News Numbers

An ounce of Prevention

I exercise regularly and don't smoke, but I avoid reading Prevention.com. It's just too annoying to be reminded of all of the other "smart ways to live well."  When I see "by the editors of Prevention.com," I have this picture in my mind of a bunch of really healthy people popping out cheerful stories like "5 Vitamins Your Bones Love" and "10 Reasons You're Always Exhausted." 

Now I have another (annoying) vision, thanks to MinOnline's story about how well Prevention is using web analytics.  Of course a staff that is so pragmatic and probably always mentally alert would resist "going for the cheap link grab and traffic spike" - the junk food of web analytics.

I haven't been sleeping well because I think too much (the top reason people don't get enough sleep and are therefore exhausted), so I'll just plop in these two paragraphs verbatim from Steve Smith's MinOnline story, "At the Building Prevention.Com, Only The Abs Are Flat."

Prevention stays "on its own brand message and [courts] the kinds of audiences that it and its advertisers really want. 'We got back to engaging with our customer in the ways we knew they wanted us to engage with them,' says [vp/digital Bill] Stump. Fishing for any and all eyeballs and courting simple traffic spikes in the search-driven universe doesn’t pay off in the end. 'You get waves of traffic, but the tide goes back out and what are you left with?' Instead, by keeping to the needs of the 'core customer' in everything that goes out to syndication or into the e-mail newsletters, prevention.com is courting the people who tend to stay.

"Now, each big wave raises the sea level for all of prevention.com’s metrics, says Stump. In the last two years, overall page views climbed 60%. In the last year, the number of visits per user went up 12%. But it is the engagement metrics of which Stump is proudest. 'The number that warms my heart,' he says, 'is page views per visitor that are up 49%.' That means the new visitors are sticking with the site and drilling much deeper than they ever have before. 'In general, advertisers want an engaged audience. They want the metrics that show that people value your brand and come to you for something that is unique. We own natural health and fitness and beauty. We are the authentic voice.'"

 

AOL analytics

In the late 1990s, "America Online" was the shiny new company everyone watched, feared and tried to copy.  Just "AOL" now, it's hardly as fresh or inspiring. With its new CEO, logos and use of web analytics to select the stories it covers and evaluating its reporters, has AOL once again become a news organization to watch?

AOL's announcement that it will employ "judicious use of Web-analytics software" sparked the expected flutter of coverage.  It's admitted to using data to inform (dictate?) news decisions, so you could be led to believe that AOL is adopting a true audience-based approach.  However, after reading the Feb. 22 story in BusinessWeek and the reactions gathered by Media Post News, it seems like AOL is still using a traditional advertising-based mass media strategy.  It's still trying to be all things to all people.  It's just using web analytics to decide what those things are.

"Audience growth and audience engagement have to be the things that we judge the most off of our journalist investments," AOL CEO Tim Armstrong is quoted as saying.  So far, so good. 

Armstrong also said that "brand ads should be a lot bigger on the Internet today," talking about how online advertising revenue should pick up.  But there was no mention about AOL's own brand strategy, something that would answer the question of "What is AOL?" for audiences and advertisers once and for all.  On which niches will it focus?  How much of its content will be unique and compelling enough to those niche audiences so that they'll come back regularly?

Patricia Handschiegel, who blogs as Daily Patricia, sums it nicely:

"The right approach to the content business is to KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE, or the people that come to your site, and create a product for THEM. AOL’s approach is clearly not centered on this....it’ll drive up page views and therefore, revenue but that’s not likely to last as the industry becomes more analytics savvy. Today, a million uniques with zero session times, high bounce rate and no repeat visitors isn’t seen as a sign of a lack of audience but in the not too distant future it will."

I haven't researched AOL myself, so I don't know if all of the details in the BusinessWeek and Media Post News stories really reflect what AOL is doing.  So I'll just note some some things news orgs should think about when using web analytics to inform news decisions and evaluate journalists.     

• Evaluating success (either a site's or a journalist's) by total page views doesn't work. A large number of page views may just indicate visitors got there by mistake or clicked around trying to find something.   Plus, dynamic content (Flash, etc.) will not be counted as page views. Page views can be a useful metric, but only when combined with other metrics - such as ratios - that give context. 

• Engagement can't be determined by web traffic or behavioral data alone.  Attitudinal research is essential to find out why or why don't people come to a site regularly, what they want and what they're not finding. 

