital newsroom is separated into content silos – the editor of sports can easily see his or her web statistics separately from the editor of business.

How to create an account

1. Go to www.google.com/analytics and sign in with your Google login and password. For future purposes, it is best to use the same Google account you use for AdSense or AdWords.

2. Click the Admin button in the top left. You will see an Accounts tab. Under this tab, click “New Account”.

At a minimum, name your account and add the website that you want to track.

3. Select http or https from the dropdown.  If you aren’t sure which one to use, go to your website and see what appears at the front of the URL.  You can add more websites later.

4. Select a timezone and industry category (the industry category is for Google compare to similar industries).

5. Select “Share data with other Google products”, as this will allow you to incorporate AdWords or AdSense into your Google Analytics account.

Once you have created the account, you will be shown a tracking ID.  A tracking ID always starts with UA, followed by the account number, and then the profile ID.  So an ID UA-XXXXX-Y means that XXXXX is the overall account, and Y is this particular profile.

6. To access the code you will need to put add to your website, scroll down to “Website tracking” and select “What are you tracking?”.

7. Select the website you are tracking. You will then be given the tracking code to put on your website.

How to give other people access to your account

You probably have other people in your organization that you want to be able to access the analytics.  It is important that they do not create a new Google Analytics account on their own Google account, instead you should give them rights to view the account you just created. The reason for this is that since cookies are based on a user visiting a website, it can confuse things if multiple accounts are trying to update a user’s cookies. The data will likely be incorrect.

1. Make sure that you are administering your account, not your property or profile, then click on the Admin button in the top right.

2. Underneath the menu, click either on “Account List” or the name of the account that you see directly after “Account List”.

3. Once you are in the account admin screen, click the Users tab.

4. Click the button to add a new user. You can give them user rights, or admin rights. You can also select just specific profiles in the account for the user to be able to see.

Metrics and Dimensions

Google Analytics splits its data into “metrics” and “dimensions”.  Simply put, metrics are anything that gives you numbers, and dimensions are ways in which you can categorize those numbers. For example, number of visitors is a number, so it’s a metric, but the way you want to view those numbers – by day, by month, by country, by device – those are dimensions.

Common Metrics

• Visits (Sessions) – The number of times that anyone visited your website. One thing to note is that a visit is considered over if someone leaves your website, closes their browser, is inactive on your site for over 30 minutes (the 30 minutes varies by analytics tool and can be customized), or when it hits midnight in your timezone. This means that if someone is interacting with your site and they go get lunch for over 30 minutes, when they come back and start interacting again it will count as 2 visits.  For more detailed information – http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2731565
• % of new visits (or returning visits) – When a user visits your website, Google Analytics will see if they already have a cookie for this site, indicating that the user is a return visitor. This means that a visitor may also be considered new if the user has cleared their cookies, or if the cookie has expired (after two years for Google Analytics)
• Average visit duration – Adds together the length of time of every session and divides it by the total number of sessions. Google calculates “length of time” by calculating the time between when a user came to your site, and the last thing the user does on your site.  Unfortunately, leaving your site is not something that Google can get a timestamp for – it does not count as an event on your site. Therefore, the length of time the user spends on the last page before exiting is usually not included in the Average visit duration calculation. Also a user that only visits one page, does nothing, and then exists will have a length of time of zero even if they spent 15 minutes reading that one page. Therefore, the average visit duration will always be an underestimation. It is worth noting that not all Analytics tools work this way and that there are ways, through coding, to change this functionality. However, since Google Analytics is one industry standard, it is perfectly acceptable to use this value for time on page or average visit duration.
• Bounce Rate – The number of users who only visit one page and leave. Sometimes the bounce rate is a good indication of whether or not the “right” people are visiting your website and whether or not it’s easy for them to find what they need. However, if you have a blog for example, you would expect a high bounce rate since all the articles are on the homepage anyway. Even if someone spends 5 minutes reading your blog, they will still be considered a bounced user unless they click on a page or have an event.
• Pages/visit (or average page depth) – This is the average number of pages that are viewed in a session.  Repeat visits to the same page during a session will be counted as separate page visits.
• Pageviews – This is the total number of pages that were seen. Repeat visits to the same page are counted as separate page views.
• Unique pageviews – This is the number of unique pages viewed, aggregated by all the visitors.  If you see the number of unique pageviews for a specific page, it would count the number of sessions during which that page was viewed at least one time. The total number of unique pageviews tells you how many pages people visited, but not including their repeat visits to the same page during the same session.
• Unique visitors / Visitors – The number of different users, or at least different cookies, that visit your website. Of course, if a user comes from a new browser, different computer or device, they will be counted more than once. Also, when people clear cookies and appear as new visitors, they will be counted more than once. Since people often clear cookies manually, the industry standard for reporting unique visitors to your site is to report by month, and not any longer like by year, where many users may be counted more than once.

Common Dimensions

• Visitor Type – New or returning
• Medium – The way someone came to your website. (none) refers to a direct visit where someone typed the URL in or used a bookmark; organic refers to a search engine; and referral is if they clicked on a link other than a search engine or campaign.  Also, for campaigns, Medium could be a custom parameter or ppc if it is an AdWords campaign using autotagging.
• Source – This is the more specific source of the referral to your website. It is most often the domain or URL where they clicked the link to your site. It can also be a campaign custom parameter, or Google if they came from AdWords with autotagging.  Again, if the visitor just came directly it will say (direct).
• Continent, subContinent, Country, Region, Metro, City – Google Analytics will try to source the location of the visitor based on the IP address.  If it cannot determine the location it will use (not set). Unfortunately in some regions of the world this can happen quite frequently – in fact the majority of users may be from not set.

Standard Reports

Reports are where Metrics meet Dimensions.  For example, you might want to look at the behaviour of new vs returning (dimension) visitors. You could compare the number of visitors (metric) who are new and the number who are returning, or the number of unique pageviews (metric) for new visitors compared to those for returning visitors.  Perhaps you want to see the bounce rate (metric) for the visitors from your country vs from other countries (dimensions).

In the standard reporting view, which is one of the buttons in the main menu, there are some useful reports that you can pull up from the sidebar:

• Location, under Audience > Demographics
• Mobile, under Audience > Mobile > Overview
• Sources, under Traffic Sources
• Search terms, under Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic
• Social Network overview under Traffic Sources > Social > Sources
• Pages visited under Content > Site Content > All Pages
• AdWord Campaigns under Advertising > AdWords > Campaigns (note this must be enabled)
• AdSense Overview under Content > AdSense > Overview (note this must be enabled)

For every report in Google Analytics, you can set the date frame and the range.  To set the date frame select the arrow in the top left-hand corner beside the current date frame and choose a start and end date.

You should immediately see your graph change dates. By default, you will notice that the analytics graph reports on the metric by day. You can change this at the top of your graph by toggling the day, month, or year buttons.

You can also compare to a previous date range by clicking “Compare to” when you select your start and end dates.

EXERCISES

• How many unique visitors did you have yesterday, last week, three months ago for the month?
• How many visits in the last week were from mobile devices? What were the top three mobile devices used?
• What are the top three countries, based on number of visits, to your site?
• For the people that are from your country, what is the bounce rate?
• How many visits to your site were from referrals?  What were the top three domains that they were referred from?
• Compare the sources of visits to your site between this month, and last month. Is there a significant difference? Why do you think that is?
• Compare the number of visits in general between the last week of this month, and the last week of last month. If there is a difference, then why?
• What were the top five pages visited in the past week? Does that surprise you? If so, how could you use that information to change your editorial flow for next week?