Behavioral Analytics Tools for Smaller Newsrooms

In the 21st century, many newsrooms have seen a radical reinvention of the way they distribute content. Digital news makes up about 80 percent of the news consumers engage with. No longer does distribution depend upon creating newspaper routes and distributing to newsstands and newsracks on every street corner—distribution now largely depends on consumer behavior and engagement. 

Most major sources of information on the internet also engage behavioral analytics in order to personalize your experience. Twitter, Facebook, and Google all monitor interactions, what links you share, what you search, key words and phrases you use, etc. to target advertisements and content for your experience. This means that every single user has a different experience of the internet—which paints an intimidating picture for marketing digital content. Luckily, some of the very same tools for analyzing consumer behaviors Google and other platforms use are available to the general public.

What exactly does behavioral analytics highlight? Behavioral analytics takes consumer patterns (via clicks, typing, and other objective actions) and begins to paint a picture of the way consumers are engaging with a particular piece of content. For newsrooms, some pieces of information that are particularly useful to track are: how long consumers, on average, are staying on one page; which page(s) have attracted the most consumers to sign up for newsletters or updates; what consumers are skipping over; and which features of the newsroom’s website get the most (or least) engagement.

Google Analytics is the most popular–97 percent of digital news mediums use it. However, Google Analytics needs to be cross referenced in order to get the most complete and user friendly results.

Some analytics tools that can really assist with that include:

AMPLITUDE ANALYTICS

With Amplitude Analytics, you can transform your data into visual aids in a couple of ways. Their most popular features are the behavioral graphs and flow charts that track a single user’s journey on the website. This graph makes it easier to find out where users are brought on or where they drop off, and also charts their clicks and entries into the website chronologically on an individual basis. 

CRAZY EGG

Crazy Egg offers visual aids like heatmaps, which color-code how “hot” or “cold” certain features of your website are (high engagement is hot, low engagement is cold). There’s also a scrollmap report, which color codes the most popular “scroll depth,” or where consumers scroll to on your page before they click away. 

HOTJAR

Hotjar offers both heatmaps and behavioral graphs, but the major feature that sets it apart from Crazy Egg and Amplitude is the individual recording it takes of each user. Similar to how Amplitude records and then maps out a user’s journey chronologically, Hotjar intimately records each user’s interaction with your website, and can be watched back as if you, the analyzer, are the user. This also makes it possible to infer more information from the user’s journey, as you get to see nuances such as how fast they scroll past items on your homepage and where they double back to before clicking away.

HEAP

Heap is a catch-all service that focuses on making cataloging and interpreting the data for your page as easy and user-friendly as possible. Heap, in addition to coagulating data and turning it into easy-to-digest visual aids, also contains suggestions for next steps in how to make your website more efficient for consumers. 

There’s more where this came from of course: analytics tools are popular with everybody from online retailers to libraries who digitize their catalog, and newsrooms should explore the various options to find the best ones suited to their group of journalists and their mission statement.