Tags containing: "engagement"

What makes a great headline, and why? How can headlines make the casual skimmer stop and read? While much has changed in media’s shift from print to digital, these fundamental questions haven’t. Editors and writers correctly describe headline writing as an art — but with all the technology out there, there is a scientific way to put evidence behind that art, and help publishers grow their engaged readership as a result.

Changing behaviors

Reading, scanning, skipping, sharing – our reading behaviors have changed dramatically in recent years. Chartbeat data shows that on average, only around half (55%) of readers who click through to content actually read what they land on.

The context of headline writing has changed as well. Media objectivity, which involves writing factually true and balanced content, is sometimes at odds with the goals of social media marketing, which values metrics like shares, likes and clicks. Increasing readers’ engagement with content can align objectivity and editorial integrity with the need to grow audience in a world where more than half of traffic to publisher sites is driven by platforms like Facebook.

However, publishers can support those better reading behaviors. Recent Chartbeat research shows that despite our changing reading and writing habits, there are scientific ways to improve the likelihood that something will get read.

The role of language and technology

In an analysis of around 100,000 headline tests and 250,000 individual headlines, we examined linguistic traits of successful and unsuccessful headlines and found that language really does matter.

What we see is that words like “what” and “where,” as well as numbers, quotations and superlatives (like best and worst) lead to more readership, whereas using question marks or time references can actually hurt. Interestingly, short headlines actually have a negative effect on readership of content as well, whereas notably longer headlines have no effect.

In a separate study, we also looked at the impact of headline testing technology and its ability to improve the number of visitors who read for more than 15 seconds. What we found surprised us. In a comprehensive evaluation of headline tests that use Chartbeat’s multi-armed bandit testing model, we discovered that alternative headlines – ones that, without testing, would never have seen the light of day – outperform the original roughly two-thirds, or 62% of the time. That means most headline writers only get headlines right the first time for 38% of stories. But technology can vastly improve these results.

A headline should not only entice readers to click and see more; it should drive consumption of a story. Of those 62% of stories, the alternate headline saw on average a 78% lift in traffic. It also led to a 71% lift in readership, measured by quality clicks: visitors who spend more than 15 seconds or more of engaged time with an article.

The bottom line

While gut instinct around language matters, technology can enhance that ability to find the right fit between content and audience. This, in turn, can dramatically improve engagement with content.

These days, publishers wear many hats. They have to write, edit, promote, monetize, optimize and grow quality audiences. The good news is that science — both in terms of predictive modeling and engagement-focused technologies — can help us improve the imperfect art of writing so we can better connect with readers and, ultimately, with each other.

Industry-Research | Video

The 5 big trends media execs must understand to succeed

October 9, 2017 Terri Walter, Chief Marketing Officer—Chartbeat

How has both consumer consumption of news and traffic patterns changed year-over-year? What about the role of platforms? Every October, media analytics platform Chartbeat identifies macro trends in audience behavior and news consumption to help publishers understand major shifts and discover new growth opportunities. These just released trends, rolled up from Chartbeat’s network level data from 2016 to 2017, sum up the key findings:

1. It’s not a mobile first-world, it’s mobile-only.

In looking at platform-referred traffic by device type, we see that mobile has made stunning gains year-over-year. Last year, traffic from Google had just tipped over the 50% mark for mobile for the first time ever, showing a 51% mobile vs 42% desktop split. But from 2016 to 2017, Google mobile traffic grew from 51% to 60%, and Facebook’s grew from 78% to 87%. For publishers with high dependencies on platform-referred traffic, it is significant to note that most visitors are now coming via mobile. At least for platform-referred visitors, it is practically a mobile-only world.

2. It’s not that Facebook traffic is down, it’s that Google is up.

Traffic that was referred from Facebook and Google to premium sites has been fairly steady over time, with Google driving roughly 1.25 billion visits per week and Facebook around 1 billion. The ebbs and flows in their traffic have stayed pretty consistent each month—until now.

Due to recent major news events including the solar eclipse and hurricane Irma, we saw traffic coming from Google escalate in unprecedented ways in September. Recent reports have described a decline in Facebook traffic, but in looking very closely at multiple data sources, we see a different picture: While it is true that Facebook’s share of total traffic is down, the missing piece is that, in fact, the pie is much larger, and Google is up.

So what does this mean for publishers? Newsworthy events, particularly those that are unfolding over time, are huge moments for search activity leading to direct traffic. Social traffic does not spike until afterwards, mainly around more emotional, reactionary content.

3. Demand for video is not constant; it spikes around breaking news.

In looking at consumer engagement with video content, we see that it’s much more dependent on what’s in the news than text is. Below we’re looking at how much time visitors spend watching video, relative to the time they spend with text. The first notable thing is that this line isn’t at all constant — demand for video content really changes across the year. When we look closer, we see that spikes in video watching correlate with a few highly visual stories in the news (like hurricane Irma). And that makes sense: for highly visual news, readers look for a highly visual news medium.

It is noteworthy for publishers that video demand is variable, and deeper insights here should lead to a better content strategy and smarter monetization.

4. Longer time reading content drives higher loyalty.

How can media companies build and grow a loyal audience? Focus on engagement.

