Web analytics software is fantastic at collecting a ton of data about user traffic and usage patterns. It also can make it amazingly easy to keep this rich data trapped and accessible to the chosen few, usually senior peeps in an organization. It’s not necessarily done on purpose, alot of the advanced reporting and automatic emailing of reports can be a pain in the ass to set up. And when there are dozens of job roles and hundreds of metrics, who is going to step up and customize all these reports? I am guilty of it myself, I get my web stats hit and then walk.
But if you are a news organization with a large staff of reporters and content producers, providing detailed metrics to each and every one of them about every content item they produce could provide valuable feedback to shape future content production efforts.
Patrick Thornton has a nice blog post raising some of these issues Using Web Analytics To Improve Content. The main theme is that if you have this information available and it does not cost anything but time to make it available to every staff member, then why not do it.
At the most basic level, each article has page views, page visits and time spent on page. Any reporter or content producer could use these numbers as a starting point to try and identify patterns in what content is popular and maybe come to some conclusion as to why. I will call these basic “on-site consumption metrics”.
I think where things get really interesting is when you push to the next level of metrics which I will call “Content Metrics” for news professionals. Content metrics depend on sophisticated software to analyze every content item produced by a news organization and then deliver stats, graphs and trends about that content to anyone interested.
Imagine being able to capture, store and analyze patterns with letters, words, paragraphs, fonts, spacing, topics, time published, location published etc… to quantify the precise profile of popular content.
We are launching an on-demand publishing intelligence service called publishflow™ in the fall of 2008 that will provide “Content Metrics” about every content item produced by the worlds largest media brands including newspapers, magazines, tv stations and pure online properties. We are hoping that this service used in tandem with traditional web analytics software will provide a near complete metrics view of the content production and consumption cycle for every content item published on the web.
I will post when the beta is about to unfold, but until then you can get some more information on publishflow™ here.
