Twitter accounts for less then 2.5 percent of traffic to publishers; Instagram and Pinterest barely supply one percent together. Currently, Facebook represents 22 percent, but its role in distributing publishers’ content has been falling dramatically for more than a year, and is only accelerating.

Data from Parse.ly, which tracks visits to more than 2,500 publishers, shows that ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, more than 40 percent of traffic to those sites came from Facebook. By the end of 2017, it was less than 26 percent. It’s still dropping. For some sites, like BuzzFeed, this is a big problem, but even if you don’t rely on social traffic to the same extent, it’s a challenge.

The chart below shows the amount of traffic coming to publishers from Google and Facebook since the beginning of 2017. It’s not just Facebook’s decline — the huge growth in Google mobile visitors is very striking. This can largely be attributed to the growing popularity of AMP, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages format for the mobile web.

Source: Chartbeat

Social traffic was never a great way to make money anyway

How much was social referral traffic really worth? As Scott Galloway points out in this great video, Audience vs. Traffic: “People don’t tune in to BuzzFeed because they’re fascinated by the journalism, they click because someone forwarded them ‘Pick some of your favorite potato dishes and we’ll tell you your best quality.’” Social referrals are fickle, hard to monetize, and disappear when Facebook changes the algorithms. They’re traffic, not an audience. Even before Facebook’s changes, BuzzFeed had apparently been seeing a decline in unique US visitors for two years.

In many ways the decline in social referrals is just the icing on a pretty unappetizing cake for traffic-dependant sites, which struggle to monetize beyond programmatic ads. Yields are declining, the use of ad-blockers is on the rise and Facebook and Google are hogging all the growth. Meanwhile, those sites that managed to build a loyal audience, like the New York Times and many special interest magazine sites, are flourishing — usually by using that loyalty to monetize in other areas like subscriptions or e-commerce.

Social traffic was never all that great for anything other than reporting big numbers. While that doesn’t change the fact that content distributed directly on platforms can be an important acquisition channel (e.g. The Economist has used Facebook as an effective way to retarget potential subscribers), that only really works if you can convert your off-site viewers into paying subscribers. Monetizing content on somebody else’s platform is really tough. Your company’s account on Instagram may have a lot of followers, but how much value is that generating, and is it going to you or the platform? As a friend likes to say: “Everyone knows National Geographic has amazing photography, but how many people remember the names of individual photographers?”

Long-term, the move away from desperately trying to drive and monetize social referral traffic is a necessary step, but right now it’s still hurting many people. So, how can you thrive despite Facebook’s continuing retreat from publishing?

The antidote to declining social traffic

One answer is Google. As the Chartbeat graphic shows, Google is quickly regaining its status as the primary source of referrals for publishers. So the main question becomes, how do you drive more large scale, organic traffic to your website via the search engine result pages (SERPs)?

Basically, you need to refocus your efforts away from social traffic and re-energize your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) team. As a quick refresher, SEO is the umbrella term for many tactics, all of which aims to optimize your content for search engine algorithms, so that you rank higher when a potential visitor asks a query. The higher you rank, the better your natural traffic becomes, and the more chances you get to convert that traffic into a loyal, revenue generating audience. However, SEO in 2018 is not the SEO you remember: Google is always tinkering with algorithms and features (like AMP), and that means the best SEO tactics constantly change. Sometimes quite radically.

What are the ranking factors that influence your SEO score most these days? Google famously doesn’t give us full transparency on ranking factors, but recently large studies by intelligence platforms such as SEMrush have shed some light into the ranking darkness. The answers probably aren’t what you expect.

The days of keyword stuffing are over

No, it’s not keywords (in the anchor, body, title or anywhere else) or backlinks. It’s your engagement metrics. The top four ranking factors are direct website visits, time on site, pages per session and bounce rate. This isn’t surprising really when you think about it: Google wants to find the ‘best’ answers for queries, so happy Google users are a key indicator for them. What they’ve worked out is that engagement indicators, like low bounce rate, high pages per session and superior dwell time, are the best signs of a good search answer. They’re also hard to game, which can’t be said for keywords and backlinks.

This all means that there is now another very obvious reason to try to increase your engagement metrics: high engagement is a virtuous cycle. More engagement directly means more new organic traffic, which in turn means a greater opportunity to monetize your site and build a loyal audience, which means higher engagement and more organic traffic.

Source: SEMrush

SEMrush’s study results are backed by industry experts such as Larry Kim, Founder & CTO of WordStream. He says that “having positive website engagement metrics is critical” and he presents the data that shows the relationship between engagement rates (such as bounce rate and time on site) and rankings here.

So, yes, you shouldn’t ignore keywords and backlinks, but the biggest opportunity to increase organic traffic from Google comes directly from boosting on-site engagement metrics. This is especially true for established sites that already rank fairly well.

That leaves one question: how do you improve your SEO? If you’re already creating great content, what can you do that will impact these metrics right now?

How to effectively raise your site engagement and search traffic

SEO expert Matthew Woodward describes internal link building and content recirculation as “the most powerful SEO tactic you are not using.” Why? It increases engagement.

Internal content recommendations are the best way to help readers discover relevant content that they really want to read. This means fewer people leaving after reading just one article, more articles per session and more time on your site. Most importantly, the more of your content they explore, the more likely they’ll be to come back. Search visitors can be fickle if they’ve come looking for a particular piece of content, and often leave as soon as they’ve consumed it. You give yourself the best chance of converting them into a loyal audience member by providing other high-quality content that’s relevant to their interests.

Content recommendation is even more important when you consider that, for over half of publishers, less than 10 percent of visitors enter the site via the homepage, according to research by Parse.ly. This means your content pages also have to do the job of the homepage and help people find the next piece of interesting content.

What all this adds up to is this: the related and recommended content widgets on your content pages are the single most important performance unit you have. Measure them and optimize them!

Social media can still work great as an acquisition channel for publishers and media companies, but as a dependable traffic- and revenue-driver it’s a busted flush. You can’t rely on it to drive engaged traffic to your site, the principal source of sustainable revenue. Now that Google is the most important referral source again, SEO has a renewed importance, and the days of keyword stuffing are behind us. You should be doing everything you can to improve your user experience. An easy way to do this right now, as well as implementing tools like AMP, is great recommendations.

