By: Elizabeth Coffey, Marketing G2 Digital Marketing Specialist

We’re living in the information age. Everywhere you look there’s a new revelation, a new statistic, or a new metric that can help your business thrive when properly applied. Still, it is easy to get overwhelmed, especially if you’re new to analytics or you’re not trained in marketing.

Everyone can benefit from analytics; the trick is knowing which metrics and KPIs are relevant to the different people on your teams. You want to keep your people informed, especially with how they’re performing, without overwhelming them, or worse paralyzing them with an abundance of unnecessary information.

Use the tips and tricks below to empower your news teams with the information they need to do their job effectively and efficiently.

1. Are these numbers relevant? – Like we touched on earlier, not all of the numbers that you have available to you will be relevant to all of the people on your news teams. For example, journalists might benefit from an overview of their stories’ performance with such metrics as time spent on article, web traffic, and engagement. They wouldn’t really get anything out of UTM tracking data.


2. Will access to these numbers have a positive impact on the performance of your teams? – Consider how the metrics you give your teams will affect their performance. Will the numbers negatively impact some best practices or processes? This is especially important when it comes to real-time data where the risk is getting stuck in the present, unable to look at the long-term impact of one’s work. For instance, journalists might be tempted to turn out quick, low-quality work with click-bait headlines to boost their performance in the here and now without thinking about the long-term outlook for your news organization’s brand. For editors, it may be helpful to see the most popular news story articles over a specified period of time rather than a bunch of real-time data.


3. Are these numbers already available to your teams? – Your employees may already be doing their own performance tracking and may already have the numbers that you want to provide to them. Having data in many different formats can be confusing and make it harder to make decisions. Try to consolidate the tools you use internally so your employees aren’t tracking metrics differently from one another.


4. Do your employees know how to interpret and use the data that they're given? – If your employees don’t understand the data and the metrics that you’ve given them, the whole initiative will be quickly ignored and forgotten. Take the time to explain the different metrics and what they mean to your teams. Relate the metrics to their workflow so they know what to do when KPIs are not aligning with organizational goals.


5. Does what your measuring align with your organizational goals and strategy? – You don’t have to make use of all of the data that’s available to you. Don’t allow numbers that aren’t relevant to you and your strategy get in the way of your organizational goals.

How is your news organization measuring its performance goals?