Interactive News Editing and

ProductionThursday, March 5

• Web metrics and analytics

• Document publishing

• CSS/HTML5 bug hunt

Today’s agenda

Web metrics and analytics

Sorry I have to do this to you ...

#thedress

26 million visits in a single day for Buzzfeed.

It’s an unparalleled success born in a culture of

technology built that embraces using metrics to

identify trends and capture audience.

N.Y. Business Journal: http://bit.ly/1aM9PeA

Medium: http://bit.ly/17T1vrI

Content (does it make you smarter, teach you something, emotional connection)

Author

Availability/virality

Technology

Audience demand for that information

Brand loyalty/trust

Placement

Image

Headline clickability

Peer influence

What creates a pageview?

“Each of these components might be used to

make better editorial choices — such as

increasing promotion of an important story,

choosing what to report on next, or evaluating

whether a story really changed anything. But it

can be hard to disentangle the factors. The

number of times a story is viewed is a complex,

mixed signal.”

More: http://bit.ly/1M7Hs6h

What opportunity does a pageview create?

We’ll discuss an overview of today’s digital

measurement landscape, the terminology and

tools used, and how they can help to grow

audience.

Metrics 101

Metrics is quantitative data about user activity.

Analytics is analyzing that data for actionable

interpretation.

“Metrics is to accounting as analytics is to

finance”

Metrics = information

Analytics = strategic analysis

Metrics 101

• Google Analytics

• Adobe Analytics (aka Omniture SiteCatalyst)

• Chartbeat

• Social (Simply Measured, Twitter Analytics,

Facebook Insights – the ones you know)

Tools

What's the difference?

• Google Analytics is free.

• Omniture is more powerful, often moreso

than necessary.

• Chartbeat measures real time behavior. Why

is that better?

Tools

Both good and bad ways, for both short-term

and long-term goals, according to the Reynolds

Journalism Institute’s Analyzing Analytics

report: http://bit.ly/1DXzU48

How are metrics used in a newsroom?

What are commonly watched metrics and what

do they mean:

• Pageviews: A pageview or page impression is

a request to load a single HTML file of an

Internet site.

• Visitors: The number of users on your

platform for a selected hour, day, week,

month, quarter, or year. Can also segment

new or returning.

The metrics glossary

• Unique Visitors: A UV refers to a visitor who

visits a site for the first time within a specified

time period (daily, monthly).

• Visits (Sessions in GA): A sequence of page

views in a sitting. The visits metric is

commonly used in reports that display the

number of user sessions within the selected

time period.

• Pageviews Per Visit: # of PVs during a

discrete visit.

The metrics glossary

• Average page depth: This metric is valuable

in determining how far within a visit your

audience reaches a given page.

• Time spent/average time spent: Metrics that

report on the amount of time visitors spend

on a page, site, or per visit.

• Designated Market Area (DMA): Attempts to

ID users from a Nielsen area.

The metrics glossary

• Traffic sources: Percentage of visits referred

by social media, organic search, or “direct”

(URL or bookmarked).

• Device type: Percentage of visits on desktop,

phones or tablets.

• Top sections

• Top content type: Segment content by type,

such as articles or photogalleries.

The metrics glossary

• Natural search keywords: What terms did

people search to get them to your content.

Google no longer shares this.

The metrics glossary

• Bounce rate: Percentage of users who go to

a page but do not interact with it.

Metrics and analytics 102

• Time of day/day of week, hourly by device: A

segmented report that aims to understand

when users are accessing your content and

via what device.

Metrics and analytics 102

• Total time reading (TTR): A measure of time

people spend on story pages that is used by

both Upworthy and Medium to estimate of

whether users are getting value out of their

content.

Metrics and analytics 102

• Engaged Time: Chartbeat’s measure of the

time your visitors actively spend with your

content. According to its research, “there’s a

strong correlation between visitors’

engagement and their propensity to return to

a website; visitors who read an article for

three minutes return twice as often as those

who read for one minute.”

• So, engaged time = loyal reader

Metrics and analytics 102

• Dark social: Many analytics programs identify

this traffic as coming “direct” or from typed-in

links or bookmarks. Coined by Alexis

Madrigal.

• According to new data on many media sites,

69% of social referrals came from dark social

while only 20% came from Facebook. But

dark social is mostly Facebook.

• Gigaom: http://bit.ly/1M97mbu

Metrics and analytics 102

• Total engagement: My blend of metrics,

combining PVs beyond the story, off-site

traffic sources, on-site page flow and

engaged time.

• Suggests the top content is deep (has a high

PPV and and keeps you engaged for longer

durations), is sticky (keeps you on site) and is

driven by social, search or other sites.

Metrics and analytics 102

Sorry, I can’t give you the keys.

• My dashboard

• A top page summary

• Election center in Google Analytics

Tours of Adobe and Google

• Chartbeat is real-time analytics software that

checks in every few seconds with your site’s

users to see where they are, what they’re

doing and how they got there. And because it

checks in every few seconds, it can

determine how long users are spending on

that content – engaged time.

• Chartbeat is two primary components:

Editorial Dashboard and the Heads Up

Display.

Tour of Chartbeat

Chartbeat HUD: Installed as an overlay on your

browser.