Mads Holmen is co-founder and CEO at Bibblio, a leading provider of personalization and content recommendation services. He’s a passionate “better web” advocate and recognized publishing industry commentator.

The post It’s Time For Publishers To Get Bullish On SEO Once Again appeared first on MediaShift.

At many publishers, community and engagement editors have long been pushing for a change in the newsroom culture away from superficial metrics toward a more authentic relationship with readers. Yet that culture shift was often impeded by the value and sheer size of the Facebook audience, whose reach, distributed audience and referral traffic publishers came to rely on to hit their analytics and advertising goals.

Well that particular barrier has fallen. And now is a good time to talk about better engagement metrics.

When engagement is no longer defined as the total number of likes, reactions and shares by a aggregate audience and is instead an interaction with a particular reader of your website or publication, increasingly one you can identify by name, what are the best ways to measure that? A handful of recent examples point the way to a better set of measurement practices that rethink traditional digital analytics and refocus attention on key performance indicators.

Measuring New Engagement With Old Web Metrics

The return to loyal users is a return to traditional web metrics. But instead of page views and total unique users, publishers are using time on site and frequency of visit to take the measure of their web audience. Loyal users are more likely to seek out the site on their own, leading to the return of the home page as a priority for publishers. They are more likely to spend time on the site and more likely to come back more often. The bounce rate for a loyal audience will typically be lower than the bounce rate for users arriving from social media.

These are metrics that have always been available to publishers but that have often been overlooked.

The product team at Vox has been using web analytics to measure and grow reader loyalty. As they rethink the on-site editorial experience for their readers post-Facebook, the team is looking at how to package content to show readers relevant articles and keep them on the site longer. “We definitely think about recirculation as a key metric across all our networks and as a way of understanding our users getting a lot of value out of this,” the head of Vox Media’s CMS, Mandy Brown, told Nieman Lab.

Recirculate! Vox Media’s new structure for story packages gives readers context — and helps them stick around https://t.co/EvNaFN278X

— Nieman Lab (@NiemanLab) March 27, 2018

What about time per user? In a new set of recommended KPIs, or key performance indicators, for public media, time per user (or sessions per user, if time can’t be measured accurately) is offered as a key measure of engagement. The goal of audience engagement is to “encourage affinity, loyalty membership and advocacy,” write Steve Mulder of NPR and Mark Fuerst of Public Media Futures Forums in a piece on Current. Across websites, podcasts, streaming video and mobile apps, time per user could be a consistent starting point to measure success.

Yet there are important limits to web metrics when it comes to engagement. Most important, they only measure the activity of journalists indirectly, through content. They don’t directly measure what journalists do to engage with readers and communities. One KPI that missing from the public media recommendations, for example: How often organizations engage with their audiences, a suggestion made by The Coral Project on Twitter.

These are good – but we do wish that the 'Engage with our Audiences' KPIs contained at least one KPI around how often the orgs (and their journalists) engage with their audiences https://t.co/10OckMSGWh

— The Coral Project (@coralproject) March 27, 2018

Engagement Metrics for Real People

Engagement metrics need to account for the increasingly “real people” aspect of engagement work. Community and engagement teams now find themselves managing and scaling relationships with individual users. Rather than an aggregate audience and reach on social media, publishers have print subscribers, members of Facebook group, sources and email newsletter readers. Editorial engagement can even be the cornerstone of an audience revenue program. Editorial engagement, “builds the practice of bringing readers’ concerns deeper within the [news] organization,” Emily Goligoski and Elizabeth Hanson wrote in a report for the Tow Center earlier this year.

This kind of engagement work with real people needs metrics that measure the direct work of journalists, not just the indirect effect, and the quality of engagement, not just the volume.

Take Facebook groups for example. With Facebook pages getting less attention from the News Feed algorithm, groups are a way for publishers to remain engaged with users. The Dallas Morning News invites its subscribers to join a private Facebook group, one of more than a handful overseen by engagement editor Hannah Wise. Its success is a measure of subscribers’ loyalty to the News. “A group seemed like a low-cost way to test if our subscribers even wanted to talk to us since they have habits built around joining Facebook groups, liking content and reacting in the comments,” Wise told Solution Set. Wise also edits the News’s Hearken-powered project, Curious Texas.

https://twitter.com/hwise29/status/976982243896909825

Publishers from The Texas Tribune to The Atlantic are also measuring engagement with Facebook Groups. “We started looking at groups because it allows for more community and more semblances of privacy and sharing experiences,” The Atlantic’s Caitlin Frazier told Digiday. Newsrooms can use Facebook’s Group Insights dashboard to understand how members engage, see the most active group members, and examine post-by-post engagement.

Operating in a similar community-centric model, local newsletter publisher WhereBy.Us also measures engagement by looking the work of its journalists. Alongside traditional newsletter metrics like list size and open rate, they look at the number of responses to callouts and attendance at events. “I care most about metrics that indicate people have found value in what we’ve created and want to participate in our community,” growth editor Alexandra Smith told MediaShift in a recent interview.

Finally, one metric of editorial engagement is the impact on the journalism itself. People shared nearly 5,000 stories about maternal harm for ProPublica’s “Lost Mothers” investigation. And ProPublica tracked how they got to almost 5,000, including editorial engagement efforts that came with specific goals about increasing the representation of their story sample and led to stories like an advice piece with tips on improving maternal care from hundreds of women. At Reveal, after 2,000 listeners texted in questions about modern-day redlining, their reporters dug up the answers — and then they texted back.

Were you one of the 2,000 listeners who text us a question about modern-day redlining? @Aaron_Glantz @eman_thedataman @ByardDuncan have you covered.https://t.co/sqouUt4NTk

— Hannah Young (@HannahDotYoung) March 27, 2018

https://twitter.com/ByardDuncan/status/978714314717540352

Join MediaShift and experts from Content Insights, WhereBy.Us and the Dallas Morning News for “How to Get Better Engagement Metrics,” a free online panel on April 18. Reserve your seat now!

