During a stop on the two-day INMA study tour in Amsterdam, we took a deep dive into DPG Media’s editorial metrics — a sophisticated framework that involves measuring long- and short-term metrics and establishing engagement scores for content.

Pieter Verbeke, editorial insights and growth, later told me that DPG developed the KPI framework last year and has been implementing it since January. He said journalists are being trained by local editorial analysts, who are embedded in the newsroom.

The new KPIs, he told the study tour, are designed to be more actionable.

“Data in the newsroom can be overwhelming,” Verbeke said. “Insights need to be actionable and guide our editorial teams in making changes.”

Here’s how DPG now looks at content metrics:

This system ensures teams are analysing metrics live, daily, and longer term — and that metrics are paired with specific roles. I love this framework for a lot of reasons and chief among them is the ability to make metrics more actionable.

Verbeke offered an example: 60% of DPG’s users land on the homepage, but 25% of those users never click through to anything. 

“Context mix drives bounce rate,” Verbeke said. “To reduce the homepage bounce rate, we need to improve the context mix.”

Bounce rate improvement is a key operational goal for homepage editors. They’ve focused on reducing the bounce rate by adopting a broadcast schedule, guided by understanding which user needs perform better at which times of day, as well as other data points.

Verbeke said the editorial analysts are currently working on developing and improving dashboards to make them more role-specific. 

“Our team is co-responsible for setting goals for editorial teams and monitoring them subsequently,” he said. “We have been using goals in the newsroom for most metrics for a couple of years now: users, qualitative users, pageviews, article pageviews, video views, loyal readers, new paygate subscriptions … . What we are now trying to do is to create more focus by giving each role only two or three metrics to follow.”

DPG also has established engagement scores for content, understanding engagement is key to driving subscription sales and reducing churn. Anyone who has spent time with data analytics knows there’s no perfect engagement metric — so DPG crafted one of its own.

The engagement score is built upon nine underlying metrics under the categories of frequency of visits, volume per visiting day, and depth of product use. Understanding engagement allows the editorial teams to focus on strategies for improving it, Verbeke said.

Verbeke ended his talk by offering five pieces of advice for others:

1. Embrace data in the newsroom.

2. Create a framework for editorial metrics.

3. Pair metrics to different editorial roles.

4. Identify actionable, live metrics.

5. Improve these metrics to improve subscriptions.

I later asked Verbeke what advice he’d give to newsrooms that are looking to improve their editorial metrics. Here’s what he said:

“The first step is to look at all the metrics that are currently being reported and ask yourself the question: What’s the relationship between them? Are they leading or lagging? Should we look at it live or less frequently? And which roles have the most impact on the live leading metrics on a daily basis?”

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