Learn readership preferences with Yandex.Metrica content analytics

Yandex.Metrica, a global all-round web analytics tool, introduces a new feature for online publishers – content reports. This update provides a clear and instant understanding of how the content works and what can be done to increase the audience engagement.

(PRESS RELEASE) MOSCOW, 19-Sep-2019 — /EuropaWire/ — Yandex.Metrica is an extensive, ever-growing toolkit that helps companies know every detail of their online performance. And, to top it off, it’s completely free to use.

Challenges for publishers in 2019

After quite a challenging 2018, for online publishers it becomes more and more important to understand how quickly posts gain traffic, where the audience comes from, which articles are most popular, and how exactly people read the publications.

According to a survey of 120 digital publishers of all shapes and sizes conducted by Ezoic, audience growth remains the highest priority in the industry (34%), with over 43% of the respondents acknowledging growing quality traffic as the biggest challenge. Contrary to the popular opinion that people tend to read less, half of the respondents (47%) plan to produce more long form content in 2019.

Association of Online Publishers’ most recent research has revealed that non-advertising revenue growth is a high priority for 78% of AOP members in the UK, with 67% suggesting the introduction of new products and services or expansion as a priority strategy. To identify new solutions that will bring more revenues in the future it’s crucial to understand how exactly readers interact with the content, and what makes them come back again and again – or turns them away forever.

Track audience reactions in real time – free of charge and on the go

New content reports from Yandex.Metrica allow publishers to monitor the performance of every single publication in real time and instantly optimize content and distribution – totally free of charge, with the summary data being updated every minute.

The reports show such pivotal engagement indicators as:

• number of users and page views,
• average reading time,
• recirculation – the percentage of visitors who viewed more than one post or article on the website, meaning they found the content interesting,
• full scrolls and full reads for a specific piece of content or a whole category.

The popular content section shows how some articles rise to the top, while others drop down: titles change right in front of you without the page reloading. The click-through sources section shows which channels provide audience flow.

Reports on specific content provide detailed information on how visitors moved along in the text. The full scroll funnel shows where people usually scroll down to: the more rectangular the funnel, the more visitors scroll to the end of the article. The full read funnel shows whether visitors are on long enough to finish the text, taking content interaction time into account.

The reports also help you understand audience distribution by the format traffic comes in from – desktop or mobile.

The category report lets you compare user interest for different topics and determine the most popular ones. On one category page, you can see how invested readers are in the content. This information is available from the full read and full scroll funnels generated for all the content in the category.

A perfect recipe to successful publications

Content reports add depth to your analyses of live content:

• Understand which articles people more often read to the end – these have a high rate of full reads.
• Find articles that increase engagement (with high recirculation rates) – these are the ones that readers are more willing to click through to other materials.
• Assess how long content will continue to drive traffic by looking at view dynamics which shows how the number of views changed over the reporting period. If views don’t fall over time, it means that the content is evergreen and adding it to the recommendations section can help attract even more visitors.

How Yandex.Metrica evolves web analytics tools for media publishers

Earlier in the year Yandex.Metrica introduced a new feature in its service allowing to track clicks from content recommendation platforms and messengers and see detailed performance of each content piece. New sources have enhanced the previous list^[1], opening new horizons for publishers in terms of content performance and user engagement analysis.

As a next step, author reports will show which authors create the most engaging content and bring in the most views. It’ll also help settle certain disagreements between editors and authors, since questions about title choice and article length can quickly be resolved with numbers.

In the nearest future, content reports will be enhanced with other useful data, allowing publishers to find even more ideas to develop their platforms. For example, readers’ preferences will be split by regions, and types of visitors (e.g. subscribers vs non-subscribers) can be compared by their typical behavior on the page.

Right now, publishers can also leverage other Yandex.Metrica features to boost their media performance. In the essential set of Yandex.Metrica reports, they can analyze how their marketing channels work and keep the share of non-human traffic in check, find reasons for low engagement by watching anonymous recordings of how users interacted with their site, and spot issues with displaying content on different devices and browsers.

How to enable content reports

To use the content reports, Schema markup is required. For any help with the markup setup, please contact us via feedback form.

View content reports on the Yandex.Metrica demo tag.

[1] The previous list included 8 traffic sources: traffic from ads, links, search engines, social networks, mails, as well as direct, internal and cached page traffic.

SOURCE: Yandex