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

Each section has a collection of posts on the steps publishers need to take to transform their newsrooms into effective digital news gathering and publishing operations, organised in the following way:

The unbolted newsroom: Several posts giving an overview of unbolting issues.

Getting your newsroom started: Carrying out a newsroom assessment to help set priorities.

Cover events and breaking news live: “Live coverage provides depth, immediacy and interactivity for the digital audience. You should always cover breaking stories as they unfold.”

Unbolt enterprise from the Sunday story: Instead of planning enterprise stories (articles that explain the forces shaping events, rather than simple reporting of those events) for the Sunday newspaper, plan them to appear first on digital platforms at the best time to reach your digital audience.

Cover routine daily news as it unfolds: Change the daily routine so reporters produce content throughout the day, not in the evening for the next morning’s newspaper.

Focus on mobile success: Prioritise mobile.

Newsroom meetings: “Daily planning meetings need to focus on digital platforms, rather than the next morning’s newspaper.”

Leading the unbolted newsroom: Include data and interactive specialists in story-planning, hire staff with digital skills, get the right CMS, let people lead, and more.

Editing: There should be fewer editors but more journalists who can edit their own work.

Measuring success: It’s challenging, but there will be a mix of subjective ratings and measurable metrics.

How the Berkshire Eagle is unbolting: A case study of one ‘unbolting Master Plan’.

Working Digital First: Posts on other issues to consider.

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.

Educating advertisers

It is one of the paradoxes of digital journalism that increasing the size of your audience doesn’t always result in higher income. Some of that disparity can be attributed to the fact that while advertisers want to shift their advertising budgets from offline media to online media, they also need to learn about the opportunities, Chia said. Educating advertisers about the possibilities of digital advertising is an important first step in building an effective and revenue-earning premium advertising strategy.

Educating advertisers starts with producing rate cards and media kits to fully introduce their site to advertisers. One of the key messages is that digital advertising is not a blind mass campaign, she says. Online advertising is about about measurability and being able to target specific audiences. She said:

You need to have a demographic breakdown (of the visitors to your site). That is the main product you can use to attract advertisers and convince advertisers to come and buy advertisement on your website.

To deliver better targeted and better performing digital advertising campaigns, publishers need to invest in technology that allows them to build a demographic profile of their audience. Malaysiakini has detailed information about the age, income and education of their audiences. They have information about the interests of their audience, such as whether they are into automobiles or online banking. All of this data, which is included in their media kits, provide essential demographic information to advertisers so they know who they can reach by partnering with the site.

In addition to printed media kits, Malaysiakini also has an advertising blog which provides further information about advertising packages and advertiser-focused events. These events and conferences are another way to educate advertisers and communicate to them the opportunities they have with digital advertising.

“We actually have a new media school. We discuss different topics, and we invite advertisers, agencies and advertising department staff,” she said. They sometimes charge for these conferences, particularly when they have high profile speakers who bring expertise in digital advertising campaign measurement, models and services. Some conferences are on very specific topics such as how to use measurement tools like Google Analytics.

Premium advertising strategies

One of the factors contributing to the challenge that news organisations have faced in earning advertising revenue from their digital audiences has been downward pressure on digital advertising rates. Many early stage news websites are reliant on advertising networks for their ad strategies, but falling rates over the past several years have made it difficult for news sites to earn enough revenue from digital advertising alone to cover their costs. Malaysiakini earns less than 10 percent of its advertising revenue from ad networks. Instead of relying on ad networks, they have developed premium advertising strategies based not just on the richness of the demographic data but also on providing new ad formats that appeal to advertisers.

Malaysiakini charges premium rates for premium placement on their site. “It is usually the top spot, and it has very high engagement and is very creative,” Chia says. Malaysiakini does not put ad network slots on the top of their pages because it would undermine their efforts to charge higher rates for those slots.

Premium buy advertising is sold by their own in-house sales team, and the premium pricing is for advanced campaigns. Companies allocate a lot of money to premium campaigns, she said. This is where the demographic data of their audience is key in convincing advertisers to pay more, not just for premium placement but also to reach specific audiences.

Chia says that you also need to have flexible site designs to make sure that audiences don’t suffer from “ad blindness”. Ad blindness occurs when publishers have fixed spots and formats for their advertising. After a while, audiences simply learn to ignore these areas of the site.

