Category: Ratios

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.”

Prevention 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.”

Page views rpt 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.

Page views per visit “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.'”

 

 

Comparing unique visitors in political blog sites

David Kaplan of PaidContent.org compared the number of unique visitors in April in political blog sites such as Huffington Post and The Drudge Report and found that “left-leaning” sites had 6.4 million; “right-leaning,” 4.8 million; and “neutral/non-partisan,” 1.3 million.

This is a fun comparison, but here are a few web-analytics-nerd thoughts for newsrooms who are competing for these audiences.

  • The left didn’t necessarily “win.” To really gauge the relative strength or engagement of the audiences, you should look at ratios like number of visits per UV, number of page views per visit, and bounce rate.
  • The left’s 6.4 million UVs is dominated by HuffPo’s 5.6 million.  The right’s 4.8 million was more distributed among The Drudge Report, Free Republic, World Net Daily and others.  I’d like to know how many UVs the sites shared – and how many went to only left sites, only right sites, and only neutral or nonpartisan sites.
  • Also, how many went to both left and right, or to all three?  How many who categorized themselves as left-leaning went to right sites?  Right-leaning to left, and so on?  (Note:  A lot of this data will send you into analysis paralysis, but there could be some actionable info here.)
  • In the minds of your audiences, is your site categorized as  conservative/right, liberal/left or neutral/nonpartisan?   Ideally, you should measure the differences in perception between news stories and editorials.
  • Are your pages coded and/or is your site set up to track all “political” content, whether it’s on the home page or the officially named “Politics” section?