Tracking and analyzing engagement data enables newsrooms to better understand who their audience is, and their needs, behaviors, and preferences. Newsrooms may use spreadsheets, dashboards, and written logs, among other digital tools, to document key metrics and engagement patterns to monitor growth, make informed editorial decisions, and identify marketing opportunities.
In March, I led a team affiliated with the Arthur L.Carter Journalism Institute in evaluating engagement data for Hell Gate, a New York-based news organization that boasts over 5,000 paid subscribers, another nearly 21,000 subscribers to its biweekly newsletter, Inbox Hell, which highlights the team’s favorite stories of the week, and about 20,000 subscribers to its daily morning newsletter, Morning Spew, which provides reporter analysis of daily news stories. We viewed our process of collecting, processing, and analyzing this data as one akin to creating an “audience data diary.”
Our primary goal was to create a document that Hell Gate could use to understand audience behavior and inform its editorial decisions. The secondary goal was to provide insights enabling the team to kickstart a digital marketing journey that would enhance reader retention and subscriber conversion.
We identified Hell Gate’s typical readers, tracked how reader growth progressed annually since the outlet’s launch in January 2022, discovered the beats readers enjoyed most, and how they have engaged with content.
Here’s how we built the diary:
Data aggregation
Hell Gate publishes on multiple platforms and seeks to engage its over 24,000 followers on X and 23,000 followers on Instagram. With the Hell Gate team’s support, we collected data from its website and social media accounts to assess how user engagement varied over the years and how the outlet’s followers interact with its content.
“One thing that made this plausible was our access to a lot of information from Hell Gate. With our Google spreadsheet, we could analyze all the numbers and really deduce what was good and what was bad,” said Paz Radovic, a Spanish-Community Correspondent at Documented and a member of my team who worked on platform analysis.
As we struggled to track down certain data on X due to deleted tweets and incomplete tweet analytics, perhaps due to the platform’s new ownership under Elon Musk, we focused on basic user interactions such as likes and favorites.
Data segmentation
Many organizations –– especially small and medium-sized –– use a CRM tool for their engagement and customer management needs. Some of these tools incorporate the functionalities and features of Google Analytics, but customize certain aspects to suit their brand and customer needs.
This is the case with Lede, which Hell Gate used at the time, and, which doubles as both a customer relationship management tool that tracks customer insights and an advanced analytics system for evaluating story performances. We sought to understand the terms Lede uses to measure performance, while comparing it with Google Analytics’, then cleaned and divided the data into manageable groups for easier analysis. For example, all data related to customer insights was grouped from Hell Gate’s launch and onward to track long-term trends, while engagement and social data were combined and analyzed year over year to evaluate performance across platforms.
Segmenting the data allowed us to identify and track inconsistencies and extract key insights. For example, we were able to determine the cause of a significant discrepancy between the total number of readers reported and the readers broken down by city (the reader number by city was inflated because of overlapping categories).
User personas
Subsequently, we developed four user personas with attributes such as political ideology, motivations, and preferred platforms, combining real data with some hypothetical traits to fill the gaps. These personas were modeled based on customer insights from Lede such as location, language, interest, and average time spent on the site, best performing topics, top themes of interest, paired with hypothetical information on gender, career, hobbies, and political ideologies.
We mapped potential gaps in the data to better understand and illustrate the characteristics and behaviors of the target audience — New Yorkers.
Reflections on methodology
We adopted a methodology for this project that would allow us to analyze whether Hell Gate’s readership was growing or stagnant. We evaluated the site’s growth numbers and identified key highlights based on readership behaviors, and then proceeded to create the user personas.
“The methodology framework is indeed the crux of the project. We created a framework that can be replicable for organizations, especially early news organizations who are thinking about audience [growth],” said Victoria Mortimer, Daily Beast’s audience analyst and a member of my team who handled data aggregation. “It is very hard to achieve goals if you do not have a specific methodology for each project that guides your analysis work. Something that helps you track your work daily.”
Data visualization and presentation of analysis
Our final audience data diary for Hell Gate was organized into the following sections.
A. Readers:
This section introduced information about user personas and interests, highlighting important demographic metrics that can be utilized for targeted marketing.
B. Brand powerhouse:
This section outlined average clicks –– number of times a user clicks on an ad or link within a page –– on Hell Gate’s website, as well as its unique monthly users. It showcased the company’s influence based on its growth numbers and engagement metrics.
C. Content engagement:
This section provided a thorough dive into article performance, assessing top themes, bylines, and search keywords –– top terms users search for on the Hell Gate website. We also created a table showing where most readers reside, both in New York City (its target market) and countries globally.
D. Recommendations and best practices:
In this section, we identified growth opportunities, such as underserved content areas and potential new audience segments. We highlighted insights that could enhance publishing efforts and audience strategy.
Photo by Gustavo Fring via Pexels.
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