Be nimble

News publishers need more than just flexible designs. They also need to be nimble to keep pace with the rapid changes in digital advertising. Real-time bidding is coming to markets like Malaysia. As we’ve written about before, real-time bidding, also known as programmatic or algorithmic buying, uses site visitor data to buy, sell and display highly targeted advertising. Publishers are concerned that real-time bidding, or RTB, will put further downward pressure on advertising rates.

“RTB is one type of ad network,” Chia said, adding, “your ad will only appear to your target audience. … (RTB) is not a blind network but a highly targeted network.”

She gave the example of two computer companies, Acer and Toshiba, trying to sell their laptops. They will enter their bid price, and Malaysiakini will enter their floor price, the minimum price they will sell their advertising for. If the companies bid over the floor price, and if the target demographic visits the site, their ad will appear.

There are concerns that RTB will affect their premium ad strategy, but in this industry, when everyone launches a new technology, “we cannot escape from the new landscape,” she said. “We need to be part of it.”

The study revealed that “internet users (in the country) are mainly from the ‘working middle class’, as opposed to upper (as defined by living standards measures)”, Joanna Wright wrote in the Media Online. Internet penetration is still low in the country, with upper estimates standing at 35.2 percent, according to the Stats SA 2011 Census. The Census also looked at where South Africans had access, either at home, at work, via mobile phone or some other location. It is important to note that twice as many South Africans had access via mobile phones, 16.3 percent, than had access at home.

However, while internet penetration might be low, this new study by online research firm Columinate, which was commissioned by the Digital Media and Marketing Association in South Africa, shows that use is expanding beyond higher income levels.

The Columinate study also challenged another assumption about the digital market in South Africa, that it is predominantly young. The study found that 11 percent of users were over 50 years old, and most, 60 percent, were between 25 and 49 years old.

“(It’s) not necessarily a youth market. You are accessing South Africans who work, who have disposable income,” said Elna Smit of Columinate, the online research group responsible for the study.

And internet users in South Africa are well educated. The research found that 13 percent of internet users in the country have a degree, while only one percent of the total population has a higher education degree.

Publishers need to leverage data to woo advertisers

Research like this is key to helping you win over advertisers who might be sceptical about the reach of digital advertising as your market transitions to digital media.

“Marketers often complain that digital won’t give them the mass market, the bulk of South Africans,” Smit told Media Online, but added that advertisers need to look beyond simple reach. “You should be asking: What percentage of the people who spend on your brand are you reaching?” Smit said.

To win over advertisers, you need the data to answer this question. In the early days of the digital transition, audiences might appear small when compared to traditional media, but if you have effective audience measurement tools, then you can show how targeting can deliver a more relevant message to a more receptive audience.

You can begin your audience measurement work by investing in services such as ComScore, and you can also monitor your social media metrics using Facebook’s built in tools or other social media metrics tools such as Chartbeat. Data is becoming even more important to ad sales as even real-time bidding or programmatic buying reaches larger emerging markets such as Russia and Malaysia.

Even as you grow your audience, you will still need to make sure that you speak not just of the size of your audience but the income, age and geographic distribution of your audience. News publishers and broadcasters who invest in knowing their audience will find it easier to win over advertisers and compete more effectively against targeted advertising from search engines and social networks.

News organisations could learn a few things from Barack Obama. The Obama campaign built a huge data-driven analytical system to bring together vast amounts of data. “We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign,” Obama campaign manager Jim Messina told Time. This allowed the campaign to precisely target potential supporters, register them to vote and make sure they voted on election day. These innovations were one of the reasons that Obama was able to win the close election.

Some forward-looking news organisations are already using similar data-driven techniques to improve the performance of their content, their mobile apps and their business. Being able to effectively measure not only the size of their audience but also how the audience responds to and engages with their content is helping news outlets to clearly know whether they are meeting their editorial and business goals.

In the battle for audiences’ time and attention – and advertisers’ money – news organisations’ ability to compete with digital competitors will be determined by how effectively they are able to use audience data.

Making audience data a priority

For digital news organisations such as PolicyMic, keeping close track of their web analytics allows them to monitor the pulse of their website.

All nine employees of the digital news startup not only have access to the site analytics, but in addition, “every editor wakes up to an automated e-mail with a complete rundown of our analytics from the day before. We make sure the daily analytics are simple, accessible, and actionable,” said PolicyMic co-founder Chris Altchek. Media Development Loan Fund has invested in PolicyMic through its Digital News Ventures fund.

