Analytics

Our Analytics Service provides digital business intelligence for NPR stations, answering key questions on audience reach, engagement, content, and monetization. Based on system-wide data, we share key trends, actionable insights, deep analysis, station best practices, and analytics training and support on all of a station's key digital platforms: live streaming, on-demand audio listening, website usage, NPR One, and more. At the core of the service are regular webinars and the custom measurement and dashboards of the Station Analytics System.

Looking for a specific topic from a webinar or blog post? Check out our index of analytics topics.

Have you been seeing messages in your Google Analytics account pushing you to upgrade to Universal Analytics? If you haven't, then you probably aren't looking at your reports enough.  If you have, you can go ahead and ignore them for now.

The most basic reason for you to ignore these is that if you are using the Station Analytics System (SAS) tag won't be supporting Universal Analytics anytime soon. Here's why we've decided to wait:  

On our November Station Analytics Insights webinar we presented some data about the tremendous audience growth coming from social media.  If you have ever wondered how much of your social traffic is Facebook or whether to be concerned with Reddit we' shared some answers about where the audience is really coming from.  Perhaps you wonder if social media is the best platform  for reaching new audience, then you'll want to set aside 15 minutes to watch the video.  Once you've watched  - join the conversation by tweeting your thoughts using #PubMetrics.

On our December Station Analytics Insights webinar we presented some data about the tremendous audience growth coming from mobile devices.  If you have ever wondered how mobile users get to your site or what the best platform is for growing new audience, then you'll want to set aside 10 minutes to watch the video.  Once you've watched  - join the conversation by tweeting your thoughts using #PubMetrics

On October 9th  I hosted a training about how to use Google Analytics to supercharge your pledge reporting. Your pledge platform is probably giving you information about how many people have donated and how close you are to meeting your goal, but when properly set up and used Google Analytics can give you a wealth of additional insight. We covered a lot of information in the one hour session and I've pulled out some of the important points below or you can review the slides from the presentation.

Did you know that approximately 9% of all public radio streaming is happening using TuneIn, one of the biggest audio aggregators? And that TuneIn is seeing faster streaming growth than most public radio stations are seeing on their own websites?

These are the somewhat surprising discoveries made recently as we analyzed metrics on hundreds of public radio streams available in TuneIn.

The web is a visual medium. Since the html blink tag was created we have all been focused on the appearance of our websites, but for the public radio audience listening is critically important - even on the web. Rather than thinking of the homepage as a whole, we looked at the individual parts or functional elements to determine which were most effective at engaging visitors.

This week we launched an improvement to the response time for "Stations like Me" comparisons in the Station Analytics System.  Since the system launched with our 1.0 release we have been troubled by the slow response time in the dashboards.  Our team was able to reduce the amount of time by more than 75% resulting in a much better experience for our stations.

Our dashboards and monthly reports feature traffic source pretty prominently. You are probably well aware of how much of your traffic is from Direct, Search, and Referrals - if you're not, learn more about Traffic Sources in this Google Analytics Training Video. Google Analytics reporting devotes an entire section to Traffic Source, but if it isn't meaning much to you perhaps there is something missing from your reports.

Creating a goal in Google Analytics is not difficult if you have a clear idea of what your goal is and how to identify it on your website. We recommend using goals that are built around URL destinations or events  to track how successful your website is at meeting your goals. This post will walk you through the steps to create your goal in Google Analytics but if you'd like to, you can read more about why you need goals.

The Era of Digital Transformation is upon us. Listening is moving online, and more and more of our audience connects with us through computers, tablets, and phones instead of radio. One of the great things about digital is that we have so much more data at our fingertips than ever before. We can measure every listening moment, every story read, every link clicked, every point of interaction.

At last count we have over 150 stations using the NPR Digital Services Station Analytics System.  These stations are taking advantage of a customized tag that includes Google Analytics tracking and Chartbeat, as well as the ability to easily add event and custom variable tracking.  They also have access to dashboards that pull data from multiple sources - including Google Analytics and Triton Webcast Metrics.  If you haven't yet signed to use our custom Tag Management and Dashboarding system here are some great resources to help you get started.

I don't know about you, but I've always been frustrated by the Google Analytics segment builder because you couldn't set conditions about the user - only about the visit. Well today Google announced some changes to the segment builder that have my heart all aflutter. Check out the changes and look for an invite to a training session in the near future. I see some cohort analysis in our future! woo hoo - it's like Christmas in July!

We're excited to announce the launch of new digital metrics dashboards for stations, with critical data on your site and your streams. Station Analytics presents key metrics on your station's audience growth and engagement - plus the ability to compare your numbers to other stations like you.

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