Gawker had a very good post on how they measure staying power and brand earlier this month. http://advertising.gawker.com/5486668/strengthening-our-core-readership

At California Watch and CIR we struggle with this question a lot. We track the usual unique visitors, bounce rate, time spent on page; but we also are starting to examine our twitter followers, commenting, facebook pages as important things to note. Because we have a lot of media partners we also track circulation numbers and markets for all of our print, radio and television partners.

For instance, we know that our explore further sidebar probably is what has helped lower our bounce rate. The more that people can see other related stories, the more that they are clicking on them.

Largely we use them to help decide redesign and measure specifically what works, and what isn't. It's also important to set goals before you start tracking too much. Otherwise you don't know when you're measuring up.

Lisa Pickoff-White

140

In terms of the interactives we build, I start with the traffic to the page (page views). But, to me, that's really just a measure of how well our web site has promoted the content. What matters more are the metrics that show how the reader is actually using the interactive. Which buttons are they clicking? What are they using, or not? Does their behavior tell me the interface is intuitive or confusing?

Anthony DeBarros

10

The industry is moving away from a focus on pageviews for advertising, but I run a few major and minor sites, and it's the simplest, most consistent measure of growth, and I generally think simpler is better unless you have good reason to measure something else. Even then, I'd suggest that for simply getting a better read on particular features.

Across all the sites I work on, we use Google Analytics and I pay particular attention to:

• Unique Visitors
• Average Page View Per Visitor
• Bounce Rate on various key pages
• Google Intelligence to detect strange shifts, particular after a major change is made.

If you're running something that's a very heavy, AJAX-y web app, then you'll want something more sophisticated, but otherwise I would stick with this simpler, time-tested metric system for now, even if it is considered passe.

Michael Morisy

241

Check out Chartbeat, a new startup that offers realtime analytics. Rather than tell you how many pageviews/visitors a page has accumulated over time like Google Analytics, it tells you how many are sitting on a page right now and where they're coming from. We've been using it at TPM for about a year, and it's become an invaluable tool especially in breaking news situations and monitoring stories that are going viral. They also have an excellent API.

Al Shaw

90

Adding: I loved the format that the Knight Digital Media Center does for its news entrepreneur bootcamps. Just got back.

But they're a week long.

Format: Lecture, panel discussion, day's assignment delivered. Lunch (and since you have your assignment, you can choose whether to be social or whether to do work over the lunch break.)

Then: Afternoon of work, with scheduled one on one sessions with heroes, mentors, advisers. You can grab as many of the one on ones as you can squeeze in while still doing your assignment. Assignments are due the next day, usually, so again, you decide whether to be social or geeky (or both) during evening hours.

Same format might work for a startup weekend. Unsure how to squeeze it into one day, unless it was reversed, with "assignments" before day of event, or first thing in the morning, and then lecture/presentations/pitches/solutions in the afternoon and evening. Push the presentations late enough into the day, and they could be done with beverages.

Personal thought: Physical space matters, lots, in this format. For introverts and borderline introverts (raises hand), quiet space to work is a must to avoid exhaustion and attrition late in the day.

andriak

80

I'm not terribly involved with tracking our "official" stats for the newsroom/website, but in terms of our projects, I track things like retweets, comments on Facebook and LinkedIn, responses when we post qs and comments about our projects (asking for suggestions, feedback, etc). Our audience is mostly older, so we also still get a number of actual call-ins about our articles, data and projects.

I'd like a more detailed look at how readers are interacting with our sidebar content to the projects online -- are they following the order through the projects we intended, etc. Not sure how best to capture that though.

Emma Carew

30

I think Unique Monthly Visitors is the most important metric. Increasingly this is what advertisers are asking for instead of or in addition to page views.

It's pretty easy to juice your page view numbers: see, for example, the proliferation of one-item-per-page "Top 10 X" lists and slideshows.

Eli Dickinson

90