Altchek sees a clear benefit from their focus on data. “Analytics helps us drive growth month over month. We’ve grown from 100,000 unique visitors per month to 5 m in 10 months this year by learning every day from our analytics,” he said.

What is the job of the content?

These kind of results are one of the reasons that news organisations are increasingly using audience data to improve their editorial and financial performance.

Analytics software and services can allow you to measure a myriad of performance indicators about the performance of your content including raw audience numbers, location of your audience, basic demographic about your audience and referrals. Referrals are how your audience is finding your content, through search, social media or by directly visiting your site. Your first step will be to decide what to measure.

Barack Obama’s campaign wanted to measure everything, but for media and news organisations, while it’s possible to measure everything, it’s not practical. “You have to do prioritisation, you can’t track 30 to 40 metrics,” says Karl Schneider, the editorial development director at business-to-business publisher Reed Business Information.

To prioritise which of the myriad of metrics you want to focus on, you’ll need to determine your goals and which measurement techniques are best suited for each goal.

This is a radical shift in the way that editorial organisations have traditionally used metrics, and Schneider explained why and how editorial organisations are making this shift from simply measuring the size of the audience to measuring how audiences are responding to content.

In the past, they used standard industry metrics: page views, unique users and some engagement metrics, such as time on page and social media shares. He conceded that not a lot of thought had gone into why they were using these metrics. “We had been thinking for a while that the things we measured weren’t very well tied to the commercial success of the business,” Schneider said.

He compared the traditional thinking about metrics to a company designing a vehicle. To understand if they had a good design, they might choose a few criteria. An engineer might choose top speed, but first you need to figure out what kind of car you’re designing. If the car is a sports car, top speed might be a good criterion, but if we’re trying to build a delivery van, top speed wouldn’t be an appropriate metric for success. The first question that the company would need to answer would be what the vehicle would be used for. What is its job?

Similarly, before even thinking about metrics, RBI started to think of the role of the content. What were they trying to achieve with the content, both for audiences and also for RBI as a business? Once they had answered the question of what job the content was doing, what their goal was, “often, the appropriate metric would fall out straightaway, would be obvious,” Schneider said.

It got him thinking about why editorial organisations don’t ask what the role or job of the content is, and he said:

Traditionally the job is always the same, because the job is the same we never have to ask that question. Traditionally, the job is always to deliver the audience. … In the past, our monetisiation was relatively straightforward. You would either charge for it … or we sold advertising against it.

The package was undifferentiated and the advertising was relatively undifferentiated. In print, you couldn’t target advertising. For both of those business models, the job of the content was to deliver the audience. Measuring the issues sold, readership, was appropriate for both of those business models.

“But we took that thinking online without really thinking that especially, more recently, the way that we monetise the content is much more sophisticated,” he added. Now, in digital, monetising the content might include getting the reader to sign up for recruitment advertising or getting a reader to register for a paid event. They might also capture details about the reader that they can sell on for lead generation. He added:

Getting (people) to turn up isn’t good enough in those business models. If someone turns up and reads an article, watches a video, if that is all they do, we typically don’t make money. Obviously, we still have advertising, but even there, it’s more sophisticated. We are starting to want to target advertising. If they turn up and tell us something about themselves so we can target advertising, that is a more valuable thing for them to do than if they turn up and just disappear again.

Choosing the right metric

To help them understand the job of the content, what they want to achieve, RBI is now piloting an approach that involves meeting with managers responsible for the revenue streams that support the content. They discuss what the content does or could do to add to the revenue streams.

For example, for an events business, the obvious thing that content can do is to attract people who might sign up for that event to a page where they can buy tickets. Many of the revenue streams at RBI work on this model of using content to increase conversion to either a paid event or paid content. Measuring how effectively content drives these conversions is one key metric.

They also look at how content can build a brand relationship with the audience. “In most of our markets, the main experience our audience has of the brand is the content,” he said.

Brand relationship is harder to measure than conversion. They are currently developing key performance indicators (KPIs), and “you try to look for indicators that are highly correlated with the change of perception that you are looking for,” Schneider said. If someone values content enough to share it with their friends and professional contacts, RBI is finding that this is a better measure of brand relationship than simple pageviews.