Why is engagement as a metric so important? Chartbeat research shows that half of visitors who click through to an article hardly read what they land on: 45% spend less than 15 seconds on the page. As you can see in the graph below, a new reader who engages for a longer amount of time during their visit is more likely to return. And the more they return, the more pages they consume and the longer they read on the page. This in turn, means they also view more ads on the page. Overall, optimizing for engagement can drive loyalty, and revenue.

5. The homepage is not dead– it’s the place for your most vital audience.

Is the homepage really dead? Not at all. Yes, Facebook and Google are prime sources to target new readers, and those first time visitors are more likely to land on an article than a homepage. However, to our surprise, in looking at how article and homepage consumption changes by loyalty (based on the fraction of days a user visits in a two-week period), our data shows that frequently returning visitors build strong homepage habits.

As readers become more loyal, they use front pages more actively.
Visitors who come more than every other day (hitting the 50% threshold), visit more front pages than articles
Subscribers (see dotted lined below in contrast to the solid lines) demonstrate higher overall engagement, at first with articles, but as they become more frequent users, their homepage consumption then begins to spike

The lesson for publishers? It is becoming increasingly clear that there are different tools in the publisher toolbox as it relates to building and growing a loyal audience. While platforms are for acquisition of new visitors, driving direct traffic on your owned and operated properties is critical to retention. The homepage is more important than you might think–it’s where you’ll lose or retain your most loyal readers.

Innovation | Perspectives

Engagement and the evolution of audience to advocates

July 11, 2017 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

Digital media is waking up to the hard truth that more is not always better. As a result, the strong belief that a high volume of content attracts a high number of page views is being replaced by the stark realization that quality trumps everything – even traffic.

NBC News is just the latest in a string of publishers to shift their focus from pushing pageviews to encouraging audience engagement. The emphasis on quality over quantity is part of a larger strategy to avoid commoditization by ensuring differentiation.

Rather than produce more news content, NBC News produces more original content around the news in the form of analysis, narrative, and additional formats including podcast and video. The outcome is less volume – approximately 25% fewer stories a day. However the goal is to deliver more value as this is a take on the news the audience can only get from NBC News. In an interview with Digiday, Nick Ascheim, SVP of Digital at NBC News, recounts the massive “culture shift” that has taken place in the newsroom. In the past, he says, the company was focused on pageviews. “The approach now is, let’s worry a little less about how many clicks and more about telling a good story.”

But it’s not enough to adopt a new mindset; companies must also adjust internal KPIs to measure success and gauge failure. Undeterred by the lack of industry standards or metrics to quantity engagement, NBC News has developed its own, unique formula. It defines a loyal user as one who has visited the site five or more times in two consecutive months. Of course, the way a publisher chooses to define and measure engagement will depend on key variables such as content category, delivery format, audience demographics and, above all, company objectives.

Engagement from the Start

The efforts of publishers like NBC News to set new performance goals and take on the task of internalizing them is a huge step in the right direction. (NBC News has even gone so far as to print the new goals on cards it distributes to writers and employees.) But publishers would also do well to apply the same rigor to how they acquire and engage audiences in the first place.

An obvious place to start is mobile apps, where app companies are learning the hard way that strategies focused on attracting massive numbers of users are fatally flawed. In the early days, the App Economy was a numbers game where data-driven (in my view data-obsessed) approaches worked well. Companies pursued strategies that allowed them to buy app installs at low prices in the belief that it would pay off. It seemed to work, allowing some apps – particularly games and lifestyle apps – to rocket up the app store charts.

But the gold rush mood sobered when a flurry of reports and blogs made the headlines arguing that app installs, like mayflies, were literally here today and gone tomorrow. Data released by app analytics and attribution companies, highlighted “insane” app unistall rates, adding gasoline to the fire.

The Mother of all Metrics

Today the companies across all app categories and geographies are coming to terms with the realization that engagement is what I like to call “the mother of all metrics.” Indeed, engagement isn’t just the end-game. It matters at every stage of the marketing funnel and every step of the user journey. Finding ways to grow (and measure) engagement is the toughest task that confronts every company with digital assets, not just apps.

Nonetheless, we can learn a lot from app managers as they rethink and retool to identify, acquire, engage, and retain high-quality users from the get-go. Their journey started a few years back with a singular focus on driving traffic. (Sound familiar?) They relied heavily on ASO (App Store Optimization). But their toolbox of capabilities has since expanded and evolved to include direct marketing, social media, influencer outreach, above the line advertising and marketing, and everything in between. All in an effort to forge deeper connections with fewer users.

By way of background, ASO is similar to SEO. Only instead of publishers optimizing elements of their content and websites in an effort to show up high in search engine results, publishers optimize key elements of their app store landing page and presence – such as keywords, icons and videos – to ensure people discover and download their app. That may deliver a high quantity of users, but the success is fleeting if efforts fail to drive lasting loyalty and frequent use of the apps.

Quality Rules

Indeed, ASO has a role to play at every step of the journey. This inclues production, presence, promotion and the pragmatism app developers and companies will need to build a business, not just release an app. For savvy app marketers, ASO has evolved into an approach that encompasses everything neccessary to deliver great content and great experiences via an app. That is what’s required to move the needle on audience engagement and take an app from being simply discoverable to truly engaging. This ensures that the app goes from being a one-time download to a longterm addiction.

