Friday’s #MetricShift Twitter chat is all about which analytics tools we use, so here’s my list.
I prepared it for a recent gathering of college newspaper editors and advisers, the College Media Association’s spring conference held March 12-15 in New York City.
Speaking to college students made me think about how we measured success back at The Collegian, my old newspaper at Jamestown College in North Dakota. We’d check the racks to see how many copies of the free paper had been picked up. Sometimes that was an honest measure of our appeal, at least once it was an attempt at censure and more times than I’d like to admit it might have been a prank.
We’ve come a long way as an industry since then. Our data now is more reliable (though it still doesn’t give us all the answers), and analytics can be a legitimate career for aspiring journalists.
Choosing the right tools to help us make sense of that data is an important decision for companies. The right tools support your mission rather than distract from it. The right tools save time and money. With the right tools you stop fighting and begin to understand your audience.
Here, then, are my slides from #CMANYC16 — hint: find the list of analytics tools we use at lohud.com at slide 26:
Join us for the #MetricShift chat Friday, March 25, at 1 p.m. Eastern on Twitter to discuss the analytics tools you use most.
Anjanette Delgado is an audience analyst at Gannett and http://lohud.com. She also writes for USC Annenberg’s Media Impact Project.