As a business, they have started to change how they perceive success. For instance, when comparing the performance of content, they might have two pieces of content. The first one had twice as many pageviews, but the second one delivered twice as many conversions for people who signed up for a paid-for event.

“In the old way of thinking, we might think that the first one was a better piece of content, but in maybe today, maybe we would say the second one is a better piece of content because it delivered more people to a conversion we care about it because it delivered revenue to us,” he said. The first piece of content might have delivered more people but it wasn’t our core audience, he added.

They have had to prioritise because in some markets, they might have six or seven revenue streams with four or five different roles of content for each. What are the key revenue streams? What are the key roles to make a difference for those revenue streams?

Informed innovation

RBI and other news organisations are using this audience data to help them set priorities, improve their site and app design, and even help them improve the performance of their content. Using audience data involves a process of continual optimisation, using the metrics to review and revise your approach.

Before joining RBI, Schneider was a research physicist, and he brings a decidedly scientific approach to how he is using audience data. He views the KPIs they have chosen as part of a hypothesis to be tested.

After six months, they will review the KPIs. If all of the KPIs are up and the revenue is up, they will know that they have chosen the right metrics, but if not, they will have to review what they are measuring.

At PolicyMic, they using their analytics to constantly review and improve their editorial performance. Altchek said:

After every big event, we create a report and blueprint based on analytics, so when a similar event happens again, we have a solid editorial plan that improves based on past performance. We therefore assign stories, change headlines, and re-write introductory paragraphs to fit trends we’ve discovered studying past analytics.

At the Daily Telegraph in the UK, data is helping to refine their mobile products. In a piece for the International News Marketing Association, The Telegraph mobile director, Mark Challinor, said:

Instead of trial and error, we guide our app development and mobile offering with key metrics, as agencies and advertisers are demanding a more targeted mobile audience, and readers have come to expect mobile news access in differing ways.

They used data from a six-month free trial period of their iPad app to improve the app and also to test advertising formats. Monitoring how users navigated the app helped them deliver an improved experience when they launched the paid and bundled app after the free trial. Like many other news organisations, they noticed a spike in evening usage of the app. “With that in mind, we introduced a night-reading mode, turning the iPad into a true lean-back device users read in bed,” Challinor said.

They also found that there were more users over 50 than in any other age group, which led them to focus web and smartphone content and campaigns on younger readers than the on the iPad.

The Telegraph also shared its analytics insights with advertisers. “The data obtained from analytics let advertisers create more effective ads and help brands make real and engaging connections with our readers,” he said.

Making data manageable

To help teams manage the data, RBI has also created dashboards to help them easily monitor the key metrics that they have determined they want to track. They have created one top level dashboard using their metrics software, Site Catalyst from Adobe. The top level dashboard provides the key raw metrics about whatever KPI they are trying to measure. They track it over time to see if the conversion rate this month is better than the conversion rate last month.

A second dashboard looks at the content on a much more granular level. It looks at both categories of content and even individual pieces of content that performed well or poorly in terms of the KPIs. “That is the most important dashboard in terms of driving up performance,” Schneider said. Content teams can use this dashboard to find characteristics in common for high-performing content.

This allows them to test content and make informed decisions about what content to focus their time and resources on and what content they choose not to do.

Site Catalyst is used by many large media organisations, but Schneider said that they aren’t using all of the capabilities of the service yet. News organisations could do much of what RBI is doing in its pilot using simpler statistics packages, such as Google Analytics, he said.

How have editorial teams responded?

This revolution in audience data is providing new clarity to editorial organisations in their digital decision making. However, even for advocates such as Schneider, he worried how editorial teams might respond.

“That was my biggest concern how we would sell this to the content teams and how it went down. My fear was that it would be really negative. My hope is that it would be neutral,” he said.

His experience with creative staff including journalists is that they hate vague success criteria but they also hate micromanagement. RBI isn’t telling journalists and editors that they must create a certain type of content. Rather they are setting success criteria and giving editorial staff the freedom to decide how they achieve those goals.

The analytics are leading them to experiment with content types that they haven’t done much of in the past such as data visualisations. One of RBI’s revenue streams is that it has a robust data business, and these visualisations are being used to attract new subscribers to these data products.*

Although the rationality of data might seem cool, or even cold, in contrast to the passion that most journalists feel for their work, we all want to succeed, and news organisations and other publishers are finding that audience insights are helping their content to reach more people and their businesses perform better. These data-driven strategies can be an important competitive advantage for news organisations as they make the digital transition.