For publishers, winning used to be about creating huge volumes of content. For app makers, winning was about buying huge volumes of users. In both businesses the rules have changed, making way for a renewed focus on quality.

In all areas of your business, quality trumps everything. And engagement is emerging the performance metric that matters across the every stage of the marketing funnel and every step of the user journey. Whether you want to attract an audience or grow revenues, quality matters. Strategies aimed at boosting page views or installs may deliver fast — but not sustainable — growth. To achieve that, companies must double-down on efforts to create content and experiences that are genuinely engaging, thus converting an audience of readers into a legion of advocates for the long-term.

Industry-Research | Revenue

The data shows it: Article pageviews and their value don’t correlate

June 27, 2017 Clare Carr, Vice President of Marketing—Parse.ly

Advertisers know that not every view is created equal and that it’s important to understand your brand in context. It’s why ad tech companies created targeting options. It’s why content can be bought by topic. Are the companies creating content thinking about getting the most value out of their audiences in the same way?

To figure out if this is the case, we examined Parse.ly’s publisher data to see how much volume different topics produce. We broke this down by the number of articles written and the average pageviews per article. Then we compared that to how advertisers value different audience segments.

The Data: Audiences by Topic

Examining how people find different topics online revealed that the subject matter of an article has an impact on the likely source of traffic. For example, in a sample of one million articles in the Parse.ly network, Facebook brought in 87% of pageviews to lifestyle content. Google search accounted for 61% of readership to technology stories.

In addition to learning how people found the articles, we looked at how did each topic compared by scale and popularity. Articles that fell cleanly into the lifestyle or U.S. presidential politics categories received the most views, while articles about sports and entertainment were the most common by volume.

A couple of explanations about our methodology are worth noting. For this report, we selected articles that fell cleanly into one category. In other words, we selected articles where at least two thirds of the words were generated by a single topic. This left us with a subset of just over one million articles that we could cleanly assign to a single topic.

For example, imagine that most articles that are written as a mix of two or more topics. Those will be excluded from this analysis. It simply doesn’t make a clear conclusion to say that “mixed-topic articles with a lifestyle slant” tend to get more pageviews. However, we can confidently say that articles that are mostly about lifestyle tend to get more pageviews than articles mostly about business.

Other important data preparation decisions to note are that we included only English-language articles. We also excluded articles whose full text was fewer than 600 characters. (The complete methodology is detailed in the full report.)

Pageviews vs. Audience

The extremes are quite telling. An average article in the lifestyle category gets nine times the pageviews of an average article on business and finance. So, does this mean the lifestyle pageview will bring in nine times as much revenue?

In fact, in some cases, the opposite is true. Digiday recently reported that CNN leverages audience segments by vertical to optimize ad rates. Chris Herbert, CNN’s SVP of digital operations and strategy, explained: “CNN’s finance vertical, CNNMoney, for example, commands higher ad rates than the parent site does because of its upscale audience, which could justify spending more to drive audience to that property.”

So, the really interesting question is how a publisher can match monetization to the potential expected pageview or volume, regardless of scale.

For example, even if the advertising value of certain topics are lower, the high volume of certain content types opens up other monetary opportunities. Lifestyle publishers and Condé Nast brands such as Condé Nast Traveler and Allure are forging partnerships to create branded subscription boxes. Efforts like these allow them to take advantage of the large “top-of-funnel” audience to drive purchase conversions.

Opportunities in High Volume/ Low Pageviews

Our team was surprised that the average views for each sports article ranked so low among topics. Given that the high-volume content was comprised mostly of local and even high school sports means that the average view totals are much lower. This is particularly true when compared to the audience for stories about national leagues. It is also worth noting that a preponderance of extremely short stories—such as those on game stats, syndication or even automated sports reporting—contribute to the high volume.

Taken in aggregate though, readers generally engage well with sports topics. A previous study we did (based on different data, but also looking at topics) found that sites focused on sports had a median engaged time of 51 seconds per article. Thus, sports can offer a strong monetization opportunity beyond pageviews. Engaged and loyal audiences can be monetized more easily through subscriptions, live events, or membership models.

Bring back the Classifieds?

Job postings are an example of a topic with low article volume—the lowest, in fact, of all topics analyzed—and high pageviews per article. From our research, we learned that the majority of traffic to job postings comes from Google search, which drives 84.4% of referral traffic. Facebook drives 11.9% of traffic comes, while the rest comes from other sources. This kind of traffic breakdown makes sense in the context of pageviews. If readers are searching for very specific information, a small subset of articles could generate a high volume of pageviews.

The classifieds are unlikely to return to their status as a primary revenue driver. However, for any scenario where you have a high amount of traffic to a low amount of content, there is likely to be room for revenue growth.

Using Data to See the Full Picture

The data we used for this study identifies ways that audience data should be considered for revenue potential, especially for opportunities outside of traditional display advertising. However, to be fully acted on, audience data must be synced in a way, both culturally and technologically, that connects it to business and monetary objectives.

Industry-Research

3 Things standing in the way of engaged time metrics

March 31, 2017 Clare Carr, Vice President of Marketing—Parse.ly

The idea of the “Attention Economy” as a currency on the internet goes back to at least 1997. So, 20 years later, we should have this engaged time metric figured out, right?