Jason Alcorn (@jasonalcorn) is the Metrics Editor for MediaShift. He will be moderating the free online panel “How to Get Better Engagement Metrics” with experts from Content Insights, WhereBy.Us and the Dallas Morning News on April 18. Reserve your seat here.

The post It’s Time For Better Engagement Metrics appeared first on MediaShift.

Twitter has signaled its intention to focus on video as a key platform feature for 2018, and some publishers have already been noticing the effects.

Last year, Twitter’s announcement that it would be partnering with a string of media companies to provide round-the-clock video content for the platform was met with some skepticism.

Was Twitter trying too hard to muscle in on a social video space that was already saturated and showing unpredictable returns? Video on Twitter was largely known for Vine, the since-shuttered service that allowed six-second looped clips, and Periscope, a live-streaming channel that faced plenty of competition of its own.

When we previously outlined four ways that publishers used the medium in mid-2016, there was a feeling that Twitter video could only every really be thought of as a promotional or extremely short clip service.

In 2018, Twitter’s video plans look a little more concrete.

What’s changed for Twitter video?

Since the partnership announcement (which was followed later in 2017 by an announcement of even more partners), there have been a few changes in Twitter’s approach to video, some of which seem to have managed to increase use of, and engagement with, the medium. With these media partnerships and increasing numbers of key live events, Twitter appears to be stepping enthusiastically into live video broadcasting, a space where Facebook has recently ended its payments to publishers..

Twitter is also reportedly working on a new feature design to reduce the number of steps users have to take to share video on the platform, while executives have signaled that video will be an important keystone of the company’s ambitions in 2018.

Back in December, a new public metric called view counts was added to Twitter videos for the first time, leading to an increased standardization among other social video formats on different platforms. Twitter’s ‘total video view’ metric is calculated by the sum of “any views which are at least 50 percent in-view for 2 seconds.” Under this measurement system, at least half of video has to be visible and playing on a user’s screen for at least two seconds to count as a view.

There are some signals that user behavior around video on Twitter is also starting to change. Last month, several publishers, including Bauer Media and CNBC, told Digiday that they had seen significant increases in video views on Twitter recently.

One of the elements that publishers have to deal with on Twitter is that the platform has not traditionally been known as a referral powerhouse like Google or Facebook. Content on Twitter has to be able to work alone natively. Still, some publishers have been noticing the increased attention from followers. According to Digiday:

“Lifestyle publisher Stylist saw a 500 percent increase in its Twitter video views as a result of dedicating more resources to Twitter. Men’s interest site Joe Media saw a 20 percent increase in video views over the last four months to 6.2 million. A source familiar with the matter said that over the last year, Twitter has had a “significant” increase in the number of video views on the platform compared to the previous year.”

What are the biggest videos on Twitter?

So how have publishers been using video on Twitter in recent months? Looking in our analytics tool Spike, the most popular videos on Twitter (ranked by total retweets and likes) in the last 30 days from influential accounts are largely made up of viral clips, fan-focused content and videos posted from celebrity and public figures’ accounts.

For the publishers that do appear among the top videos however, certain themes are evident. News videos are extremely popular, which is not all that surprising given the popularity of news-focussed content on timelines generally.

Some of the new ways that publishers appear to be using video include standard TV-news repackages, as well as more recognizable social video formats. A strong current affairs theme runs through many. One of the most retweeted and liked videos of the last 30 days was a clip of U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s lackluster 60 Minutes interview, repackaged and posted by the news site Axios.

Sec. of Education Betsy DeVos struggles to answer fairly basic questions on school performance on 60 Minutes pic.twitter.com/lFVq3USwUW

— Axios (@axios) March 12, 2018

Another popular clip in the last month was a video posted by ABC News of a parent of one of the victims of the Parkland High School shooting criticizing the NRA. Both of these clips demonstrate strong news value, but do not differ significantly from the original made-for-TV broadcasts.

Father of Parkland victim slams NRA videos:

"If this was put out by a terrorist organization, we would be raising the terror threat level in this country. Why are we letting this lobby have anything to do with DC? I don't understand it!" https://t.co/9eh7udBMsx pic.twitter.com/FZeTqvTRmK

— ABC News (@ABC) March 7, 2018

In this way, Twitter videos may differ from Facebook video, which has placed an emphasis on differentiating itself as a unique format. Instead, audiences may see Twitter as a place where they can ‘see for themselves’ a video clip or footage that is the focus of news reports elsewhere. This is certainly a notion that Twitter itself looks to pursue, frequently touting its potential as a breaking news and live events platform.

In terms of volume of video content, there is a remarkable variance is overall posting habits from different publishers. This chart, compiled using NewsWhip Spike, shows the number of videos posted by ten selected TV news publishers in the U.K. and U.S. over seven days, from March 7 to 14, 2018.

This does not include retweets, therefore giving a clear picture of the amount of original video uploads that various networks are distributing through Twitter.

Fox News is the leading poster, with 701 videos over seven days, or an average of around 100 per day, from just one Twitter account. Other networks such as CBS and ABC also post video frequently, while BBC News posted just 28 videos in the same time period.

The vast variance is more apparent than on Facebook, and perhaps points to different experiences and strategies being pursued by the social media teams.

Twitter has some characteristics that have the power to make it a unique proposition in social video publishing. How exactly publishers decide to use the feature may change throughout this year, as the platform attempts to grow its share of the online video attention space.

In addition to audience engagement and uptake however, one question that will certainly be on publishers’ minds will certainly be: where do we make money from this?

Liam Corcoran writes about digital journalism and media trends, metrics, and more for the NewsWhip blog.

The post How Publishers Are Learning to Embrace Twitter Video appeared first on MediaShift.

Panel Title: How to Get Better Engagement Metrics

Moderator: Jason Alcorn, MediaShift
Panelists: Hannah Wise, Dallas Morning News; Alexandra Smith, WhereBy.Us; Christopher Pramstaller, Süddeutsche Zeitung

Engagement is so much more than Facebook reach. For publishers who want to cultivate a direct relationship with readers, it’s the top of the customer funnel. And how you define and measure engagement in your newsroom matters directly to whether you’ll be leading the industry or lagging behind.