* Disclosure: Before joining MDLF, I worked with RBI to train their staff in data journalism techniques including how to create charts and graphs and other visualisations.

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?

Schibsted have made strategic investments in digital advertising, building an international online classifieds business and buying ad network Webtraffic in 2007. They have also invested in services and technology that leverage audience data across their own network. These investments have been key in allowing the group to generate meaningful digital revenue that is offsetting the declines in print revenue.

Not all news groups are in a position to make acquisitions like Schibsted, but no matter how large or small your news organisation is, strategic investments in digital advertising, whether in staff, technology or services, are essential in order to win in the fierce competition for online and mobile revenue.

Explosive growth in digital advertising

Many news organisations have only seen a glass half empty when it comes to digital advertising, bemoaning the fact that digital revenue for news groups has not come close to matching the revenue from print.

The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) recently announced that only 2.2 percent of total global newspaper advertising revenue comes from digital. This is against a backdrop of rapid growth in digital advertising revenue. In the last five years digital advertising has risen by 55 percent from $42 bn to $76 bn. The wider challenge for news organisations is that there obviously is money to be made from digital advertising, but that news businesses aren’t the companies making that money. Search advertising – dominated by Google globally and regional players such as Yandex in Russia and Baidu in China – now captures 58 percent of global digital advertising revenue, according to WAN-IFRA.

This isn’t a phenomenon isolated to Western Europe and North America. In Russia, internet advertising grew 56 percent year-over-year in 2011, but Yandex and social networking sites such as vKontakte and Mail.ru are winning the digital advertising battle. Yandex saw its advertising revenue grow by 60 percent in 2011, and Mail.ru sold 56 percent more display ads in 2011 than the year before, according to paidContent.

Fundamentally, this raises the question: How do news organisations compete for digital advertising revenue, especially when successful forms of advertising, search and social media, are not tied to the traditional content that news organisations produce?

To compete for digital advertising revenue with these new competitors, news groups need to compete with them on relevance, delivering ads that match people’s interest. That is what has made Google rich, delivering ads based on what people are searching for, and building up a rich store of data about your audience so you can deliver the most relevant, clickable ads possible to them is key to competing effectively for the ever growing pot of digital advertising revenue.

Disrupt or be disrupted

Shibsted is facing the same declines in print advertising revenue that many newspaper groups are in Western Europe and North America, but the group’s response has been very different. In its second quarter 2012 results released in August, Schibsted reported a 9 percent decline in print advertising revenue, but unlike so many other news groups, they offset that decline with a 10 percent growth in digital advertising revenue, driven by an increase in their global online classifieds business. They reported a decline in single-copy sales of their newspapers, but they also reported strong growth on mobile platforms, not only in traffic but also in terms of revenue. As digital strategist Ken Doctor noted about Schibsted earlier this year:

… 36 percent of its revenues come from digital offerings, a percentage more than three times that of the average newspaper company.

This is what a successful transition to digital looks like, with digital revenues helping to either add to print revenues or offset declines in print revenues as audiences shift their reading habits to digital platforms. Shibsted has looked beyond its traditional competitors in the news business to invest in disruptive technologies including online classifieds and the Webtraffic ad networks.  “We weren’t afraid to cannibalize ourselves,” Schibsted CEO Rolv Erik Ryssdal told Businessweek.

Relevance: The key to digital advertising success

Schibsted’s digital advertising strategy isn’t simply about a large news organisation making smart acquisitions, a strategy only possible for groups of the size and scale of Schibsted. They also recognise that digital advertising strategies rely on data and precise targeting to deliver relevant advertising to audiences.

Search-driven advertising has been successful because people are shown advertising based on what they are searching for, and social media advertising uses the information you share and information from your profile to deliver targeted ads.

Schibsted has been improving the relevance of its ads through behavioural targeting techniques, better audience data and a relatively new technique called dynamic targeting, according to Halvard Kristiansen, the head of product development at the Schibsted owned ad network Webtraffic. Webtraffic sells unsold advertising inventory from 155 partner sites.

