At the recent Knight Digital Media Center Social Media Leadership Seminar, University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communications faculty member Dana Chinn gave a talk in which she emphasized how important it is for news outlets to measure online engagement.
Although her talk focused on social media metrics, it has broader implications that point to the kinds of data news organizations should keep their eyes on.
In terms of Web site analytics, Chinn said that numbers alone (straight tallies, such as unique visitors or time spent on site) are not very useful for measuring engagement. Ratios can tell you much more.
The three key ratios Chinn recommended monitoring in your Web analytics, as a start, are:
- Page views per visit
- Visits per unique visitor
- Home page bounce rate (percentage of home page visitors who never go beyond the home page)
This resonated with me because so many sites — including news sites — still focus on building “site traffic,” which they define mainly by total unique visitors or average time spent on site. Sometimes this is because of how advertising is priced and sold on the site, but more often it seems to me that these sites aren’t thinking as clearly and strategically about engagement as they should be.
Ultimately, engagement will do far more to achieve news sites’ goals, strengthen community connections and diversify revenue streams than “traffic” ever will.
In addition, you can also measure actions people take in response to your online offerings. Here are a few examples:
- Non-spam comments left on stories or posts
- Links to your content shared via social media
- @ replies or retweets on Twitter
- Percentage of videos played or slideshows viewed (how far did they get?)
- Facebook fans/friends, or content added (wall posts, comments, photos, etc.)
- Event signups or buzz (including event hashtags)