This live online panel will include a discussion with publishers who are at the forefront of using engagement metrics to build a direct relationship with readers, improve the quality of their journalism and drive revenue for their businesses.

This free online panel is sponsored by Content Insights. Content Insights is a robust, powerful and extremely user-friendly editorial intelligence tool, turning Big Data into easy reading. Being tailor-made for editors by editors, Content Insights helps journalists understand what drives audience behavior in a really simple and comprehensible way. By replacing inadequate metrics like page-views, scroll-depth and sessions with Article reads, Read-depth and Readership and more, Content Insights provides an uniquely editorial take on how content success should be evaluated. All attendee emails will be shared with the webinar sponsor.

Handouts:

– Presentations will be available to participants.

Who should attend:

Journalists, editors, growth managers, social media editors, marketers, publishers, non-profits, and content creators interested in learning about engagement metrics.

Date and Time: April  18, 2018, 10 am PT / 1 pm ET

Free!

Register now for the online panel!

Note: If you can’t attend the live session, you can still register and see the archived video of the panel. Free registration for BigMarker is required.

About the Moderator:

Jason Alcorn is the metrics and impact editor at MediaShift. As a consultant he advises news organizations on business strategy and leadership and works with funders to develop program strategies. He also facilitates the Institute for Nonprofit News Emerging Leaders Council. Jason lives in Washington, D.C., with his family. You can follow Jason on Twitter at @jasonalcorn.

About the Panelists:

Hannah Wise is the Engagement Editor at the Dallas Morning News. She oversees the newsroom’s social media strategy and seeks ways to cultivate conversation around the News’ journalism. She edits The News’ Hearken-powered project, Curious Texas, where readers ask questions and journalists track down answers. Hannah is the Online News Association Dallas-Fort Worth chapter co-founder and president. She is the stitching maven behind behind the viral Instagram account @sewmanycomments where she doesn’t read the comments, but sews them.

Alexandra Smith recently became the growth editor for the digital media and tech startup WhereBy.Us. Before that, she led the audience engagement team at the Fort Collins Coloradoan. She started her journalism career seven years ago at the Asbury Park Press in New Jersey after graduating from Rutgers University. Alexandra is most passionate about connecting local news to the community its meant to serve. When not ruminating on engagement strategies, you can find her learning to love all that living in Colorado has to offer.

Christopher Pramstaller works as an analyst and audience editor at Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s biggest quality newspaper. He has a background as a journalist and editor and has worked with editorial data for several years. Nowadays he tries to enable the editorial staff to be data-informed in a meaningful way – live and based on longer time frames.

The post DigitalEd Panel: How to Get Better Engagement Metrics appeared first on MediaShift.

I don’t trust anyone.

When it comes to news, at least.

When I decided to pursue a journalism career a few years ago, I knew I wanted to “fix” the industry. But I don’t think I realized at the time how broken it is. And I’m not even talking about “fake news” or media companies struggling to stay profitable, though these issues are connected. What I mean when I talk about trust is: There is no news organization out there today that I believe is fully doing what’s best for me, its audience, or itself. These publications’ other motives — whether it’s driving “engagement” or maximizing page views — sometimes make me feel as though telling compelling and accurate stories is only a secondary goal.

And that’s a problem.

According to a Pew Research study, younger people have much less trust in media than their older counterparts, with only 12 percent saying national media do a “very good job” of keeping them informed. These same people are much more likely to get information from social media, which you might say is to blame, but I’d argue that the problem is the opposite: young people flock to social media because it’s made for them, and online news is not. If you want to save the youth from social media’s addictive and insular vices, you have to create high-quality news that maintains social media’s strengths: authenticity, relatability, and user experience.

The Modern News Consumer: The online behaviors & attitudes of young adults https://t.co/z0q7KjoKaH pic.twitter.com/pS2KfX4bDu

— Pew Research Center (@pewresearch) July 7, 2016

Traditional media companies moved their businesses online in a way that disenfranchised loyal customers and repelled potential audiences. And then they thought they could save their ad revenue with clickbait tactics, poor design, subpar reading or viewing experiences, unhelpful push alerts, fluffy and sensational storytelling, and more. But no one stopped to think: “Is this what people want?”

And if you, Mr. Media Executive, don’t think this is what people want, or you don’t understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, then how can any of your customers understand it?

And if I, as a member of the public, don’t think you know what you’re doing when it comes to your product, then why should I think you know what you’re doing when it comes to reporting, fact-checking, or storytelling?

How could I trust you?

This isn’t sustainable. It’s not what’s best for audiences now. And it’s not how to grow a long-lasting news business for the audience of the future. These longstanding institutions of journalism have chosen to give up on user experience and instead produce “content” that serves only to demean audiences and reduce trust.

Wow @modbee thank you for this informative and user-friendly headline pic.twitter.com/mDL2e0Qmk5

— James Tyner (@jamestyner_) September 23, 2017

My friends and I have a fun game. We go to the website of the Modesto Bee, a newspaper in the Central Valley of California, and we mock the awful headlines. It’s kind of cruel, but we do it out of love.

“‘I knew nothing about volleyball at all.’ He’s a dentist. And his team is undefeated”

“He had sex with a student, and said he’d blow his ‘brains out’ if she told, police say”

“This teacher bailed him out of jail, and then vanished. Police found him with her car”

“Wow — that’s a lot of turkey!”

They’re funny because they’re sad, and they’re sad because they’re desperate. But they’re also great examples of the ways in which traditional media have tried and failed to adapt to the web. I’m assuming these headlines are an attempt at a clickbait tactic. Maybe it works for them. But there’s just so much cynicism behind them. Why choose these stories, which probably don’t affect my life at all? Why intentionally withhold information from the headline to try to trick me into clicking?