Using technology from a US company called Audience Science, they gather detailed information about the user behaviour on Schibsted sites including the online classified sites they own, such as Blocket.se in Sweden. Using small files called cookies, they track how many page impressions a user has on specific sites and specific categories, the type of content they read and also what search terms they use. “Using all of this information, we can extract some target groups,” Kristiansen said.

Using that data, they can target the user with specific ads based on their behaviour across sites Schibsted owns and has a relationship with. For example, when someone searches for “safe cars” and “crash tests” on a Schibsted site and then searches for “Volvo” on a Schibsted cars section, they can make the ads for Volvo stand out on that section, he said.

In addition to delivering more relevant ads to audiences, Kristiansen also is looking for more effective ways to measure ad efficiency than click-through rates (CTR). Click-through rates on advertising have declined to the point where the average CTR is now a measly 0.07 percent in Sweden.

It would not be too strong to say that Kristiansen hates CTRs as a measurement. He even goes so far as to believe that it was one of the original sins of digital media development. He sees a host of problems with using CTR as a measure of advertising efficiency:

1. He doesn’t believe it actually gives you an accurate measure of how many people clicked on the ad. It measures clicks not people in the same way that circulation differs from readership.
2. CTRs don’t tell you anything about the person who clicked the ad.
3. Half of online time is spent at work. Your boss probably doesn’t want you clicking on an ad at work and, in effect, go shopping, so you may have seen and noted the ad but circumstances make it impossible for you to click through.
4. CTRs do not measure offline activity. What happens if an ad impression leads to an offline sale?

“If we continued to talk about CTR, we realised that we would be in the same swamp [of low ad returns] as everyone else in a half year,” he said. Instead, with behavioural targeting campaigns, they were able to charge ad rates dramatically higher than the industry average.

To deal with the last point, Kristiansen developed methods to combine measurement of online and offline effects of advertising using technology that Schibsted has created in-house. For each ad impression, they dropped a new cookie, a small tracking file, onto a user’s computer. After showing the ad three or four times, they would show the user a small pop-up survey. They asked the user if they had seen the ad yesterday or the last week. If they said, yes, they asked if they liked the ad, if they would search for the product and whether they would buy the product. For instance, if they have an ad for a car, they might ask whether the person would like to test drive the car. They now had a lot more data about the ad impression, not just about what the person is doing online but what they might do offline as well.

Based on their survey data, they know that almost one in three users say that a relevant ad has been delivered, and Kristiansen now has the data to tell advertisers that they delivered an ad to a defined, measurable group of users and that a certain percentage saw the ad as relevant. That rather than CTR is how Schibsted is measuring ad efficiency, and that kind of data and detail can justify charging much higher rates than the industry average.

How have the audience responded to the pop-ups? Kristiansen includes his email address in each pop-up to allow people to comment or complain about them. He says that he gets about one email a month, but he says about ad-supported news sites:

“Basically, people have to understand that there is no difference between a freesheet on the subway and internet (news) sites. For internet sites, the only revenue they have is ad impressions. We can either show you a random ad or we could try to ask you the type of ads you want and make an effort to show you a relevant ad.”

Schibsted’s efforts to deliver relevant advertising don’t stop there. Kristiansen is very excited about a new product, dynamic retargeting. “I love this product. We are going closer to our customers,” he said.

If you are a retailer selling shoes, and an internet user comes to your site. The retailer may not know much about the user, but the retailer can record when she puts a women’s red Adidas shoe size nine in her shopping cart. However, she doesn’t buy the shoe but rather closes the window before going home from work. He describes dynamic retargeting as:

We have developed a system that when we see this user coming into one of our network sites without our customer creating a lot of ads, we could dynamically enter into our clients site the picture of the shoe, size of shoe and colour of the shoe. … This is customising every ad impression in real-time.

It works much the way that Amazon recommendations works but not just on Amazon but across the web. After creating a profile on Amazon’s site, you will notice how you will receive emails from Amazon letting you know merchandise related to what you have searched for recently.

Dynamic retargeting works much the same way but goes beyond simply showing ads with a category that you were searching and instead shows you ads of the product you almost bought. The data is anonymised to protect the user’s privacy, and the data is only stored for 24 hours because afterwards the information is probably not relevant for that user.

He sees this as the future of digital advertising. “The ads are so relevant to you that you can’t help but click on them,” he said.