From a technological perspective, we do. We can accurately measure the time a reader spends actively reading a page, versus measuring how long a browser tab was left open with a page. Ads can measure engagement or time spent viewing.

However, we need to separate the technical ability to measure engaged time from the adoption of the metric as a valuable evaluation construct. Has the reality on the ground changed when it comes to using time to understand an audience?

Adoption at an Individual Level

We attempted to answer this question by partnering with Digiday’s CUSTOM studio on a research survey. Based on responses of almost 300 members of the Digiday audience, engaged time has gained a great deal of traction with journalists and reporters.

Time-on-page (the broader term we used in the survey questions) ranked the highest for what people use to evaluate their own work. If you interpret this chart another way, it indicates that 50% of people working in publishing see time spent with their audience a personal goal for their work.

However, we also asked about which metrics people were responsible for reporting back to their company. When asked this way, time-on-page dropped to the sixth position – out of nine total choices.

While individuals may understand and value time-on-page as a way to show that an audience cared about the work of a piece, organizations are still prizing pageviews, impressions, and social sharing.

The disconnect between these two sets of responses emphasizes the gap between how writers view their relationship with their audience and that relationship’s value to the business. If the writer’s goal is to engage the reader, but the business still makes money from impression numbers, how can those two align?

Barriers to Organizational Adoption

In addition to the data from the survey, the report revealed specific challenges that companies face in trying to adopt any new metric or goal. Here are three takeaways:

Inconsistent messaging from leadership. Though executives are usually not immersed in analytics every day, leadership still sets the tone for how employees view company success. According to one of participant in the research, inconsistent messages from management can make things more confusing: “It shifts with whoever is in charge. Some new person comes on and says, ‘This is our prime metric. This is what we’re shooting for.’ And then they go off and work somewhere else and someone else comes in.”
The right vs wrong metric mentality. Conversations need to stay away from “the right” metrics and lean more towards what success means. Employees want their work to be successful; focus on that first and then connect the metrics to how to get there.
A lack of expectations and benchmarking. With new metrics, you have to indentify the status quo in order to tell if something is performing better or worse than expected, or to show improvement over time. For metrics that aren’t as intuitively understandable as pageviews or visitors, what kind of benchmarking or expectations can be set?

Over the coming years, which organizations will ensure that the goals for their audience relationships, employees’ work and business models will align? And which will be able to adopt time as a measure of how their audience values the work they do? I suspect we’ll be able to tell soon enough.

The full research cited in this article can be found on Parse.ly’s website.

Clare Vice President of Marketing at Parse.ly, which partners with digital publishers to provide clear audience insights through an intuitive analytics platform. She writes and speaks about all the ways companies can use digital analytics to improve their operations and reach their audience goals. Prior to joining Parse.ly, Clare spent five years on the publishing side as the Director of Marketing and Online Operations at Greentech Media. Previous to that, she did digital marketing and business development at ThePoint.com, the precursor to Groupon, and Venus Zine. Originally from Ohio, she graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in Environmental Sciences.

Advertising | Industry-Research | Perspectives

Neurological research proves it: Context affects advertising effectiveness

February 28, 2017 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

The effectiveness of advertising depends, to some degree, on the content that surrounds it. In other words, content context has a direct impact on the way advertising is received. A new research study, “Why premium editorial content” from Teads, a native video advertising marketplace, analyzes why premium editorial content creates more impactful environments.

Teads partnered with Neuro-Insight, a neurological research firm, to better understand how premium content neurologically changes the way people recall advertising messaging. Four premium publishers, Conde Nast, Forbes, Time Inc. and The Atlantic participated in the research to expose video ads within their premium editorials on mobile. Consumers were also exposed to the same video ads within their personal Facebook feed in order to compare the two experiences.

The research revealed that premium editorial content is 16% more personally relevant and engaging than social news feeds. Interestingly, regardless of the personalization capabilities in a user’s Facebook feed, consumers still felt more personal relevance to the premium content. Users invest more of themselves in the premium editorial consumption experience.

Total Recall

What makes this finding so important? Premium editorial delivers a more powerful memory impact and a more memorable advertising experience. For the detailed-oriented left-side of the brain, premium editorial had a 19% greater impact on memory and for the emotional right-side of the brain, it had an 8% greater impact on memory. Memory encoding drives higher ad effectiveness and is an influencer of consumer purchase behavior.

Interestingly, both premium editorial content and Facebook social feeds create high impacts on long-term memory, however, premium content generates a greater and more even activation in both the left and the right sides of the brain. The triggering of both sides of the brain offers the best opportunity for broad video advertising creative approaches to influence a consumer’s long-term memory. Premium content is unique because of its impact to both the left- and right-side of the brain, meaning, it has an equal and considerable opportunity to influence consumers.

It’s not just that premium publishers offer advertisers a quality audience, their content also creates a higher impact on advertising. Teads’ research concludes that content with a high level of engagement is more likely to impact the memorability of online video advertising. Importantly, premium content raises the level of impact that social platforms cannot duplicate.

Innovation

Removing the friction from content access to ignite engagement at Forbes

January 3, 2017 Peggy Anne Salz, Founder and Lead Analyst – Mobile Groove

While the creation of quality content remains at the fore of premium publishers’ priorities, these days, they also need to double down improving the user experience, streamlining how audiences access and engage with content wherever they opt to consume it. This puts companies under pressure experiment with new formats and technologies in search of new ways to meet consumer demand for snackable and relatable content delivered how, when and where they want it.

