Web Metrics For Print Publications Going Online
There’s a hidden problem most traditional print publishers have when transitioning to the online medium: metrics. There are more ways to measure readership in the online arena than a single circulation statement, and not everyone is paying attention to the right measurement: page views, unique visitors, time spent on the site or on a page. Let’s take a look at what the measurements mean to the bottom line.
Initially, we’re going to assume that the publication website is supported by advertising on the traditional CPM model, which is to say that every time a web page is viewed an ad earns 1/1000 of the CPM rate. With CPC, the model popularized by Google Adwords, the publisher is only paid when an ad is clicked on, which changes the rules a little bit. We’ll look at that scenario at the end of this report.
The Page View
If you’re getting your income from a CPM advertising arrangement, the metric that measures your income is CPM. (Page Views * CPM rate)/1000 = Revenue. Want to raise your advertising income? You can raise your rates or you can increase your page views. What does this mean for editorial?
You may recall an incident where new Tribune owner, Sam Zell, was addressing his employees and some of them took great offense when he suggested that if readers liked to read fluffy news, then they might want to write some fluffy stories. Sam Zell just might understand the online business model better than some of his editors and reporters.
With a printed newspaper or magazine, you buy the whole package of stories and it may not be readily apparent precisely what the newspaper or magazine was bought for. With a website, you know exactly what’s being read, and you accrue compensation in direct scale (except in the case of CPC, which we’ll cover later). So let’s say you have two stories: one on illegal parking tickets and one on a lost kitty. To a journalist, illegal parking tickets will be the more important story. However, if the parking ticket story was viewed 1000 times and the lost kitty story was viewed 1200 times, the fluffy story made more money for the publication.
When entering the online media world, you have to look at the performance of the individual story. To my knowledge, nobody has said “quit serving the public interest and focus on fluff.” On the other hand, if you ignore popular topics when compensation is tracked on a story by story basis, you’re asking to go out of business. Period.
When you track your page views, you’ll also want to take into account which stories are spread out over multiple pages. Many publications will limit the number of words on a web page to something between 500 and 1000, so many stories and columns will stretch over 2 to 5 individual pages. With each successive click that’s required to continue reading the story, you’re going to lose a few readers, but a story spread over 5 pages can generate more revenue with fewer readers than a 1 page story with more people reading it.
Unique Viewers
Unique viewers are what you measure if you want an online equivalent to print circulation. Unique viewers isn’t a completely accurate measurement, unless 100% of your audience are registered users. Unique viewers measures IP addresses (the address of the computer from which the web page is accessed), so if two people share a computer or one person views from both home and at work, or if the same IP shows up for an office of 20 people, you’re going to have a false report. That said, this is still useful for an approximation of your reach.
What else is the unique viewers metric good for? Some advertisers will be interested in how many individuals you reach as a supplement to demographic information. Used in conjunction with page views, it can be useful to determine how many pages each visitor reads and contrasting the unique viewers with page views on individual articles to check for multiple reads and contrast popularity between stories of varying page length. I suppose it might be useful for publishers to brag about, as seems to be the case, but unique viewers is a tangential number in comparison to the dollar-earning page views.
Time on Site / Time on Page
I’ve never understood why normally rational people get excited by this metric. The amount of time spent on a site is secondary to the number of pages viewed on the site. The amount of time spent on a page is just plan silly. You make the same amount of money whether the viewer stays on a single page for 1 minute or 5 minutes. By concentrating on the amount of time, you shift your attention from the revenue-generating statistics. As a supplemental statistic, it can be useful for contrasting time spent on the site with number of page views. It can also be useful for determining if your audience seems to have a limit for how long they’ll spend on your site in a given session.
In the CPM advertising world, you start out with page views and then read the nuances of your traffic report by combining page views with unique viewers and time measurements.
Looking at your metrics in these terms also has some direct bearing on two online publishing buzz topics: blogs and video.
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