Google Analytics (GA) is by far the most used, go-to analytics tool for websites. It is key to understanding KPI’s such as Pageviews, Unique Visitors, Bounce Rate etc. but it remains generic for general online presences such as e-commerce companies or corporate sites.
But for online publishers, who have very specific industry needs, GA is not enough. Publishers require a complete, detailed analysis of their entire readership, rather than the condensed analysis that GA offers. Additionally, GA’s analysis is overly simplistic for publishers requiring in depth data. For instance, reader’s topics and keywords of interest are not covered. Thus, GA’s reports on most viewed content links are of no immediate use to publishers. Of course, you are welcome to spend hours every day/week/month trying to make sense of this data by adding layers of tags, events, etc.
Therefore, we have listed below two tools we believe are ideal for online publishers to make the most of their data.
Chartbeat: Real-time Analytics for Newsrooms to Optimize Titles and Story Placements
Chartbeat, the content intelligence platform for publishers, empowers media companies to build loyal audiences with real-time and historical editorial analytics across desktop, social, and mobile platforms. Chartbeat helps digital publishing organizations understand what, within their content, is keeping people engaged.
Key Benefit:
Chartbeat belongs to “Real Time Analytics” category of the tech stack, while Google Analytics can be primarily classified under “General Analytics”. Chartbeat lets you know what pages on the website are being viewed the most and how many users are on your site in real time.
Chartbeat tracking code checks in with each open session to your site, effectively asking each person on your site “where are you and what are you doing now?”. This enables you to give a uniquely accurate assessment of how many active visits are occurring at any one moment in time as you know precisely when a given page session ends, whereas Google tracking does not capture this.
In our opinion, the key differentiation from GA is real-time visual analytics based on each published content piece.
Magnet®: Better Decision Making and Automating Time-Consuming Tasks Using NLP While Increasing User Loyalty
Magnet is a publisher-specific solution that enables media and publishing brands to deliver more engaging and personalized user experiences. (Check out Magnet’s top features by following this link)
Klangoo, the developer of Magnet, created the editorial-specific Magnet® Smart Analytics (MSA) which offers in-depth topical analysis of your publishing and consumption. It, therefore, allows your team to automatically find answers hidden deep within your data.
Through its comprehensive dashboard, MSA provides in-depth data about audience collective interests, your publishing stats, and ROI based on categories and names. MSA can you help you answer questions that neither GA nor Chartbeat can such as:
- How many articles about Donald Trump did we publish this month?
- Which company coverage got the highest number of views on our website this year?
- Which political group news on my website is more interesting to Facebook Mobile users?
To conclude, online publishers should take advantage of all the available tools to truly understand the data gathered. Google Analytics helps with understanding the overall performance of the website, Chartbeat gives a clear picture of where users reached the website from and what is keeping them engaged now, and finally Magnet allows publishers to be efficient while making better consumption/user-base-focused decisions.
Start building a winning content strategy today with Magnet® Smart Analytics.