Station Analytics System

Member Station website audience crossed an important threshold in July 2017. For the first time since NPR has been tracking aggregate station web traffic, there were more sessions on mobile devices that on desktop/laptop devices.  

Here's why it matters:

Last week was our monthly analytics webinar, where we gather together the top insights across the system on both audience and engagement. 

As you might expect, election coverage was a big focus for the system this month, and we broke down  audience consumption of election coverage, as well as its impact on retention rate. And the results are significant: politics and election coverage had more than double the one-week retention rate of the previous 12 weeks. 

One of the many helpful customizations in the Station Analytics System is the collection of public media specific meta data.  In addition to the default page data, additional information is tracked and stored in Custom Dimensions which can easily be added to standard or custom Google Analytics reports. This post will explain how to add the necessary information to your website so that it can easily be tracked by Google Analytics.

We’re pleased to announce that the Devices Dashboard is now available in the Station Analytics System (SAS)! The dashboard will add to our new tab titled “Sources”, and provide stations the opportunity to compare website traffic trends across those visitors using Desktop, Smartphone and Tablet. You will also be able to view what those trends look like compared to the average station. This chart shows information about website traffic only (and does not include information about streaming or on-demand traffic). 

Recently, the station analytics team was asked to help solve a debate in a local newsroom. This station was trying to decide if it would be  beneficial to supplement its strong local coverage with some national news from the NPR API. Since we have data about web performance for over 200 stations, we were glad to offer some insight. We started by looking at a group of 25 stations with strong digital newsrooms and monthly users between 50k and 300k. We found that, in these stations, local news drove higher engagement and encouraged users to come back.

Attention Stations! NPR Digital Services will be hosting an all-station Twitter chat to explore the Station Analytics System's Analytics Dashboard on Wednesday, March 4th from 3-4 p.m. ET using the #NPRChats tag.

#NPRChats is an informal way for NPR Digital Services to talk with and answer questions from our Member Stations about a different topic or theme each month.

The upcoming March 4th chat will focus on the SAS Analytics Dashboard—one of the most important tools available for evaluating your station’s digital strategy! NPR Digital Service’s own Michelle Bellettiere (@NPRBelle), Digital Analytics Senior Manager, will be joining the chat to answer any questions you may have about Analytics Dashboard features and benefits.

On Demand audio measurement works very similarly to webcast measurement.

We need to access your logs to process them for On Demand metrics, via a FTP account where we can download the logs nightly. Please note these are not the same logs used for SoundExchange reporting nor live streaming measurement - these are on-demand specific files.

On August Station Analytics insights webinar we talked about data that was collected using custom variables in Google Analytics.  If you missed that webinar you can view the video. For Core Publisher stations the digital services developers handled the set up, but if you are not using Core Publisher here is how you can start tracking additional data about your site.

Mobile traffic has once again hit a new peak for our station sites and we eagerly anticipate the time when more of our traffic will come from mobile and from tablet than from desktop devices. All this growth can lead us to want to know more about our mobile users - who are they, what are they doing, are we helping them find what they are looking for?

Limitations of Segments in Google Analytics

Last month we launched our project to understand the public media audience lifecycle by using better segmentation. This month we are looking into one of those segments to gain insight into whether our new users are returning to become loyal users. The key to growing our digital audience is attracting new users to our sites.

In late 2013 Google Analytics added demographic information to its capabilities, allowing reports to be viewed and segmented by user characteristics like age and gender.  This information comes through the use of Google's ad network tagging and it determined using a combination of estimates based online behavioral data or Google+ information when it is available.  The results can be informative but are also limited.  

Ever have one of those days when the next big thing has just launched and everyone is waiting for the good news, but instead of spiking, Google Analytics seems to suddenly have flat-lined? Before you have a coronary there are few things to keep in mind.

The Station Analytics System adds a number of benefits over the standard Google Analytics tag. One of these is the creation of a number of custom variables design to track common elements of articles.  You can now summarize pageviews and visits by Author, Keywords, Source Organization or Program. In this video you can learn how to create custom reports that use these customized fields to track station specific data.  If you don't have time for the video you can download templates for some of the custom variables from the table below.