Clickbait isn’t new, though it’s grown more nuanced over time. But for those of us who grew up with the internet, we see right through it. And when you think about the youngest audience members out there, the ones who have never read newspapers, clickbait — or tap bait — hurts trust even more in the long run. Headlines like “Is This Place Hiding Aliens??” and “11 People Put WHAT In Their Bathtubs?!” that I saw on a scroll through Snapchat Discover are training Generation Z to see vapid content as what news aspires to be.

RIP journalism pic.twitter.com/4fnnMJaWpS

— James Tyner (@jamestyner_) September 18, 2017

It shouldn’t be this way. American Press Institute research shows that people don’t like to feel manipulated, so why do publishers openly manipulate them? That API study found that people aged 34 and under choose to pay for news sources that provide good coverage of topics they care about. So why don’t we put that first? And don’t just think about the information, think about the best way to convey that information, from the story format to design to wording. Put yourself in the shoes of the audience, or better yet, talk to your audience. What is the best way for this person to learn about this topic?

We're running another test of our Smarticle story format today and into tomorrow for #SOTU . Follow on your phone and let us know what you think https://t.co/Glq4lBjbxJ

— Guardian Mobile Lab (@GdnMobileLab) January 30, 2018

The long game — the right game to be playing, where news is concerned — is to pursue that perfect match of information and format. Recent new products like NBC News’s Snapchat show Stay Tuned or the Guardian’s “Smarticles” are a step in the right direction, innovating with the audience in mind. We have to develop valuable user experiences and optimize the workflow of our newsrooms around getting the best and fullest information to end users in the best format. We have to build loyal audiences based on trust and appreciation, not fleeting ones based on clickbait.

In other words, we have to create news that people trust and journalism products worth paying for. Then they’ll start paying for them.

James Tyner is the product manager at USC Annenberg Media and a journalism student at the University of Southern California, focusing on product design, audience trust, and the role of technology in the newsroom.

The post Trust In News Matters. Don’t Give Up On It. appeared first on MediaShift.

The New York Times’ Lindsey Goddard, Greentech Media’s Brady Pierce and Parse.ly’s Clare Carr generously shared their expertise. Watch the video here or scroll down for seven of their best tips for how to get better newsletter metrics.

1. Segment your audience.

Newsletters feel personal, like a one-to-one communication. Or at least they should. By segmenting your audience and developing email products that deliver on a unique, targeted value proposition, you are likely to have the greatest success.

2. Track what happens after the click.

You might not get your audience segments exactly right the first time. After all, that’s what metrics are for. By tracking your newsletter audience after they click through to your site, you’ll be able to see what stories and topics keep their attention. You’ll know if they are on mobile devices or at their desk when they are reading. Use that information to refine your email and improve your results. Bonus tip: Follow Google Analytics guidelines and use email as your UTM medium.

3. Measure promotional activities alongside growth rates.

Growth rate isn’t an independent variable. If you publish multiple newsletters, there are going to be times when some, and not others, are more timely and will see increased demand. You’re marketing and promotion calendar should reflect those changes in demand. An Olympics newsletter, for example, will grow more quickly this month than last month. Set target growth rates and compare across email lists, but make sure you know which ones got an extra boost.

4. Run re-activation campaigns.

Is a newsletter getting a little tired? Engagement and open rates dropping? It might be a good time to do a re-activation campaign. In fact, good list hygiene is always important. A re-activation campaign will ask readers if they want to stay on your list or not. If they don’t open it — and they haven’t opened any of your emails in the last six months — go ahead and unsubscribe them. Then explain to your boss that even though the list is smaller, it’s higher quality, more valuable to advertisers, and all your performance metrics will improve.

5. Do regular A/B testing.

A/B testing isn’t a one-time effort. First of all, you can’t — and shouldn’t — test everything at once. You’ll get the best results by regularly testing.

6. Heat maps.

Both Goddard and Pierce shared heat maps of their email newsletters. Heat maps provide a quick, visual snapshot of where your readers click on your site. Whether you are making the business care for email, reporting on results to your team or considering a product redesign, heat maps are an essential better-metrics tool in the email producer’s toolkit.

7. Evaluate on a regular basis.

Newsletters have been around for a long time, but they don’t stand still. Your reader’s inbox is a competitive place and you need to earn their attention. Our panelists all said that regular evaluation, whether that’s once a week or once a month, is important to making sure that your newsletters are performing up to standard and that your metrics align with your team’s KPIs, or key performance indicators.

Jason Alcorn (@jasonalcorn) is the Metrics Editor for MediaShift. In addition to his work with MediaShift, he works as a consultant with non-profits and newsrooms.

The post 7 Tips to Get Better Newsletter Metrics appeared first on MediaShift.

Traditional publishers like the New York Times, online specialists like Quartz and even newsletter-only publishers like TheSkimm are winning over droves of readers and creating new revenue streams at the same time with their email strategies. And there are as many newsletters as there are topics to write about. At Revue, we help tens of thousands of people, from big companies to individual writers, publish editorial newsletters that readers look forward to seeing in their inboxes.

Their success turns on one metric above all else: Open Rate.

Why is the open rate crucial for editorial newsletters?

There is a wide range of newsletter metrics available to newsletter publishers: list growth, delivery, open and click rates, return on investment and more. That’s not surprising given the wide range of newsletter types. Some are meant to promote a product or service, while others are editorial. Some come out daily with lots of original content. Others are less frequent and round up links.

The right metric to focus on depends very much on the type of newsletter. In an earlier article on MediaShift, the creators of newsletter planning tool Opt-In give a nice overview of all metrics and which type of newsletter they apply to.

For publishers of editorial newsletters, however, it’s the open rate that matters most, for a number of reasons:

• Editorial newsletters are standalone. Editors want readers to consume the newsletter content right inside their email software, rather than enticing them to click through to the publisher’s website. Opening an email is therefore more important than clicking on a link.
• Editorial newsletters are all about loyalty. They are intended to be read regularly. And a high open rate signals that readers open a high percentage of issues.
• Typical monetization options are sponsorships or digital subscriptions. Both require an engaged audience. Sponsors will want to get their name in front of a welcoming audience. And selling digital subscriptions requires regular readers that understand the value.