• If journalists are going to be held accountable for web traffic and audience engagement will they also have control over the factors that drive traffic, such as design, navigation and marketing? Or will they just submit their stories and hope for the best?

• "AOL is even considering sharing a portion of quarterly profits with staffers whose work fetches the most page views."  BusinessWeek

How will traffic goals be set?  If journalists will be rewarded for generating "traffic" (however it's defined), will they be fired if they don't? Will the benchmarks or starting points - and the time journalists have to reach the required traffic levels - be based on whether a topic is already established or whether it's one a news org wants to nurture and grow because the topic is essential to achieving its strategy?

• "Tacked to the newsroom walls in AOL's downtown Manhattan headquarters are pages and pages of Web traffic data." BusinessWeek
  
  Uh, this would cause even me to shut down.  It's definitely not "judicious use of Web-analytics software."  Does AOL have a few key performance indicators that everyone understands and on which they can focus as a team?
  
  Software and reports don't make decisions; people do. Successful use of web analytics depends on the decision-makers understanding and using the information correctly.  If news orgs believe the success of their websites depends on being truly audience-focused then they must also ensure the analytical resources and processes are there as well.  

AOL may stumble again but at least it's trying something different.  I look forward to learning from AOL whether it succeeds or fails. 

Video metrics for everyone!

YouTube's become a verb and a household name, but I'll always see it as an organization that's brought metrics into the lives of the common people (those who have broadband Internet, anyway).  The "Most Popular" and "Featured Videos" are seen worldwide, sometimes garnering millions of views.  "Hey, did you see...." is usually accompanied by something like "...and it has x million views on YouTube!"

Number of views is great for little else other than bragging rights.  It's one of the  "famous" metrics (web analytics guru Avinash Kaushik's term) that "are staring you in the face when you crack open any analytics tool" but "barely contain any insight."

Yep, for anyone in the content business, number of views is right up there with hall of famers number of page views and monthly unique visitors.  

YouTube has pushed all of its account holders  - no matter how amateur - to use meaningful metrics. In March 2008 it launched Insight, its "video analytics tool for all users," along with some almost-preachy instructions on how to use metrics to get more people to watch your videos and, of course, come more often to YouTube.

The Insight tool allows you to track "community engagements" (there's that word again) in terms of ratings, comments, and favorites.   YouTube doesn't want you to settle for people just watching your video.  People have to show, in a measurable way, that they not only watched it but also reacted to it. 

At the very least people should give a star rating (one is bad, five is good).  Rating is easy, quick and anonymous.  Tagging a video as a favorite is the next rung.  And if they're really engaged, they'll leave comments. 

But, as anyone who's ever spent any time at all on YouTube knows, many comments are spam, obscene and irrelevant - just noise.  But the value of social media metrics is in looking beyond what James Kobelius in Information Management points out is an "often low and laughable" signal-to-noise ratio. 

Kobelius notes that "if you crawl, correlate, categorize, mine, and explore it with the right tools....[this unstructured information] can yield unexpected insights....The intelligence value of any individual tweet [or comment] in isolation is negligible....Intelligence emerges from the aggregate."

If you can stomach a few obscenities, look at this thought in Encyclopaedia Dramatica about YouTube view fraud and how the ratio of VPC, or views per comment, "is the most accurate way to determine if anyone" cares.  "A high VPC usually means view fraud has been committed." 

The example in ED shows that a video with 136,097 views and 3,529 comments has a VPC of 38.7, a low number that indicates this is a video "that people actually find funny."  The video with 296,413 views, 541 comments and thus a VPC of 547.9 is probably something nobody really cares about.

I calculated some VPCs from this week's "Most Popular" videos and came up with some numbers that I don't know what to do with yet.  To see if VPC can be used as a key performance indicator, I'll need to calculate VPCs and crawl through the cacophony of a variety of news videos.  VPC may never be  "famous," but it might be insightful. 

Always a bridesmaid, never a bride?

It's almost Valentine's Day, so let's muse again about what it means to be "engaged."  In this day of figuring out whether people will pay for web news, defining success by measuring engagement is more important than ever. 

It doesn't matter whether you love or hate a news organization if you're engaged with it - as demonstrated by behaviors such as going to the site frequently, contributing content, e-mailing a story, rating a video or paying a monthly subscription fee.