According to, Lewis D’Vorkin the company’s Chief Product Officer, Forbes is pursuing a comprehensive strategy to accomplish both. Peggy Anne Salz—mobile analyst and Content Marketing Strategist at MobileGroove—catches up with D’Vorkin to discuss how the company is reinventing the mobile app user experience with the help of new technology that removes friction, increases engagement and opens up additional opportunities for monetization.

Peggy Ann Salz: You have overseen a wave of change that includes the introduction of a new content-creation engine, the launch of an innovative digital publishing platform, and—most recently—a complete rethink of the mobile app experience. Why choose Progressive Web Apps over ordinary native mobile apps?

Lewis D’Vorkin: I don’t believe traditional apps will be successful in the news space. Moreover, I think most of them are likely to end up as revenue failures—for several reasons. One, you don’t get the scale required to be able to monetize mobile apps, unless, of course, they’re paid apps. Two, there’s a lot of friction tied to the traditional mobile app experience. People have to go to the app store. They have to find your app and they have to download it.

The Progressive Web App is a lot like a traditional native app experience, but without the hassle and the friction. The reader basically bookmarks it on their home screen, and they have it just like that (!) No going to the Apple App Store. No going to Google Play. No downloading it. No searching it. No installing it. And, once the user gives us their permission, we can send alerts, push notifications and re-engage in all the ways you can on native apps do. It’s just faster and simpler to do all this on Progressive Web Apps.

I don’t believe in native apps. In fact, I didn’t believe in news apps from the start. Now, there are countries like the U.K. where news apps have been successful. But, for the most part, when you look at the apps you have on your phone you’ll see you have utility apps—banking, maps, productivity apps. The appeal of the news apps was a dream.

Your web app is in beta and slated to launch by the end of Q1/early Q2. What is the user journey and experience as they explore the content you offer?

On top of the Progressive Web App comes a new experience based on cards. We began launching Forbes’ new mobile card-like experience in June, starting off with Forbes’ Self-Made Women list. Forbes has been testing two elements of our new mobile card-based experience— lists and articles—allowing readers to engage with bursts of information. And I say engagement because the consumption or usage of card-based lists is extraordinary. In the case of the Forbes 400 [list] average session duration was 45% longer on the new mobile list compared to the current mobile list and engagement, specifically pageviews per session, almost tripled.

The card-like experience is obviously engaging. What will the impact be on how you create the content to match?

There is much more engagement and much more opportunity to create a different kind of navigational construct. For the user, it’s more mobile-centric, allowing them to swipe and tap, and that also creates opportunities for new advertising revenue formats. We are starting to educate our newsroom around how to create new kinds of mobile content that is shorter and much more visual.

It’s why we’re also embarking on creating a new content management system. Today you go into a system like WordPress where the default position is write a headline and write a story. Well, what if the default position had several defaults, allowing you to choose a story format, a photo format, a graphic format, or pick some other format? We’re building a content management system to allow this freedom and choice so that the default of writing a story is no longer the instant thing to do. Of course, it also means reorienting the staff reporters and contributors and getting them to understand and accept that the 800-word story is not the be all and end all of everything. But, after 40 years in this business, that’s what I find the most exciting.

What about advertising? How you going to align this with your chosen format, Progressive Web Apps, and with your audience?

This format is as exciting as it is engaging because we will be able to develop and deploy new kinds of ad formats and ad strategies around time-based advertising versus just pushing impressions. The user experience will also be very beneficial to our BrandVoice platform, which is our native ad platform. Overall, it gives us new and unique ways to integrate native advertising. Imagine our card-like experience, and then imagine if we flipped some of the cards every 5 or 10 seconds, for example. It would also be a very smooth way to time-based advertising. The point is the card format layered on top of the Progressive Web App technology allows us to experiment with new formats, including advertising that is time-based, learn what works. We really don’t know what works yet. But we do know there are many different ways in which different kinds of ad formats will play in here.

How might that help in the delivery of contextually relevant advertising?

It’s simple and it fits with our model that makes us the only brand that enables native advertisers and brands to publish content in the same CMS as our contributors and journalists. In the new content management system that we’re building it will be much easier for us to make connections between what the user is reading and serve up related content, as well as a BrandVoice piece of content in a card perhaps, that complements the user experience, without interrupting it.

Today we get our content from many sources, and social networks top the list of referral sites for some audiences, such as Millennials. What are you going to do to ensure your Progressive Web Apps and card-like content don’t lose steam?

Within the content management system, it’s not just about presenting our contributors and journalists with different options on how to create content, such as a graphic or a photo. It’s about understanding that a particular format may be far more suitable not just to publish on Forbes, but to publish on Instagram or somewhere else. In other words, it’s about creating content once for publication across Forbes.com and whatever social network is appropriate. We’re finding ways to be part of those ecosystems. I believe that what wins at the end of the day are new models, new content creation models, new ad models and new distribution models.

Peggy Anne Salz is the Content Marketing Strategist and Chief Analyst of Mobile Groove, a top 50 influential technology site providing custom research to the global mobile industry and consulting to tech startups. Full disclosure: She is a frequent contributor to Forbes on the topic of mobile marketing, engagement and apps. Her work also regularly appears in a range of publications from Venture Beat to Harvard Business Review. Peggy is a top 30 Mobile Marketing influencer and a nine-time author based in Europe. Follow her @peggyanne.