So while a promotional newsletter focuses on ROI, for example, an editorial newsletter needs to provide a consistently high open rate. A promotional newsletter aims to convert a few recipients from reception to click to purchase, but not every promotion needs to appeal to every lead. An editorial newsletter, on the other hand, has to provide valuable content to its readers in every edition.

The fall and subsequent rise of email newsletters

For a while, publishers were lured away from email newsletters by the enormous audiences that social media had suddenly made available. Quick and direct access to a seemingly vast number of users on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms was irresistible, while building an email list felt like slow, hard work.

As it turns out, that strategy has downsides. While publishers found large audiences on platforms, they learned the hard way that they had little control. And while audiences were quick to aggregate, they proved just as quick to vanish. Casey Newton of The Verge said it best: “So many publishers think they have audiences, when what they really have is traffic.”

So many publishers think they have audiences, when what they really have is traffic.

I think we’re about to find out who has an audience

— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) January 12, 2018

Publishers started noticing as early as 2014 that relying on Facebook was dangerous. An email resurgence began. Charlotte Fagerlund described this trend in 2016, citing the independence of Facebook’s algorithm, improvements in spam filters, mobile readability and the personal feel of email as success factors.

Around that same time, established publishers started to notice. Andrew Jack of the Financial Times collected many examples of successful newsletters, for example. The New York Times, the Financial Times and many others started expanding their email newsletter offering. And the content was popular: recipients numbered in the hundreds of thousands and open rates approached 60 percent.

From Andrew Jack’s research, published in 2016.

Four tips for achieving and keeping a high open rate

Today, editorial newsletters on our platform, Revue, have an average open rate above 50 percent. That’s almost twice the industry average for media and publishing companies (22 percent, according to MailChimp) and in line with data from other editorial newsletter publishers.

There are four main ways that publishers can achieve such a high open rate.

1. Lean into the personal quality of editorial newsletters

Rather than the generic “donotreply@domain.com”, editorial newsletters are sent in the author’s name. Readers will open the newsletter because they recognize who it’s from. They trust the individual and will be compelled to read what they have to say.

A great case in point is new media company Axios. Their flagship “Axios Pro Rata” is sent personally by Dan Primack. And readers trust Dan to provide them with interesting content in every issue.

2. Keep to a regular publishing schedule

Editorial newsletters are often sent at a specific time of the day or week. Like buying the goold old paper, readers get into the habit of expecting the newsletter and spending time with it at a certain time of their day. A regular publishing schedule becomes habit-forming.

3. Deliver original editorial content

Editorial newsletters are designed to be read, right inside the inbox. To succeed at that, they provide original content inside the email, not distracting the reader by diverting them to content on various websites.

The best ones heavily lean on text, replacing highly styled layouts and plenty of images with the email layout people use to send regular emails to their contacts. Take the Daily Skimm, for example. It’s layout is very simple, composed of only text, headings and links. While links are provided for further reading, you can read enough of it right in your email client and feel sufficiently informed.

4. Subject your editorial newsletters to strict list hygiene

Publishers of editorial newsletters have a laser focus on the right audience. People who receive the newsletter but never open or read it are considered a distraction and will be removed swiftly.

While thorough list hygiene is time consuming, it’s well worth the effort for editorial newsletters. As time goes on, the authors will be able to provide content on exactly the right topics and create a loyal, steadily growing audience.

What’s the best way to get started?

What’s interesting about the most successful editorial newsletters is that they all start small and grow organically.

We’ve seen several well-known authors with many existing followers on social media start their editorial newsletter very quietly, almost in private. They like to experiment a bit in the beginning and find out what works in terms of content and frequency. Once they have built up a bit of an archive and found their flow, they start inviting more readers slowly, and encourage replying and forwarding of the emails to create focused growth.

That way the open rate of these newsletters starts out very high and never dips below the 50 to 60 percent range.

Mark Schiefelbein is head of growth at editorial newsletter tool Revue. He can be reached at mark@getrevue.co and would love to talk with you about editorial newsletters.

The post 4 Ways Newsletter Publishers Can Hit Open Rates Between 50 and 60 Percent appeared first on MediaShift.

Recently announced changes to Facebook’s News Feed algorithm are causing a lot of fear and uncertainty among publishers. The company has not provided specifics on how or when the changes will be implemented, and the majority of the discussion is driven by speculation rather than facts. Based on our data, there is no reason to panic.

Facebook has announced similar changes to News Feed before. Starting in June 2016, after news broke that the algorithm would begin prioritizing posts by friends, we noticed a U-shaped curve: some publishers’ engagement went slightly down, but then Brexit and U.S. presidential elections happened and the same publishers’ engagement went back up.

In the second half of 2017, overall engagement for digital publishers again fell — this time dramatically. Digital publishing isn’t a monolithic industry, however, so we broke out the data to look at engagement with news outlets on Facebook separately from engagement with producers of viral content and controversial publishers. We also compared engagement trends across the U.S., U.K., continental Europe and the Nordic countries.

All of this suggests to us that news publishers will be hit hardest of all by Facebook’s latest decision. It’s less clear how viral and controversial publishers, who showed continued strength through algorithm changes last year, will be affected. What’s certain is that publishers can’t abandon Facebook, they will have to focus on sharing and engagement to stay in the game, and keep a close eye on analytics to gauge any big changes.

A note on data

To understand Facebook engagement trends, we analyzed how much readers engaged with (i.e. liked, hated, loved or shared and commented) posts by top publishers in each category of news. Publishers that made the list had Facebook pages with the biggest volume of engagement on their posts as of December 2017.

For news and tabloids, we analyzed the top 10 publishers in each country, and for viral and controversial news, the top 5 publishers. The table below shows the total number of Facebook interactions we analyzed from December 2016 to now.

Publishers’ engagement trends

Here’s what Facebook engagement looked like for publishers in 2017.