Many worthy people have come up with all kinds of complicated mathematical formulas for measuring and tracking engagement.  Nothing's stuck.  In other words, just because a number was produced ("Disaster!  Our engagement rating was 14 last month but our goal was 19!") doesn't mean site traffic and other key performance indicators move in conjunction with it.  A metric is just a number if it doesn't move up or down as a result of some action or mistake on your part. 

Although measuring engagement still eludes us, I hope news orgs will still adopt an engagement philosophy and an audience-focused culture that will guide the decisions that do lead to measurable results.

A philosophy still needs some definition.  I like this quote from Dave Smith, CEO of Mediasmith, a digital advertising agency.  The interview is in "Digital Engagement," a book by Leland Harden and Bob Heyman.

"Engagement is an unconscious tick of the mind that causes you to think differently about and notice a brand differently in the future."

In the same interview Smith also quotes Erwin Ephron, perhaps the "founder of modern media planning," as saying that "Media engagement and advertising engagement are very different things....Historically, media are measured by audience delivery.  Advertising is measured by response.  Engagement-based ratings would measure media by response."

In other words, it's not enough now just to put content out there and hope your audiences will like it.  Traditional audience research that produces various numbers for loyalty and satisfaction isn't enough either.  Audiences can't just tell you how they feel.  They have to show you.      

A Tablet Day thought

All the talk this week about Apple's new tablet has me picking up my Amazon Kindle and hugging it.  After all, it's real, it's here, and it didn't cost $1,000. 

I really love my Kindle, but the metrics side of me cringes every time I read an article from the Los Angeles Times, New York Times or New Yorker subscriptions that appear silently - magically - every day or every week and are always at my fingertips.  

News orgs complain about the pennies they get from each Kindle sub, but that's the least of their problems in the long run.  The bigger problem is that they can't track how many subscribers click on an issue, when they do it and what stories they read, if at all.   

This is just like the good old days!  A newspaper pumps out a seven-day home-delivered product and collects a few subscriber dollars so it can say it has a paying audience.  It then sells some ads based on a mass media theory (otherwise known as "spray and pray").   In other words, it has no idea of what works for subscribers.

Web sites give news orgs detailed information about what engages audiences.  The info is sometimes painful ("What?  No one's reading my story?"), but it's essential for survival today.  

For a reader, Kindles and tablets are great. What's great for readers should be great for news orgs, too, but only if they know why. 

Pop-up videos make government engaging

Today I watched over seven minutes - from beginning to end - of The Texas Tribune's Nov. 9 news video coverage of Kay Bailey Hutchison's gubernatorial campaign stump speech.  

The video, one of The Tribune's "Stump Interrupted" series, uses pop-up bubbles and illustrations to add context and value to a normally boring but important story.  The pop-ups are entertaining without being silly. 

When KBH is saying, "Our taxes have gone up too much in the last ten years," the pop-up points out that "But...since 2003, Texas still had the 14th lowest per capita tax increase in the country."

KBH: "I think that we are seeing too much power in one person, the power of appointment."

Pop-ups:  A large hand illustrating someone being appointed glides in from the left, followed by the fact that "Governor [Rick] Perry has made about 5,530 appointments since first taking office."

On the site, people can also see the sources The Tribune used for the pop-ups.

The metrics angle:  Counting how many times a video was viewed doesn't give any info on whether the viewer was engaged.  The more relevant measure is how much of the video was viewed, and whether the video was viewed from beginning to end.

I would also look at video metrics by topic, and set goals accordingly.  I would imagine (no, really?) that the number of complete views of a Dallas Cowboys video is usually much higher than that of anything having to do with politics, even in Texas.

The Texas Tribune got California-born-and-bred me to watch a KBH video from beginning to end.  I'm now more interested in both Texas politics and in how The Tribune covers it. Imagine how engaged a Texas resident who has a stake in this would be.

Actually, The Tribune doesn't have to completely guess at this.  In addition to commenting and e-mailing the story, people can rate a story as a "must read." 

I'm really intrigued about what The Tribune will do next.  It's a nonprofit news org that, according to WebNewser, didn't cover the Fort Hood shootings because it's "dedicated to covering 'the politics and policy of Texas state government.'" 

I love this focus on identifying a niche audience and topic, and sticking to serving the needs of that audience.  WebNewser reported that editor Matt Stiles said that the Fort Hood story just "wasn't our story.  Should we have jut been one more news organization rushing to Fort Hood?  I don't think so."

