strategies to improve digital outreach & increase audience engagement michele givens, publisher...
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Strategies to Improve Digital Outreach & Increase Audience Engagement
Michele Givens, Publisher & General ManagerEditorial Projects in Education, [email protected]
Today, we’ll cover
Context for our work to expand audience & increase engagement using analytics
Pilot partnership between reporter & analytics team
Scaling work via Analytics Accelerator
1
2
3
Today, we’ll cover
Context for our work to expand audience & increase engagement using analytics
Pilot partnership between reporter & analytics team
Scaling work via Analytics Accelerator
1
2
3
We’re a media organization
• Legacy B-to-B non-profit newspaper publisher
• 15+ years of cultural change in shift to digital
• Multi-platform (web, live & virtual events, broadcast, print)
• 60%+ revenue digital
• Web business model: paid content (metered model) & advertising
Today, we’ll cover
Context for our work to expand audience & increase engagement using analytics
Pilot partnership between reporter & analytics team
Scaling work via Analytics Accelerator
1
2
3
Pilot partnershipAnalytics team partnered with reporter who writes
for Digital Education news blog
Developed 5 KPIs
1. PVs (desktop & mobile)
2. Registrations3. Visits4. Twitter visits5. Google visits
Goal: Use analytics data to
improve the performance of his blog posts
+42% +47%Page Views Registrations
Resultsof reporter & analytics team pilot partnership
Improvements to other KPIs
Visits Twitter Visits Google Visits Mobile Phone PV's
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
+42%+35% +35%
+52%
Benchmarking resultsto our similar blogs
Digital Education Blog A Blog B Blog C Blog D
Page Views +42% -18% -16% -29% -57%
Visits +42% -19% -14% -28% -57%
Twitter Visits +35% -29% -29% -30% -55%
Google Visits +35% -4% +1% +41% -3%
Registrations +47% -20% -9% -21% -55%
Mobile Phone PV’s +52% -2% -27% -43% -62%
.
What we did: Content Strategies
• Publish more consistently
• Make more-informed decisions about what to cover
• Offer incremental coverage & clustered content on big stories
• Sprinkle in some fun
• Use more photos
• Make better use of archives
• Better leverage evergreen content
What we did: Back-end & SEO Strategies• Write search engine-friendly headlines &
URLs
• Highlight related stories
• Update blog categories
• Follow best practices on hyperlinking, keywording & tagging
• Highlight special reports, explainers, key stories
• Coordinate with social strategy
This work wasn’t top down, it was bottom up.
I’d ignored a lot of emails (on SEO, etc.), but then I got data about my own work and I was coached on strategies I could use today. (My editor) also gave me flexibility and encouragement to experiment.” Ben HeroldEducation Week Staff Writer, at long-range editorial planning meeting
Today, we’ll cover
Context for our work to expand audience & increase engagement using analytics
Pilot partnership between reporter & analytics team
Scaling work via Analytics Accelerator
1
2
3
Analytics Accelerator
Objectives:• Replicate & scale success of Digital Education pilot partnership• Increase audience, engagement around other news blogs • Build newsroom analytics capacity, skills & understanding of
how reporters can grow audience, increase engagement with their work
What it is: Rotating team of 1-2 reporters who
individually partner with analytics team for 3
months
Analytics Accelerator
Early results:
In early 2015, 2 reporters, each with their own
blog, entered the Accelerator
Work led to combined growth of 77% in page
views and 27% in registrations
Next 2 reporters now in the Analytics
Accelerator; other reporters waiting in line
Some Takeaways
Unique approach needed to convince journalists that analytics could benefit their work & serve audience
Personalized, small-scale approach good first step
Most powerful way to encourage adoption? Word-of-mouth
Building audience and engagement requires
• cross-organization, multi-pronged approach
• consistent, diligent focus on best practices
