Setting KPIs for your news and media business is not an easy job. You need to integrate various channels to understand how each of them reflect on your bottom line. Here’s a short guide on how to make sense out of it all.
For any media outlet, keeping a close connection with your audience is crucial in maintaining relevance and increasing the number of loyal consumers of your content. But, with so many channels used to distribute content, this is becoming increasingly difficult.
Your content gets commented on across social media, in discussion forums, and ultimately on your website. That’s a lot of channels to keep track of and, even if you manage to, you still need to understand what all of those likes, shares and comments really mean.
Establishing a good set of metrics and KPIs to track your content performance across the board is a fundamental step in understanding what the audience is telling you. If you can get this right, you can use this knowledge to adapt your content, engage with larger audiences, and monetize more efficiently.
Let’s Start with Your Website
Even if your media business dates back to the ‘dark ages’ of offline, you’ve probably introduced a website as one of the key channels to distribute your content. Publishing online content on a wide range of platforms has become the norm for most publishers. In doing so, it poses a key question – how does all of this fit into a single view of your overall success?
The number of website Users and Sessions is your first point of call. These metrics show how many people have effectively seen your content and how many times. You can then take a look at their demographics structure (Age, Gender) or geographical spread (Country, City). But these data don’t really tell you anything about engagement.
For that, you want to take a look at KPIs such as Average Session Duration, the number of Pages per Session, and ultimately Scroll Depth. These are a great starting point for monitoring and understanding website and content performance and come with popular free website analytics tools (Google Analytics or Microsoft’s Clarity), and are a starting point for monitoring and understanding website and content performance.
Don’t forget about SEO either. Whether you want to use one of the specialized SEO tools, such as SEMrush or Ahrefs, or remain with the basic Google Search Console KPIs (Impressions, Clicks, CTR), you need to have a way to understand how your content ranks on search engines, and how you can correct two things – the Average Ranking Position and the Domain Authority of your website.
For the fast-paced news industry, ranking in the Google News segment is essential, so you need to make sure your news website fulfills the content and technical requirements set by Google. But, you also need to take care of the website loading speed by monitoring the Core Web Vitals, which will become a decisive search ranking factor from May 2021.
If you want to know how Social Media and Advertising KPIs complete the view on news and media business performance, read the entire article on Adverity’s blog.
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