The Tribune's a great example of a truly audience-focused news organization with unique and compelling content that provides value.  Despite being staffed by "newspaper refugees," it's refreshingly not content-focused.  It doesn't build the content first and then hope the audience will come.    

Hank Wasiak: "From Mad Man to Twitteraholic"

As he said himself, Hank Wasiak is not Don Draper, but his ten minutes were the highlight for me at the 140 Characters Conference in LA last week. 

Wasiak, co-founder of The Concept Farm, said that social media, as a "killer app," has brought about a fundamental change in the way we do business and in the metrics that define success.  He said companies must have a "mindset makeover" and a "people strategy" to survive. 

He was talking about marketing and advertising, but all I could think about was how everything he said applies to news organizations, too.

Oh, and he also said that the way we're teaching is completely outdated.  I agree...I'm going to see if I can take his marketing and advertising class at the USC Marshall School of Business in the spring.

140 characters of engagement

I've just gotten back from the 140 Characters Conference in LA where the message, loud and clear and 10 minutes per speaker at a time, was that it's the quality of your followers that matters, not the quantity. 

More reinforcement:  Twitter's new list function is already prompting "mass unfollowings" (thanks to Mary McKinnon/@bestwebstrategy for this link). 

The first #140conf in New York in June was all about the unique communities that Twitter inspired.  The dominant sponsor was Hootsuite, personified by a large owl walking around hugging people.  Ann Curry duked it out with Rick Sanchez.  Wyclef Jean showed up, late of course, but illustrating the importance of authencity.  Attendees bonded over the duct-taped power outlets.   

Five months later, it appears that Twitter has...matured.  The speakers in LA weren't giddy.  The lead sponsor was Kodak, represented by CMO Jeffrey Hayzlett, a glossy brochure touting Kodak's "convergence media tactics" and coupons for 15 percent off Kodak products. You can't have either duct tape or power outlets in the Kodak Theatre (where the Academy Awards are held) so the crowd was often bigger in the lobby than in the auditorium.

I still had fun at #140conf LA - it is Twitter, after all - but the biz talk was pervasive:  strategy, goals, objectives, processes, systems, results, the four Ps and the four Es, one of which was, of course, engagement.

Niche audience = $10 million

"...Mail.com Media Corporation...purchased Deadline Hollywood Daily for upward of ten million dollars....It is an ambitious plan for a site that attracts a few hundred thousand unique visitors per month - but then many in that group check the site ten times a day."  "Call Me," by Tad Friend, The New Yorker, Oct. 12, 2009 

This is a telling statement, despite mixing up the use of "monthly unique visitors" with "daily unique visitors." 

It doesn't matter how many millions of "monthly unique visitors" a news site has.  The value of a site is based on the ratio of visits per weekly or daily unique visitor.  

It also matters who those unique visitors are.  Deadline Hollywood Daily is a must-read, not just for the hangers-on in the "Industry" but for studio and agency executives at the highest levels.

Nikki Finke, the diva extraordinaire without whom DHD would be worth nearly nothing, posts 24/7, multiple times a day.  So, the number of visits per daily unique visitor is the more appropriate metric.  The number of monthly unique visitors is a "so what" number - useless.

E-mail newsletter benchmarks

Here are some benchmarks to use as a guide when setting KPI goals for e-mail newsletters or alerts.  The open rate and the bounce rates are the most important.

The benchmarks come from a study by a e-mail vendor featured in an eMarketer story.

Metric	Low	High
Open rate	20%	31%
Click rate	4%	7%
Soft bounce rate	.1%	2%
Hard bounce rate	.3%	3%
Unsubscribe rate	.4%	.5%

The open rate is the most important; the total number of subscribers much less so.  You're not engaging your audiences if you're pushing e-mails to them but they're deleting them without even looking at them. 

If the content in your newsletter is pretty complete in itself (e.g., breaking news alerts, news briefs), your click-through rate will be low.  You might not even want to monitor it.  

Not all e-mail newsletters should relentlessly focus on pushing traffic to sites.  Segment your audiences and ask each segment how they would most like to get your content.  Perhaps an audience largely gets its e-mails via a smartphone, and don't want to link to a site. 

A little bit of engagement - subscribing to and regularly reading your e-mails - is better than none at all.

Hard bounce:  The number of e-mails returned due to invalid e-mail addresses or spam filters.

Soft bounce:  The number of e-mails returned due to temporary reasons such as inboxes being too full or the subscribers' e-mail services being down.