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.'"

 

Wasting time

Time spent on a site or a visit ranks right up there with total page views and monthly unique visitors as widely quoted metrics masking as indicators of success for news organizations.

No, it's not a crime to misuse a metric, but isn't a shame to waste your time on something that's not absolutely essential to your site's success? 

Plus, the way that time spent is calculated is flawed.  All web metrics are flawed somewhat, but time spent is really misleading.

More on the ugly methodology later - let's tackle time spent's uselessness first.  In other words, if the methodology were acceptable would time spent still be a key performance indicator?

Advertisers have always made decisions based on the level of engagement a news org's audiences have with its brand and content.  But both content and the ways people use and interact with content are different - and thus the way engagement is measured is different, too. 

In the past, time spent was an important measure of engagement for news orgs and advertisers.  People spent whole chunks of time with one medium or another.  Readership surveys measured time spent per day or per week.

Because these were surveys, time spent was based on self-reported information.  It was what people said they did vs. what they actually did.

But it didn't matter whether what people said matched with what they did.  What mattered was how engaged people felt.  People who reported they spent an hour a day with Monday's newspaper but actually only spent twenty minutes believed they spent a large chunk of time and attention with a news org.

In stark contrast, web advertising decisions depend on knowing actual behavior as reported via rows upon rows of numbers ruthlessly pouring out every second.   Among many other things, advertisers track the number of times their ads come up and are clicked upon. Sites and audiences are more niche and are highly segmented.   The algorithms for and definitions of "engagement" vary for every site and every company.  

Time spent just isn't a good indicator of engagement.  Someone who spends five minutes a day on a site, goes to five different stories each visit and adds comments twice a week is clearly more engaged than someone who comes onto a site for 30 minutes a week and clicks idly on a few pages while talking on the phone.    

How many times have you spent 30 minutes or so on a site, flipping and flapping through what seems like a million page views in a fruitless attempt to find something?  Maybe you spent 30 minutes in such a visit once - and never went back.

A news org's success in the long-term will be based not on how much time people spend on a site but what they do once they're there.

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How Time Spent on a Site is Calculated

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. 

Black + white = grey

Which of these things are not like the others?

a.    Black vs. white
b.    Mass vs. niche
c.    News vs. advertising
d.    Site-centric vs. person-centric
                   OR    
       Census server vs. audience panel data
e.    None of the above (all are alike)  

The answer is (d).  Really?

When I plunged into the huge world that is web analytics, I decided to focus on site/server-centric or census analytics, or the data you get from software like Google Analytics or Omniture.

After all, site-centric data gives you what people actually did.  The comScore or Nielsen data comes from panels of people reporting what they said they did. 

It makes sense that there are two different types of data, because there are two different needs:  Advertising needs overall site data that gives some demographic information and allows competitive comparisons, but the newsroom needs data that tracks traffic for every story in every section (otherwise known as "excruciating detail").

Here's the smug little chart I've been using in presentations.  (It got a nice comment from someone on Slideshare:  "The best way I've seen yet to describe the fundamentals of web data structures!")

Things might not be so left-side vs. right-side now.  comScore and other panel vendors claim they're now combining the best of both.  Josh Chasin of comScore asserts in Online Metrics Insider that its hybrid methodology is "helping to resolve what once seemed to be irreconcilable differences between two ways of counting....But this convergence doesn't mean there isn't still room for two distinct metrics disciplines....The function and purpose of these two data streams remains separate, and both are essential....panel data can make census server data better, and...server data can make panel data better." 

I think I'll still focus on census server data.  It's too overwhelming to go deep into the panel side when there's still so much to learn from the census side. 

However, I'll start following the evolution of hybrid measurement systems.  More data often just leads to more "so what" reports.  But we might be on our way to a better understanding of our audiences, which both the newsroom and the business sides desperately need.

A world record - so what?

I guess I'm proud to say that I contributed one of the reported 45-million-plus views to the Evian Roller Babies video ad, which is touted by the Guinness Book of World Records as "the most viewed online advertisement in history."  