If Google, Facebook and Amazon are winning the online ad wars by delivering higher performing advertising by delivering more relevant advertising, then techniques like behavioural targeting and dynamic retargeting are two techniques that can help you as a news organisation begin to compete effectively for digital advertisers.

The key to both techniques is data-driven relevance, and improving your ability to capture information about your digital audiences and deliver ads based on that information are important first steps in building material digital advertising revenue. Invest in technology to deliver more relevant digital advertising, and you’ll see see advertising revenue that will allow you to grow your digital editorial business and prepare you for the future.

You don’t have to be as large as Schibsted to start taking advantage of better ad targeting. Just as Schibsted uses third party services such as Audience Science, many companies can deliver behaviour targeting or dynamic retargeting services.

Here we highlight a brief case study from KPLU, a public radio station in Seattle in the United States, which underwent not just a technology transition but also an evolution of their on-air and online editorial strategy. As we noted with digital media product development, the number of choices both during development and after launch can seem overwhelming, but the lessons from KPLU apply to any market and provide you with a sense of where to start.

Technology

KPLU carried out a “ground-up overhaul” of its digital platforms and learned some hard lessons, according to the station’s assistant general manager and director of public media Jennifer Strachan. Not only did they learn which digital services weren’t working, they also learned not to underestimate the complexity and cost of such an overhaul, which cost them not only money but also time.

When choosing a technological solution, it is important to think first what you’re trying to achieve editorially. Good technical staff will help you make technology choices based on your editorial goals, and when you’re evaluating developers, whether on staff or an external contractor, one criterion should be how well they help you make these choices.

Staffing and organisation

KPLU doesn’t have a large news staff – only four full-time reporters, a part-time reporter, four news hosts and a news director. They added a full-time multimedia manager, a digital intern and an online managing editor to help them achieve their digital goals. That is still not a huge news staff, so using them effectively and efficiently was a key strategic challenge.

A few years ago, full integration of digital and existing editorial teams was embraced by many, but many news organisations that moved towards full integration now realise that running an effective multi-platform news outlet isn’t as simple as that; to create strong content for digital and existing platforms, whether they be broadcast or print, some specialisation is necessary. For KPLU, they decided not to fully integrate the staffs but instead have both staffs focus on a common goal – they found this to be a much better use of limited resources:

The news and digital teams remained separate but worked collaboratively toward a common goal: competitiveness in the region’s online market for news. Digital relevance would require both our radio and online staffs to acknowledge the strengths of both media.

A checklist for digital success

Once they had the technology and staffing in place, they found that “webbifying” their radio stories, converting radio scripts to text with only a light adaptation for the web – wasn’t successful in attracting readers. “(M)ost of the web stories were buried, almost unread,” Strachan said, adding:

We had to be much smarter about our content so that users would not only find us but also choose to read our post over the other 10 stories reporting on the same subject that day. Our news was important, but posting it was not so important if no one saw it.

To understand why their digital news content wasn’t attracting the audiences they had hoped for, they turned to their web analytics services. They found that readers weren’t coming to their stories by the station’s homepage but rather via search and social media. They then turned to their real-time, social media analytics service, Chartbeat, to analyse comments and how readers were sharing stories on social media.

They started to see patterns including themes, ideas and characteristics of the stories that online audiences responded to. Sadly, the stories that found success were a small part of the content they were initially producing.

They noted these commonalities and created what they called a “web rockstar checklist”, which they posted in every reporter’s cubicle. Here are the criteria they found helped determine whether a story would perform well and be relevant to their online audiences:

• Is it timely? (Are we ahead of others?)
• Are you adding something NEW to a known story?
• Does it have a unique angle or perspective?
• Does it ask users to take action or express an opinion?
• Is it shareable? (Would YOU share it?)
• Does it celebrate an idea, person or place?

They continue to evolve the strategy, and they now have a checklist to help them decide whether to add extra digital features to their radio packages. They have also developed a checklist for when and how to enhance their radio content online, so be sure to read the original article. The results are impressive with visits are up 101 percent, page views are up 63 percent and unique visitors are up 149 percent.

What is your strategy for using your precious editorial resources? How do you decide whether or not to create additional digital features? If you don’t have a strategy for the digital content you produce or how to digitally add to existing content, you’ll want to follow KPLU’s lead and dive deep into your analytics first to help you write your own “web rockstar checklist”.