Audience data experts give advice on what metrics, behaviours to prioritise

By Paula Felps

INMA

Nashville, Tennessee, United States

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By Sarah Schmidt

INMA

Brooklyn, New York, United States

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By Jessica Spiegel

INMA

Portland, Oregon, United States

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As analytics become ever more important to media success, news publishers and journalists can find themselves awash in numbers without clear ways to interpret how they can lead to revenue. News media companies are also looking for ways to act on metrics to support reader engagement.

During the recent INMA Subscription Growth Master Class, media leaders discussed the best ways to measure engagement, the new ways to stimulate habitual reading, and the most important subscription KPI.

In his summary of the event, INMA Readers First Initiative Lead Greg Piechota shared that a survey revealed most attendees said they focus on measuring user activities (e.g., article views or time spent), loyalty (e.g., active days), popularity (e.g., number of users), and conversions (e.g., to register, subscribe, renew).

On the relationship side, Piechota added a reminder about the importance of the relationship economy: “Customers choose your product not just for what it does but because it helps them achieve their goals and invokes positive emotions around success.”

The New York Times cycle of discovery

As analytics become ever more important to media success, publishers and journalists can find themselves awash in numbers without clear ways to interpret how they can lead to revenue.

The metric hierarchy created by Kendell Timmers, vice president of data and insights at The New York Times, has led to a more useful measurement cycle, replacing the “cycle of doom” with the “cycle of discovery.” It starts with a data-driven planning stage.

 Kendell Timmers, vice president of data and insights at The New York Times, has helped create a more useful measurement cycle, replacing the “cycle of doom” with the “cycle of discovery.”
Kendell Timmers, vice president of data and insights at The New York Times, has helped create a more useful measurement cycle, replacing the “cycle of doom” with the “cycle of discovery.”

Preplanning is based on previous tests and correlations. A few leading indicators are selected that would work across many tests (like articles per session or newsletter opens).

For engagement, Timmers looks for the factors that seem correlated with a decrease in churn: “Is it, say, more active days per week? Or is it coming week after week over the course of the month?”

She pointed out indicators should not be highly correlated with each other; they should be working on slightly different parts of the business. To estimate how the indicators transition to anchors, Timmers uses past tests and correlations if available.

Once the testing period is underway, The Times runs many tests, each assigned to one leading indicator. Timmers developed a template for presenting reports that consistently shows leading indicators on the first page to make things consistent and easy to compare.

After the testing period, Timmers updates correlations based on results and considers any new business-driven leading metrics.

This is a big change from the previous model when the group was always saying “we think” all of these products made a difference and only had anecdotal information for backup. Now they have real numbers, Timmers said: “Something you can take to the board and say, Here’s why we have a product team. Here’s what they did.

The psychology of streaks

Deepening engagement with casual users could be as simple as cheering them on. Jackie Silverman, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Delaware, said as technology evolves, consumers can track their behaviours over time, and in some cases, keeping that streak intact becomes the goal. For her research, a “streak” is defined as behaviours performed consecutively three or more times.

Streaks may tap into a feeling of basic comfort people and animals find in consistency,  Jackie Silverman, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Delaware, said.
Streaks may tap into a feeling of basic comfort people and animals find in consistency, Jackie Silverman, assistant professor of marketing at the University of Delaware, said.

The psychology behind the importance of streaks may lie in the basic comfort that people and animals find in consistency, she added. The gamification aspect of it — earning points or rewards for maintaining a streak — also helps drive habit and behaviour.

“People like getting positive feedback, seeing a little notification saying something positive or something reassuring,” Silverman explained. “And as a society, we’re all getting more and more used to getting that sort of messaging and badges and awards on these platforms for all sorts of behaviours. So I think getting that feedback is also quite valuable to consumers and getting feedback for streaks helps bolster that streaks are valuable and positive.”

Leveraging streaks could be the answer to getting casual users to engage. Heavy users who are already spending lots of time on the site are already engaged, so there’s not much of a reason to encourage them by rewarding streaks: “I think that these more casual consumers are where you might see the most lift from highlighting streaks,” she said.

The most important subscription KPI

Every news media publication’s goal is to have more paid subscribers who remain engaged for the long-term.

Robert Skrob, best-selling author of The Retention Point, said there are a variety of metrics used in the news media, including annual subscription rates. But a renewal rate of, say, 70% can “obscure the fact that first-year renewal rates are actually much lower than people who have subscribed for two years. And that second-year renewal rates are lower than people who have subscribed for three years. And so on.”

The result?

“When you add a bunch of new subscribers, the annual retention rate often goes down because you suddenly have more people in the year one renewal term,” Skrob said.

Author Robert Skrob thinks it’s more useful to work on improving renewal rates by subscription term by looking at monthly recurring revenue (MRR).
Author Robert Skrob thinks it’s more useful to work on improving renewal rates by subscription term by looking at monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

Instead, Skrob thinks it’s more useful to work on improving renewal rates by subscription term by looking at monthly recurring revenue (MRR). The number one growth metric, he said, is the 24- to 36-month MRR forecast.

“Look at your churn rate, the number of new subscriptions, and forecast what your MRR will be at 12, 24, and 36 months from now,” Skrob said. “When publications do this, it completely changes their subscription growth in a good way because now they understand where the churn is happening — and where they can focus to have the biggest impact.”

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