United States

Publishers included in the analysis:

News and tabloids: Fox News, CNN, ABC News, HuffPost, NowThis, The New York Times, NPR, NBC News, ATTN:, The Epoch Times

Viral news: The Dodo, Sun Gazing, Power of Positivity, Word Porn, Memes

Controversial news: Breitbart, Daily Caller, American News, Western Journalism, Conservative Tribune

United Kingdom

Publishers included in the analysis:

News and tabloids: BBC News, Daily Mail, The Independent, The Guardian, Channel 4 News, The Sun, Daily Mirror, Sky News, BBC Swahili, BBC Arabic

Viral news: UNILAD, The LAD Bible, SPORTbible, Pretty 52, UNILAD Tech

Controversial news: Tommy Robinson, Paul Joseph Watson, EU – I voted LEAVE, Goodbye EU, Jayda Fransen

France

Publishers included in the analysis:

News and tabloids: 20 Minutes, Le Parisien, LExpress, LCI, Le Figaro, Le Monde, France 24 Arabic, FRANCE 24, Ouest-France, La Provence

Viral news: Minutebuzz, Incroyable, BuzzFeedFrance, Golden Moustache, HuffPost C’est La Vie

Controversial news: Macron Dégage, On Aime La France, Droite Nationale 3, Je mage du porc et je t’emmerde, J’ai honte de mon président

Sweden

Publishers included in the analysis:

News and tabloids: Expressen, Aftonbladet, AlKompis, SVT Nyheter, Omni, Göteborgs-Posten, TV 4 Nyheterna, Metro Sverige, Svenska Dagbladet, Dagens Nyheter

Viral news: Newsner, The Typical Jag, Newsners bästa, Uppskattat, Newsner Familj

Controversial News: Politikfakta, Politiskt Inkorrekt, Political Scrapbook

Spain

Publishers included in the analysis: El País, La Vanguardia, Antena 3 Noticias, Diario Público, ABCes, laSexta I Noticias, El Mundo, eldiario.es, La Voz de Galicia, NacióDigital

Germany

Publishers included in the analysis: Bild, Tagesschau, SPIEGEL ONLINE, WELT, RTL Aktuell, ZDFheute, FOCUS Online, ZEIT ONLINE, HuffPost Deutschland, The Epoch Times – Deutsch

News declines, virals steady, controversials grow

Looking at the overall decrease in engagement volumes, it’s possible that Facebook already made changes to the News Feed algorithm last year, and only announced it now.

We also need to consider that news-wise, the second half of 2017 has been relatively calmer than the first half, with the exception of the #MeToo movement, which continues to have ripple effects across the world. In the first half 2017, media was full of reports about the start of Trump’s presidency, fake news, Russian meddling in the US elections and natural disasters, including several hurricanes. In Europe, we saw news around Brexit, elections in France, The Netherlands, Germany, and other countries, Grenfell tower, the Stockholm terrorist attack and more.

All of these events drove a lot of engagement, and we haven’t seen as many big news events in the second half of 2017. That could be another reason for the overall lower volume of Facebook engagement for news publishers towards the end of last year.

On the other hand, viral publishers’ engagement has remained steady throughout 2017. We would expect to see this as their content is designed to be shared, liked and commented, and the News Feed algorithm will continue rewarding that behavior.

Worryingly, however, controversial publishers’ engagement rose throughout 2017. Their stories are designed to evoke strong emotions which drive engagement and debate, things that Facebook suggests will be important for News Feed visibility in the future. Recently Mark Zuckerberg added that Facebook will give more weight to “reliable” news sources, as marked by the users. Will this have an effect on controversial publishers, since people who regularly engage with these pages are likely to mark them as reliable news sources? We’ll have to wait and see.

What does this all mean for publishers in 2018?

• Web shares are growing in importance. Make sure it’s easy and compelling for readers of your website or app to share your stories.
• Engagement has always been important and that’s clearly not changing. While some publishers are struggling to convert engagement into traffic or revenue, publishers who’ve invested in this area already have stable business models and revenue streams. These publishers will focus on maximizing the potential of their Facebook presence as usual. Publishers who haven’t invested in this area are likely to suffer, though they’ve probably been lagging behind in terms of social traffic already in 2017.
• Keep calm and carry on. With 2 billion active users, Facebook is (still) an important source of referral traffic for publishers. Whether your business relies on traffic, subscriptions, or additional streams like events, reaching your audience through Facebook is still possible and free.
• Look at the data. Uncertainty over News Feed changes causes fear and that uncertainty is not likely to go away as Facebook will continue experimenting with their algorithm. Publishers need to have a strong analytics team and reliable tools to look at their own as well as their competitors’ data to understand what’s really going on. That way, they can respond to the real effects of any changes and not the imagined scenarios.

Varpu Rantala is EzyInsights’ data scientist. Anna Bessonova contributed additional analysis.

The post Which Publishers Benefit Most from Facebook’s News Feed Change? appeared first on MediaShift.

DigitalEd Panel: How to Get Better Newsletter Metrics

Panel Title: How to Get Better Newsletter Metrics

Moderator: Jason Alcorn, MediaShift
Panelists: Clare Carr, Parse.ly; Lindsay Goddard, New York Times; Brady Pierce, Greentech Media

Newsletters are a direct line to your audience. In a pivot-to-reader world, there’s arguably no product more valuable for digital publishers. Not surprisingly, newsletters have been one of the most exciting media segments to watch, and in 2018 we can expect even more innovation.

This live online panel will include a discussion with publishers who are at the forefront of using newsletter metrics to increase engagement, develop new products, and drive revenue for their businesses.

This free online panel is sponsored by Parse.ly. Parse.ly empowers companies to understand, own and improve digital audience engagement through data, so they can ensure the work they do makes the impact it deserves. All attendee emails will be shared with the webinar sponsor.

Handouts:

– Presentations will be available to participants.

Who should attend:

Journalists, editors, growth managers, marketers, publishers, non-profits, and content creators interested in learning about newsletter metrics.

Date and Time: February 7, 2017, 10 am PT / 1 pm ET

Free!

Register now for the online panel!

Note: If you can’t attend the live session, you can still register and see the archived video of the panel. Free registration for BigMarker is required.

