Hundreds of people work in our newsrooms. They have different roles and audiences, and cover different topics, but they share one thing: every morning they find at least one report from our content analytics team in their email inbox. How these reports are made, why we make them and what do editors learn from them?
Our business analytics section consists of four specialised teams:
1. Integration and reporting team
2. Web analytics team
3. Data journalism team
4. Our content analytics team
Our team supports editors and product managers so that they have all the data and insights they need, both for their daily work and for strategic decisions. While we used to operate more decentrally, with each newsroom having its own analyst, today we work as one team across titles and projects.
Dozens of reports a day
We work with data from more than fifty different sources, and the key ones for us are above all Google Analytics, GTM, NetMonitor, SimilarWeb and readership data from MediaProjekt.
We put this data together, create meaningful views and, above all, interpret it for the needs of the newsrooms, so that editors have all the important information for their work.
Editors have access to data in several places. They can watch data in real time in the IO platform, and like most people here they have access to all the key reports in Tableau.
To give them the best service, however, we send reports directly to their email. Every editor thus receives an email report every day, created in Tableau from the previous day, showing which articles were read the most. Because certain trends and topics recur periodically, the report also includes a section on which content had the highest readership and viewership a year ago. Once a week, editors also receive their own personal author report on how successful their content was, which article worked and which did not.
At the same time we produce large reports where creators find really everything: traffic, what is read the most, how loyal users are and where visitors come to the website from. And of course, alongside the automated reports, we also produce many custom reports, typically background materials for a website redesign or a change in content strategy.
Qualitative data fill in the picture
A large part of our work is interpreting quantitative data from various sources. But not everything can be read from them, so we also work with softer, qualitative sources. Typically public opinion surveys such as the Market & Media & Lifestyle survey by Median. We also collect qualitative data in-house, for example tracking movement across the website with heatmaps in Clarity, which give us more insight into where people click and what really interests them.
Thanks to the combination of quantitative and qualitative data, we are able to unravel even complex questions very efficiently, such as why a website’s traffic has started to decline. Is it because it publishes fewer articles? Has one of the promotional channels dropped out? Or is some society-wide trend undermining it? Usually it is a combination of factors, and we can avoid guessing and instead assign them a clear weight.
To measure data this well, the careful work of our colleagues from the web analytics team comes first, of course. They make sure we have reliable data on practically every click and scroll (and they are also looking for new team members!)
I am proud of our team’s work and would like to thank my colleagues Lukáš Doffek and Kateřina Zatočilová. The greatest satisfaction and highest praise is the fact that our editors really work with our materials. The proof is that when they cannot find their report in their email, they miss it and immediately ask for it.
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