I can't find any verification from Guinness itself on the web.  OK, I didn't look that hard, and I didn't contact Guinness.  I didn't think it was worth much effort because this record - like so many other Guinness records -  is one of those "so what" numbers - mildly amusing, sort of astounding, and utterly useless.

Mashable's Ben Parr, saying that "millions" remembered and "actively discussed" this "critically acclaimed" ad,  thinks that "any brand will take those numbers."

If I were Evian, the only numbers I would take are those in dollars, euros, yen, pounds and pesos and the like.  I agree with David Berkowitz in Social Media Insider:  "I have yet to see any coverage of the record that mentions Evian's market share or any other success metric from the brand's perspective. Maybe a needle moved, maybe nothing happened, but it's hardly a clear-cut case that a viral ad means it's successful."

It's a highly watchable, entertaining video, but it hardly embeds "Evian" in my brain or makes me want to buy it.  What do roller-skating babies have to do with mineral water?  The babies don't even drink Evian in the video - they just skate around the bottles.  I guess the Evian's tag at the end, "Live Young," ties it all together.

 And of course there are quibbles how video ads are counted, and how the 45-million figure came about.  Apparently it was a combination of YouTube, Nielsen, Ad Age and Visual Measures.  Because the video was embedded in many places, you can't just look at the number of views on YouTube, which right now is showing about 11 million views. 

Whatever.  It really doesn't matter.

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. 

Count "active" users, not totals

It's tempting to measure success by the total number of unique visitors.  Total UVs, total registered users, total paid subscribers - they are all nice, round numbers bandied and crowed about in the newsroom and in the media, just like circulation.

Circulation (or readership) and the circulation penetration (the percent of the households reached) are the correct success metrics for mass media print, partly because they're drivers behind advertising decisions. 

Online is a niche, interactive medium.  It's far more important to measure the number of active users - however you define "active" - and what those active users did or didn't do.

As Neil Mason in ClickZ writes, measuring only total users is "a case of be careful what you measure, because what you measure is what you get. 

"Because the business was focused on measuring registrations, the drive was to generate as many registered users as possible, irrespective of the quality of those registrations and whether they were likely to actually do anything valuable on the site."

Totals do no harm.  But they don't tell you what you need to retain your audiences and attract new ones. 

Seattle's "resurgent" audiences

I'm not convinced that the Seattle Times' 30 percent increase in print circulation, as reported by the New York Times, is cause for much optimism.

First, the increase comes from former Post-Intelligencer subscribers.  These are dyed-in-the-wool newspaper people.  We love them, but they are not new audiences.

Secondly, increases in advertising revenue no longer neatly correlate with print circulation increases.  Even when the economy picks up, I doubt that The Times will get a substantial ad revenue bump from either rate increases or new advertisers. 

Advertisers are reaching their customers in new ways; the old business models just don't apply.  The costs of providing the print edition - newsprint, ink, delivery - for 365 days a year to 30 percent more subscribers aren't covered by subscription revenue, and are now unlikely to be covered by advertising. 

The New York Times article points out that SeattlePI.com seems to have "kept most of the reader traffic it had as a newspaper site."  Also, past Seattle Times and P-I staffers have started a number of local news sites.

The audiences for news in Seattle haven't grown.  They've just shifted, from print P-I to print Seattle Times, and, increasingly, from print to online.

Traffic spikes aren't always good news

Here's a good point about interpreting high traffic spikes.  It's from Google's Brett Crosby, as reported by Online Media Daily.

If you get a sudden bump in visits due to a breaking news event, don't celebrate until you look at the time of day of the spikes, the timing of your competitor's posts, and your bounce rates. 

Your competitor might have posted before you did.  And if your competitor had better coverage, your bounce rate would probably reflect it. 

Then, use attitudinal research to gauge whether the traffic spikes led to building audiences in the long run.  For example, you can survey people to see whether they think your site "always has the latest news about [a topic] before anyone else."  

Be sure to include a healthy sample of non-users and light users in your surveys.  It will be more time-consuming and expensive - and perhaps painful.  But listening only to your current users through online pop-up surveys won't give you the insight you need to grow online audiences.