The Truth About Traffic
Jason Fry |
May 10, 2010 8:02 a.m.
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Why should you want to know your traffic numbers? Not so much for the numbers themselves, but for what they can tell you about the effectiveness of your writing, where your readers are coming from, and where more of them are to be found. These days, a sportswriter’s job (or that of any journalist) extends beyond reporting and writing to playing a role in the larger conversation among readers, a feedback loop that makes existing readers more loyal and brings in new ones.
Some writers instinctively resist learning about their traffic. They see their job as getting and telling the story — pretty hard jobs in their own right. How the story is presented to readers is someone else’s responsibility — and numbers are the province of the bean-counters on the business side. Moreover, there’s a suspicion that publishers will use traffic numbers to make coverage decisions, opting for a diet heavy on slideshows and scandal.
I know, because I used to feel that way, too. I saw traffic, promos, teasers and everything else as part of the vast category of things that were Not My Job. It was a print mentality reinforced by early stints as a Web guy writing about low-traffic subjects such as mortgage-backed securities. (I had no idea exotic forms of those would one day threaten to ruin the world economy — I just thought they were incomprehensible and boring.)
That all changed for me when I started a baseball blog with a friend as an experiment to learn the rudiments of blogging. (As recounted here.) But within a couple of weeks of beginning blogging, I found myself poring over Faith and Fear in Flushing’s daily traffic reports. Why had a blog post I felt was really well-written failed to find an audience, while one I felt missed the mark did well? Who was linking to us, and what were they responding to — or misinterpreting? Was a choice of headlines making certain posts rank high in searches, while others were buried? As half of a blog, I was my own publisher – and without a big publisher’s brand behind me, traffic was very much part of my job. It was a revelation, one that made me wonder how I’d ever seen things otherwise in my day job. After that, I was much more curious about traffic, and much more helpful about promos and every other aspect of trying to make something I’d written connect.
Besides, the fact that you aren’t seeing your traffic numbers doesn’t mean your bosses aren’t. Without good metrics, writers wind up using crude leaderboard tools such as “Most Viewed” or “Most Emailed” to try and see what’s effective. If conversations about your traffic are going on within your news organization, it’s in your interest to be a part of them — and to have the best possible tools to inform that discussion.
Last week I chatted about traffic and measurement tools with Trei Brundrett, who leads the product-and-technology team for SB Nation, a network of predominantly team-specific sports blogs. Brundrett and his team just released a new dashboard allowing SB Nation’s bloggers to see a mix of real-time and historic traffic data, with great detail about how readers were reaching their blogs.
For those interested in the techie details, Brundrett explained that SB Nation had previously used a diverse collection of tools to measure traffic, from Site Meter to Google Analytics and Chartbeat.
“Our bloggers were using Site Meter and trying to extract this information,” Brundrett says. “We were using Google Analytics and trying to divine these things after the fact.”
SB Nation wanted to marry Google Analytics’ historical data with real-time data, giving its bloggers the ability to see traffic over time as well as up-to-the-moment data about it — along with information about what search terms were driving traffic and who was linking to a post, talking it up on Twitter or sharing it on Facebook. (And how much traffic those links were creating.) To do so, SB Nation settled on a mix of data from Google Analytics and Clicky.
“We had to put all of it together to get an experience where you have a feedback loop, and a real-time one so you can adjust,” Brundrett says, adding that “the conversation is so much more real-time now.”
Brundrett notes that communities gather around successful blogs — but are bigger than those blogs, including readers using Twitter and Facebook and other blogs concerned with the same teams and sports. Or, as Brundrett puts it, “communities travel.”
Brundrett says no part of SB Nation’s dashboard shows a leaderboard of most-trafficked posts, noting wryly that “some people blog about the Kansas City Royals.” Rather, the emphasis is on unique visitors and where links are coming from — which lets bloggers quickly see what’s being said.
Knowing that information, he says, “brings you closer to your audience. It helps you understand how they are trying to find the information that they want and where they’re going to try and find it.” And that audience doesn’t wait around, he adds: “The news cycle has accelerated so much that you can’t wait two days [for metrics]. You have to dive right into it.”
As a final piece of the puzzle, Brundrett notes that SB Nation is open about its traffic numbers — for potential advertisers, readers and bloggers within the network. Among other things, that lets its bloggers see what posts are working for their peers — and ask them for advice.
“That’s definitely an open dialogue,” he says. “You have to get real about what your numbers are if you want to improve them, and understand how you’ll grow.”
Jason Fry is a freelance writer and media consultant in Brooklyn, N.Y. He spent more than 12 years at The Wall Street Journal Online, serving as a writer, columnist, editor and projects guy. While at WSJ.com he edited and co-wrote The Daily Fix, a daily roundup of the best sportswriting online. He blogs about the Mets at Faith and Fear in Flushing, and about the newspaper industry at Reinventing the Newsroom. Write to him at jason.fry@gmail.com, visit him on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.
