The digital audience development team at Caracol TV, a free-to-air television network in Colombia that has aired in more than 80 countries, wanted to create an efficient model. They had two priorities: implementing Google Analytics and creating a strong, technically advanced dashboard.

Ricardo Suárez, head of digital audience development, said his team created a first version of their dashboard and quickly sent out a poll to see how their departments liked working with it. After gathering feedback and recommendations about the usage from newsroom staff, they continued to evolve the dashboard.

“Some of this feedback was that we had to step on the brake a little bit in order to optimise this tool and this interface,” Suárez said. “The idea was to create more advanced functions to have some tools that could be more specific in terms of analysis, but also take into account that they were user friendly.”

Using feedback to improve

The team created five versions of the dashboard based on feedback, but also taking into account the metrics and how they were going to make it work with their specific KPIs, Suárez said.

Their dashboard has three separate tabs, Suárez said:

1. The first focuses on what to publish.
2. The second focuses on what to promote: “What are the best channels in terms of performance in terms of content? We’re using a metric that is really important, which is CTR.”
   
3. The third tab is the audience tab. “It’s to bring the main data of Google Analytics in terms of users, demographic data, and there are times when they access the Web site. This is the area where journalists see how the site is working at a specific time.”

They are working on some pending issues.

“We are working with a consulting company, an external one, to deal with data, and we are generating a roadmap of adoption of a dashboard by the newsrooms,” Suárez said.

Taking a deeper dive with data

Looking to the future, Suárez anticipates creating even deeper habits within the departments to build a data-driven newsroom that is based on making decisions through data and metrics and not gut feelings.

“So we qualify them. We train them in order to bring this digital culture into the newsroom,” Suárez said.

Caracol is working on a sixth version of the dashboard to make it even more user-friendly and ensure the information is clear and easy to understand.

This case study originally appeared in the INMA report The Benefits and Risks of Media Data Democratisation.

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