About the Moderator:

Jason Alcorn is the metrics and impact editor at MediaShift. As a consultant he advises news organizations on business strategy and leadership and works with funders to develop program strategies. He also facilitates the Institute for Nonprofit News Emerging Leaders Council. Jason lives in Washington, D.C., with his family. You can follow Jason on Twitter at @jasonalcorn.

About the Panelists:

Clare Carr leads Parse.ly’s marketing team. She focuses on helping companies understand the power of audience’s attention. She contributes to MetricShift, Native Ad Institute, Digital Content Next, and speaks across the world on digital analytics, data, and marketing.

Lindsay Goddard is a product manager on the email team at The New York Times. She helps drive new features and and platform development across the email portfolio. Lindsay previously worked on email at Forbes and Oxford University Press. She holds an undergraduate degree from the University of New Mexico and a masters degree from New York University.

Brady Pierce is senior manager of digital marketing at Greentech Media, a creative strategies company that creates branded content including videos, podcasts and webinars. Brady previously worked at Yield10 Bioscience and Tufts University.

The post DigitalEd Panel: How to Get Better Newsletter Metrics appeared first on MediaShift.

Readers have never enjoyed greater access to content and the media industry has never been more competitive. Yet news outlets rely on the big platforms to deliver traffic, at increasing cost to the quality of their news content and bottom line.

As a publisher, for your project to survive and thrive you need to create a loyal audience — users hungry for content who satisfy their appetite on your site instead of skipping away for their next bite. The best way to measure your success is with a metric called recirculation.

If you’re unfamiliar with recirculation, this article will guide you through what it is, how to use it to maximize potential, and what it can achieve for your team.

What is recirculation?

Recirculation is a straightforward metric. It’s the percentage of users who visit another page of your website after they finish reading their first article. It’s the inverse of Google Analytics’ bounce rate, the percentage of readers who left your website without loading a second page or engaging with anything. And it’s much easier that bounce rate to follow.

With recirculation you can not only examine whether or not an article is performing well on average, but you can also begin to understand which pages your readers are likely to visit next, allowing you to choose — manually or algorithmically — the best links to include on each article page. This can do wonders for your core KPI.

In fact, there are two big reasons to track recirculation.

The first reason is to measure how well you’ve captured the loyalty of your audience. When retention goes up, as measured by recirculation, users are spending longer on your site, engaging more with your content, and hopefully starting a positive feedback loop to further increase loyalty. The second reason to track retention is to understand and increase depth, the number of pages users view on average each session, indicating both how interesting your content is and how well you package it.

How can you increase recirculation?

For starters, learn to link. If you’re publishing content you need to make sure your articles include links to other pages on your site. These links can be contained within the article’s text, or in your ‘read more’ sections. It sounds obvious, but when was the last time you considered how well you use links?

Make sure the links you insert into the text of your article are relevant, and if the subject forms part of a chain of articles on one issue, ensure the links have a logical progression that match the history of the story.

You can also insert tags on related topics of your article. Make sure they’re inserted at the top of your article, and that they remain static when the article scrolls down, to maximize visibility.

After you publish an article, check your analytics tool to see how well your article is performing and which links are performing the best. If recirculation is lower than your site’s average you can do two things to change it.

First, you can add a few cross-links to the article, but only if they lead to relevant articles. Using cross-links can boost recirculation as long as they lead to an article on a similar topic.

Secondly, make sure you have plenty of appealing articles in your ‘read more’ blocks. Your team may refer to them as ‘read also’, ‘related’, or other terms. As opposed to cross-links, include links that are unrelated to the subject of your article. Pique readers’ interests and can lead them down a rabbit hole of varied, interesting content on your site.

One thing you must remember if your articles tend to have several or large ‘read more’ sections is make sure you check your scrolling map.

A scrolling map allows you to see how many people finished reading your article by a specific point. For example, 75 percent might read down to one point, but only 45 percent make it to the next section, so place your most popular ‘read also’ links in the most-read section. This will go a long way towards maximizing your recirculation.

You’ve got the data but how do you measure?

A “typical” recirculation won’t be the same for everyone. If your audience comes from direct sources, rather than through social media, your recirculation rate will be higher.

Bear this in mind when choosing your links. If, for example, the majority of your readers come via Facebook, check which pages (if any) they visited next and include those links in your ‘read more’ blocks. For example, ask whether timely headlines or closely related stories are more effective. Do stories that performed well originally on Facebook also work when targeted to Facebook users on your site?

If two articles share the same number of page views, and you can’t decide which one to place first, check recirculation. The article with the higher rate will allow more of your readers to see more of your content, so pick that one.

Examples: Improvise and adapt to increase recirculation

The worst thing you can do for recirculation is not include any links at all. After all, you do want your readers to read more of your content, don’t you?

If fact, you only need a small increase in recirculation to get a large boost in page views, as two recent efforts by publishers, one in the Czech Republic and the other in South Africa, show.

We looked at two different websites that both experienced a major jump in page views over a three month period, Aktuálně.cz and The Citizen, news websites published in Czech and English respectively.

Aktualne.cz achieved a 4 percent rise in recirculation over three months and it saw its page views increase by 56 percent. The Citizen did even better. With an increase of 6 percent in recirculation over a three month period, its page views increased by an impressive 87 percent.

If these two websites can increase their pages views so exponentially with just a couple of percentage point rises, you don’t need to imagine what can be achieved with a 5 to 10 percent or higher rise in recirculation.

And that’s that. A good editorial team will use all the analytical tools it has at its disposal and recirculation is absolutely crucial to growing a project and improving the quality of the content you publish.

It’s vital as increased page views and audience size will improve other factors like ROI, in short, every aspect of your project can be improved if your editors harness the power of good recirculation.

Remember to always measure your recirculation rate and constantly consider how you can improve, both as an individual and as a team. After all, the best editorial teams are those driven by data.

Andrew Sweeney works at .io technologies, a digital analytics company that provides tools and services for publishers and e-commerce.

All images courtesy of the author.

The post Why Recirculation Is A Key Metric For News Publishers in 2018 appeared first on MediaShift.