What does it do? Measures in real time how

users are interacting with the content on a

single page and ranks it against all content on

that page (numerically) and against historic

data for that position and specific times

(colors).

Tour of Chartbeat

What doesn’t it do? It doesn’t tell you the top

story on your site. It doesn’t take into

consideration other ways people could find

content on a site (search, social). Nor would it

track links that leave your core domain. It also

doesn’t contrast types of content – video,

premium, etc.

What’s it good for? Determining story play.

Determining a piece of content’s life cycle.

Testing and refining headlines or images.

Tour of Chartbeat

Myth 1: We read what we’ve clicked on

A stunning 55% spent fewer than 15 seconds

actively on a page. The stats get a little better if

you filter purely for article pages, but even then

1 in every 3 visitors spend less than 15

seconds reading articles they land on.

Metrics myths

Myth 2: We read what we share

Chartbeat research show that among articles it

tracked with social activity, there were only one

tweet and eight Facebook likes for every 100

visitors.

Metrics myths

Myth 3: Unique visitors are truly unique

If you visit a site on your phone, on your tablet,

on your work PC and on your Mac at home, GA

and AA data will show you as four unique

visitors.

Metrics myths

Myth 4: Engaged time is universal across

metrics programs

There’s a huge different in methodology

between a realtime metrics app like Chartbeat

and Omniture.

Let’s look at the Curt Schilling story …

Metrics myths

Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti: “I feel like what you

see in the industry now is people jumping

around and trying to find the God metric for

content. It’s all about shares or it’s all about

time spent or it’s all about pages or it’s all about

uniques. The problem is you can only optimize

one thing and you have to pick, otherwise all

you’re doing is making a bunch of compromises

if you try to optimize for multiple things.”

Why no metric is perfect

Peretti: “So you pick the one that matters and

maybe you have minimum thresholds for a few

others. The problem with that is that the natural

inclination, if one metric is seen as the

important, true metric … is to game it. And then

when you game it, you essentially are creating

a fake version of that metric.”

Why no metric is perfect

Peretti: “So pageviews are a metric of how

many stories people want to read—and then

you split the story in two. You essentially are

doubling your pages for that story, or not quite,

probably, because not everyone will click. But

you create pyrite pageviews.”

More on Medium: http://bit.ly/1BK4Gyf

Why no metric is perfect

• All the links above and …

• Medium: A mile wide, an inch deep:

http://bit.ly/1GmjfdJ

• Upworthy’s shift to TTR: http://u.pw/18Ssi8T

• Tony Haile on engagement minutes:

http://ti.me/1giECic

• Gawker says the traffic game is over:

http://bit.ly/1Gmjx4h

Good reading

• Google Analytics Academy:

http://bit.ly/1B9ohWI

On the class site are:

• My guide to Chartbeat

• Chartbeat guide to Traffic Sources and

Audience Behvaior

• Adobe Analytics reference guide

Good resources

• Team up with one other person.

• Download the file reports.zip from the class

sure and follow the instruction metrics-

workshop.docx. Answer those questions by

using the 20 Adobe Analytics reports in that

folder.

• How-to read reports reminder

Workshop I: Metrics scavenger hunt

Document publishing

• DocumentCloud is both a repository of

primary source documents to internal sharing

and a tool for publishing those documents.

• Scribd is just a tool for publishing not sharing.

• In our quest for transparency and

authenticity, we not only encourage but also

insist that these materials get published along

with the story.

DocumentCloud 101

• Is there a demand? Yes, a huge one. The

Ferguson report did better than the story it

was on.

• We’ve seen this behavior on major stories

like Bridgegate, Sandy Hook, court cases, etc

…

DocumentCloud 101

• Single responsive document: Ferguson report

• Single annotated document: FRA derailment

• Single annotated document: NIOSH

firefighter deaths report

• Document collection: Jesse Jackson Jr. case

file

Examples

• Supports many file types

• Embed a single document, single note or

series of documents

• Can edit a document, add/subtract/reorder

pages

• Annotate and redact documents

DocumentCloud features

• Download the file documents.zip. Upload the

file rick-perry-indictment.pdf into your

account.

• Follow the instructions in the file

documentcloud-workshop.docx.

Workshop II: Rick Perry

• Upload the file doj-report-into-ferguson-

police-department.pdf into your account.

• Process the document and make it live,

annotating at least 5 passages of your

choice.

• When you publish it, follow the responsive

instructions in the DocumentCloud primer on

the class site (documentcloud-primer.pdf).

Homework I: Ferguson police report

• To make DocumentCloud responsive. Set

embed to full page. Hide sidebar. Then, in the

embed code, add “responsive: true,” here …

sidebar: false, responsive: true, container:

“#DV-viewer-1376717-cia-report”.

• Only the NYT and Chicago Tribune are beta

testing this feature, so you’re all pretty cool.

Homework I: Ferguson police report

• There are at least 10 errors in the HTML and

CSS files of the final Drew Peterson

homepage.

• Download the file drew-peterson.zip and

follow the instructions in the file bughunt-

instructions.docx.

• This is an extra credit assignment.

Homework II: HTML5/CSS bug hunt

• Deadline: Tuesday, 11:59 p.m.

• Process and publish Ferguson police report

• Optional CSS/HTML5 bug hunt

Homework recap

• Tableau

• Photoshop

• Media trends

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