By: Elizabeth Coffey, Marketing G2 Digital Marketing Specialist

Numbers are great but if no one knows how to interpret the data you get from your analytics and use it effectively to make informed decisions, you might as well not be collecting any data at all.

Many companies including news media organizations do a good job of collecting data but a bad job of interpreting it. Passing on raw data and numbers to your news teams is a great way to get them to tune you out and hope that your initiative for a more data-driven organization is quickly forgotten.

Use the tips and tricks below to make your data and metrics more digestible and useful to your managers and their teams. Making the move to a more data-driven company may be complicated but it’s essential to your news organization's survival in the current economic climate.

1. Include context with your numerical data – Explain why the numbers went up or down, where the readers came from, and what they read when they came to your site. Clarify how this hour, day, week, month, quarter is different from other time periods of the same length and if the data is unusual, different, or unexpected.


2. Determine and report key takeaways – What can be learned from the data? What plan of action can be extrapolated? You want to help your teams understand what happened and how to make their successes sustainable over time while fixing anything that went wrong.


3. Know who you need to talk to within your news orgnization – Talk to the people within your news teams that can drive actionable, organizational change based on the data and key takeaways that you deliver to them. Determine the frequency with which to deliver these insights based upon your organization’s needs and publishing schedule.

How are you delivering data to your news teams?