Industry-Research | Perspectives

Everyone talks about audience engagement. But what does it really mean?

December 6, 2016 Clare Carr, Vice President of Marketing—Parse.ly

In this year’s Reuters Institute Digital News Project report, “Journalism, Media and Technology Predictions 2016,” Author Nic Newman said that this will be the year of audience engagement—with more than half of all respondents in his study acknowledging that improving audience engagement would be the highest of their priorities in 2016.

And true to this prediction, online media has seen a rise in the title of Audience Engagement Editor. Sites want to know how long readers have engaged with their articles. And above all else, the question remains how to harness this engagement and turn it into results: action, loyalty, monetization.

But what do we mean when we talk about audience engagement? And possibly more important: Do we all mean the same thing?

Digital publishers’ current approach to measuring engagement
Parse.ly surveyed thousands of digital media professionals, asking them to share their definitions of “audience engagement.”

From the 130 plus responses, we learned a majority of digital publishers are measuring audience engagement. Nearly 77% of survey respondents considered the ways their organizations measure engagement to be average or better.

Perhaps one reason that digital publishers are so confident in how they are measuring audience engagement is that they have more access than ever to analytics that can help them to better understand their audience. While some publications have a clear sense of how to use this data to help meet their goals, other media outlets are struggling because they don’t have a universal sense of what goals they are trying to reach.

That’s one reason that there’s no common definition for “audience engagement” among publishers—or even within organizations. Over half of the survey respondents said that their organizations don’t have an agreed upon definition.

These two findings seem to be at odds. How can publishers be active and confident in their measurement methods but unsure of what exactly they’re measuring?

Do we need a common definition for audience engagement?
One explanation could be that many publishers have access to analytics tools but aren’t necessarily setting a common goal for which metrics to measure.

The survey results showed that many publishers considered shares and engaged time to be the best representations of engagement. Rather than settling on one “golden” metric for defining audience engagement though, many publishers combined multiple metrics, such as “page views per visitor” or “shares plus comments.”

Furthermore, while only 28% of digital publishers considered “offline impact” a representation of engagement, many respondents (when asked to share anecdotes that represented particularly good examples of audience engagement) talked about audience engagement as a personal relationship or interaction with readers.

Take a look:

“Personal replies that make me smile or think.”
“A two-way relationship with the people in our community.”
“To interact in any way with the content or the author — write a comment, answer a poll, follow the author, share, etc.”
“When our audience responds with a question, especially.”

Getting on the Same Page About Audience Engagement
A recent audience engagement webinar with panelists from Hearken, MediaShift, and Parse.ly touched on the importance of settling on a common definition within an organization, whether that definition involves one metric or many.

Parse.ly CEO Sachin Kamdar explained, “It’s probably important that you talk with everyone at your organization around how you want to define engagement. But tied into that…is you’ve got to be able to measure it, too.”

He continued, “So, picking the right metrics—and again, that might be a multitude of metrics that are important to you—can help you align your goals of engagement with how you can measure and that can lead towards success.”

Industry-Research | Perspectives

Making metrics meaningful: Benchmarking engaged time

October 3, 2016 DCN

“What if we stopped focusing so much on traffic, and started focusing on experience?” I’m asked this question frequently. It’s a complex, divisive challenge for newsrooms, one I eagerly indulge.

I work directly with media companies of all shapes and sizes. I offer consultation on everything from using data to support editorial intuition, experimenting with audience development projects and honing tagging strategies. The best newsroom strategies start with someone saying to me: “It would be so interesting if we could…” and “What would happen if we tried…”. Data can provide the foundation for sussing out those new ideas while mitigating risk.

When I start to talk to clients about using engaged time, or any metric for that matter, the key is to set goals. What does success look like? But this prompts new questions: How do we stack up? Is this kind of engagement normal? Is it good? For us? For anyone?

There is no reliable comScore or Alexa rating for attention, thanks in no small part to various ways of measuring “time on site.” So if a publisher is eager to change the way they think about their audience, and their success, where could they start? I tried to find out.

How does Parse.ly measure engaged time?

First, let’s clarify exactly what we’re talking about, because Parse.ly measures engaged time differently than other analytics platforms. On your site, a visitor is considered “engaged” if they 1.) Have a browser tab open, and 2.) take an action (scroll, click, mouse-over) at least once every ten seconds.

For more details, feel free to browse this explainer on Parse.ly engaged time, or for a more technical explanation, read our engaged time technical documentation.

Analysis 1: How do we find an average engaged time for all content?

Weighted engaged time averages from a random sample of posts from 300 domains in our network gives a benchmark for engaged time.

I first set up an exploratory analysis across our network, to see if I could identify any clear patterns. Over time, I started to see the same sites consistently outperform other outlets in average engaged time per visitor. What initially struck me though was actually the lack of pattern: each site seemed so diverse in voice and size.

To identify what made them competitive, I needed to understand the bigger picture of engaged time across Parse.ly’s network. To do this, I sampled user experiences at random for content published within one month from 300 anonymized domains to first understand, “how many seconds can you expect a typical reader to remain engaged with a story?”

