Summary

ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS IS THE KEY TO FINDING INSIGHTS FROM WEB analytics tools such as Google Analytics. There’s a lot of data, but every news organization — and every department within an organization — will have different questions.

This guide covered some of the basic site metrics and approaches that can
address a variety of questions:

  • Basic site metrics: Users, sessions, pageviews, bounce rate
  • Looking at data by day versus. data by week
  • Segmenting by geography and/or traffic source or channel (e.g., organic search, direct, referring sites and links from social media)
  • Comparing the basic metrics of one story versus another 

Taking Measurement To The Next Level

FUTURE PUBLICATIONS WILL EXPLORE METRICS THAT ANSWER QUESTIONS SUCH as:

Did users actually read a story? 

If someone spends a lot of time on a site does it mean that the content and/or the site is more valuable to them? What are the differences between the standard time measures in Google Analytics versus others used by companies such as Chartbeat?   

How often did someone visit? What do regular readers do on the site versus one-time visitors? 

What are the different ways stories are shared on social media? Does sharing differ by story type and/or topic? 

Any suggestions for future topics? We would love to hear from you! Please send your questions and comments to us at media.impact@usc.edu.