Here we see how attentiveness is distributed across Parse.ly’s network. This graph shows what we can expect for “normal” attention time from any given reader, to any given article for each of the sampled domains. You can see a majority of our publishers attract an audience willing to invest roughly 40-60 seconds of their time on an article, though plenty of publishers can expect a more invested audience.

Finding engaged time in Parse.ly’s dashboard

This provided a starting point for benchmarking engaged time, especially for my clients. Any Parse.ly user can easily find in their dashboard where their site, section or article falls on this curve. Teams can check to see if their stories and authors fall above or below the norm for their audience.

Understanding the context here is crucial though; not every article needs to outperform the average of the Entire Internet. There are better questions to ask. Where does your article fit in relation to what is expected for its section? How does that section perform in relation to the site as a whole?

Of course, there’s one more comparison that everyone wants to make: how does my site stack to the competition?

Analysis 2: How do we find the averaged engaged time for similar content?

This question helps you contextualize whether your work gets more attention than pieces that are similar to it and potentially predict how other topics, outside of your core competencies, might perform. For example, if you don’t normally write technology feature, it could help to understand the engaged time benchmark for tech publishing leaders. Here, we break down the analysis above further to understand how long a reader could be engaged on similar content.

Broken out by publisher type, it’s easy to see how nuanced attentiveness is across different types of content. I found it noteworthy that local news sites command more engagement than major news outlets, even with undoubtedly fewer resources.

I mentioned earlier when I began investigating engagement, I was struck by how, month after month, the same set of publishers kept leading the pack, albeit with no discernible pattern among them. Broadening the analysis to the network, broken down by these categories, most of these names resurfaced at the top of their respective categories. A pattern finally became clear: the most engaging sites within each type of publisher were highly recognizable brand names.

Also, now that we’ve broken out engaged time averages across Parse.ly’s network, it’s easy to see how using homogenized data from a heterogenous group of sites to set benchmarks could do more harm than good. Certainly, the same concept applies within the newsroom; measuring the average engaged time on an article against what is expected for that vertical or topic will provide better context.

What do we know about engaged readers?

We’ll continue to explore other patterns within the most engaging experiences. In the meantime, here’s a reminder of what we do know:

Facebook vs Twitter. We already know from a recent study with Pew Research that, in an increasingly mobile ecosystem, referral sources on mobile were an important factor in determining engaged time. Their research found that Tumblr and Twitter generate highly engaged audiences, while Facebook audiences were less engaged.
Readers can be highly engaged on mobile, though infrequently. In another section of the same report, we distinguished between long-form articles with 1000+ words and short-form articles. Long-form consistently outperformed short-form, though visitors to either do not frequently go on to other articles.
In the analysis conducted for this post, we found no correlation between page views and engaged time. A large audience is not necessarily an attentive one.

How to navigate this brave new world

We’ve found ourselves in somewhat uncharted territory in an effort to shift away from primary traffic metrics like page views and unique visitors. How do we define what makes something “good” anymore? Why should we care about engaged time at all?

As I found in this analysis, the engaged time metric provides us an interesting exploration in how we can set a more relevant benchmark. In clinging to familiar traffic indicators like page views, perhaps we have systematically neglected not only the experience of our readers, but the nuance of our reporting. But coupling traffic metrics with engaged time helps us understand which articles create the most impact.

If your post gets hundreds of thousands of viral views, but no one sticks around to read it, did you really manage to convey anything meaningful? Increasing your newsroom’s dedication to understanding the relevancy of engagement in all its forms will lead to a deeper, better audience strategy.

Kelsey Arendt is a Customer Success Manager at Parse.ly. Previously, she worked with The Guardian’s commercial team where she managed a variety of projects for marketing and sales, including developing analytic support for sponsored campaigns and partner hubs. Kelsey is a Midwestern transplant to New York City, and is a passionate hiker, musician, and homebrewer.

Perspectives

No comment: NPR joins the growing list of media companies shuttering comments

August 23, 2016 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

Given its moniker—that P does stand for public—it seems particularly significant that NPR has opted to cut comments from its site and instead focus its resources on social media as its means of engagement. As the company’s announcement points out, “NPR introduced public comments to its website eight years ago, when many of today’s most popular venues for digital interaction didn’t yet exist or were in their infancy.”

Another factor in the decision is the fact that only about 1% of its audience is currently commenting on its site. Bloomberg’s former digital editor Joshua Topolsky also cited low reader participation as a reason for Bloomberg’s recent decision to drop comments. Topolsky’s team felt that they’re more likely to reach a more representative cross-section of their audience via external social platforms.

NPR plans to focus on maintaining its presence across Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and Tumblr—as well as support journalists’ efforts to interact on their own accounts. Yet, undoubtedly, maintaining that presence across numerous (and ever-proliferating) social media sites takes a toll on any organization that must prioritize its resources.

Recode is another site that opted to focus on conversations in social media and to eliminate comments. According to founder Kara Swisher, social media provides a more optimal setting to “engage a smart audience that’s not trolling.” This sentiment was in large part shared by The Week’s Editor-in-Chief Ben Frumin who, upon announcing that the site would no longer include comments, specifically called out the problematic nature of pseudonymous commentators. Though it should be acknowledged that social media is not without its share of trolling and other bad behavior, something platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are struggling to combat.

Other sites that have opted out of comments sections cite research that connects unruly and unpleasant comments with a lowered estimation of the content and brand with which it is associated.

Organizations such as CBS, The New York Times and The Guardian remain committed to their comments sections (for now). To confront the issue head on, CBS decided to require all of its online commenters to use real names and The Guardian went so far as to undertake a study of its own comments section as part of a larger series on online harassment. The picture painted by the study was not pretty, with particularly bold lines underscoring the high level of vitriol aimed at female writers as well as those from ethnic and religious minority groups, and LGBT people.

While The Guardian does not plan to close down comments across the site, it has opted to reduce the number of places where comments are open, particularly around contentious subjects. The New York Times also limits the number of articles on which comments are permitted, though it plans to increase the number.

NPR’s Managing Editor for Digital News, Scott Montgomery, emphasizes the organization’s continued commitment to experimenting with opportunities for community engagement, such as the Hearken audience engagement platform, which is already used by dozens of NPR member stations. Yet as Elizabeth Jensen, NPR’s Ombudsman/Public Editor pointed out in her post examining the decision to eliminate comments, sites that are managing to keep comments civil are those that make a significant investment in moderation resources; resources that many media organizations need to apply to creating quality content and to continuously evolving distribution—and engagement—strategies.

Industry-Research

Editorial analytics sharpen newsrooms’ focus

February 24, 2016 DCN

News organization everywhere are competing for attention. In a continuously changing media environment, journalism is challenged more than ever before to connect to its audience. In its report, the Digital News Project 2016, Reuters Institute examined how news organizations, across Europe and the United States, analyze their audience’s behavior in order to inform and develop their editorial voices.

The Guardian and The Financial Times, both subscription-based business models, developed proprietary metric tools. The Guardian’s real-time analytics tool called Orphan offers minute-by-minute data on individual articles like pageviews, social shares, and attention-time for each article published in the last two weeks. Orphan can also show whether the article has been pushed via the Guardian’s social media channels and/or if it was promoted on the homepage. The data can also be broken down by different segments, such as time, section, device, browser, country, referrer, loyalty, and attention time. The editors can use this data to inform decisions on headlines, pictures, placement, and how to promote across social media channels.

Similarly, the Financial Times’s is developing a dashboard for its analytics called, Lantern. The Financial Times see editorial analytics as a step to its newsroom and its reporters being audience-first journalists, integrating engagement objectives into the editorial process. The tool will focus mostly on engagement-related metrics such as time spent, recirculation, volume of articles read per visit, and number of comments.

The report identified a few third party analytic tools available to news organization:

Chartbeat known for real-time analytics that focus on audience attention. Its dashboard advices on homepage structure and helps to refine headlines and formats. Editors can modify content in real-time.
Ly tracks in real-time as well and helps to identify topics audiences have responded well to in the past as well as where readers are coming from, where they’re headed next and on what devices.
NewsWhip is also a real-time tool that offers social media tracking like tweets, shares, and comments. It also allows newsrooms to monitor what stories are trending and breaking news.

In addition to Chartbeat, Parse.Ly and NewsWhip, the more standardized report of pageviews and visits are available in analytics tools like Omniture, google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and twitter Analytic.

Usage of multiple data sources is also common among news organizations. The Huffington Post, an advertising based business model, uses an Omniture dashboard, which includes traditional metrics like visits, pageviews, and unique visitors as well as referrals from specific sources and video data. They also use a customized version of Chartbeat tracking real-time split testing where different versions of an article (copy, headline and/or pictures) are tested to see which performs best.

Importantly, even in the most data-driven analysis, decisions often involve qualitative assessment. It’s a mix of art and science. It’s also important to ensure personal assessment is included especially in terms of how the data is leveraged for both short-term and long-term operations.

Industry-Research

Crowdsourcing creates robust audience dialogue

November 25, 2015 DCN

Crowdsourcing is an important way to personalize and engage your audience. The use of crowdsourcing can result in the creation of unique user-generated content or collaborative and social journalism. To provide a deeper understanding of crowdsourcing practices, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University conducted detailed interviews, survey-work and case studies to produce its Guide to Crowdsourcing.

The two most recognized practices of crowdsourcing are news organizations asking for audience input and social media users offering non-solicited feedback. The Tow Center identified crowdsourcing in journalism as the act of inviting a group of people to participate in a reporting assignment. In other words, it’s an open call for your audience to personally contribute.

Thinking of the Center’s definition, crowdsourcing usually comes in two forms, as an unstructured open-invitation to provide feedback by way of a vote, email or call or as a targeted request to a particular segment of people. Crowdsourcing is especially popular among digital startups who are developing a unique style of journalism with a new audience.

Many news organizations include crowdsourcing in the entire process from story assigning, to pre-data collection, research and analytics to reporting and post-story discussions. Some important practices to incorporate when crowdsourcing:

Clearly define your journalistic goals.
Communicate what will be done with participant’s contribution.
Be specific about the type of response you want.
Announce your call-out more than once.
Use the proper terms like “share” versus “submit.”
Leave a short time gap between call-out and publication.
Communicate with community often.
Respond to and reward your contributors.
Make it easy for people to participate.

Effective crowdsourcing provides robust content and a valuable path for connecting and giving back to your audience.