5 Steps to Build Loyalty: Audience Engagement Strategy for Publishers

A story that goes viral is a happy accident, not a strategy.

Editors and reporters may hope certain articles perform better than expected, but when they do, it’s probably due to external factors they can’t control.

Maybe the story was shared on social media by an influencer with a huge following. Perhaps it tapped into a current event or trend that was already popular with audiences.

Whatever the cause, “going viral” is often ill-defined, especially if you can’t easily compare how the story performed with other content. Earlier this year, researchers published a study in Nature that showed the impact of viral posts, at least on social media, is usually short-lived and doesn’t translate into sustained audience engagement.

This doesn’t mean those happy accidents shouldn’t be celebrated. There are also at least seven ways to turn a traffic spike into a loyal audience. Your real goal, however, should be to develop a strategic, data-driven approach to publishing that not only drives engagement but also long-term audience loyalty.

Many newsrooms are already becoming more data-driven, and artificial intelligence (AI) will only accelerate the shift. One of the critical steps in that journey is aligning your metrics with audience loyalty as a critical outcome. Here’s how:

1. Conduct a critical review of your existing content KPIs

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with metrics and lose sight of what’s actionable, especially in terms of encouraging audiences to keep coming back. Within some publishers, silos can emerge where the key performance indicators (KPIs) used by the editorial team may differ wildly from those in functions like AdOps and sales.

Bring these groups together and discuss what’s being tracked and why. Beyond site visits and bounce rates, this is just a handful of the others that will likely come up:

• Click-through rates (CTR): This is obviously important for evaluating ad campaigns and for seeing how well newsletters are driving subscribers back to your site.
• Engaged time: Measures how long users are actively engaged with articles, and is helpful if you want to know if audiences are diving deep into the content or just taking a quick look and bouncing. Those who go further may be ready to become subscribers or enjoy more of what you have to offer. Pages per session should also be woven in here, or tracked separately.
• New vs. returning visitors: Growth comes in many forms. While you want to keep a steady influx of people who are new to your site, you’ll also want to maximize the engagement and lifetime value (LTV) of your existing base. Some describe this as “stickiness.” Parse.ly calculates new visitors as those who do not have a first-party cookie on their device from your website within a time period that could range from 30 days to two years. First-party data can identify returning visitors in the same way. 
• Conversions and conversion rates: Brands carefully monitor how many online shoppers convert from prospects browsing their product pages to buyers. Publishers need to consider this across multiple dimensions, from those who sign up for free newsletters to those who pay for paywalled content, a printed publication, or other products and services.  
• Recirculation rate: [Many publishers measure how often people leave their site (otherwise known as the bounce rate), but that doesn’t give you any meaningful insight into content quality. Parse.ly does the opposite by measuring the recirculation rate, or how many people stay after consuming your content. This is calculated by the percentage of views that went to another internal page of your site from a particular page or article. 

Talking about metrics and KPIs can dredge up many long-standing challenges across the organization. This is a moment to look at what’s working and what’s not, including whether the effort to track and monitor all your metrics requires cobbling together a bunch of disjointed tools that may not be telling the same story.

There may be legitimate reasons some teams focus on a given metric, including those that aren’t mentioned here. Just make sure there are at least a few KPIs that everyone can agree to share and act upon to build a more loyal audience.

2. Add a contextual layer to analytic inputs

Editorial analytics may begin with quantitative data, but comes to life through a qualitative examination of what happened once a story was published.

Back in 2018, The New York Times posted an inside look at its approach to editorial analytics, but emphasized the contextual factors that can have an outsized impact on performance. This paragraph is worth quoting in full, because it applies to almost any major news site:

We need to consider the promotion strategy behind the story. Did we give the story prominent placement on the home screen? Did our social media team post it to Facebook? Did we share it in any newsletters? We also need to consider the kind of story it is. Is it breaking news? Is it an investigative story? Is it a movie review?

The timeliness of the story is another consideration. Is the story pegged to a news event where we would expect nearly all of the traffic to come in on the first day? Or is it a story we would expect more of a long tail for because it’s service journalism or a piece that would sustain steady search traffic?

This is still just a starting point, because it only explains why a story may or may not have scored well based on a given metric or KPI. What you need to do is look at how your team used the engagement driven by a particular story to build loyalty, such as:

• A/B testing calls-to-action for subscription offers.
• Recommending related content
• Encouraging sign-ups to special events, such as live chats with reporters

Editorial analytics may be looking at journalism as the product, but what happens next borrows more from the world of marketing. By running a campaign designed to nurture new and existing visitors to deepen their engagement with high-performing articles, you’re demonstrating to your audience that you’re interested in continuing to bring them value on an ongoing basis.  

3. Benchmark content performance through a loyalty lens

There may not be a standard approach to editorial analytics that’s universally adopted by the media sector, but that doesn’t mean publishers have to fly by the seat of their pants. Tools like Parse.ly can provide a better view into what defines a loyal audience and opportunities to enhance their experience by bringing context to common metrics, making them easier to understand and act upon.

When you’re only monitoring session time or visits, for example, you’re still not getting a comprehensive view of your audience’s behavior and how they’re interacting with your content. This brings us back to engaged time, where Parse.ly uses what we call a “heartbeat pixel” to bring greater visibility into a particular visitor’s session. It’s a metric that’s worth studying in greater detail to see how you can use analytics to deepen audience relationships. 

Parse.ly infers engaged time through the movements audiences make once they land on your site, such as:

• When a visitor moves their cursor from side to side to navigate through an article
• When a visitor scrolls up and down to go back and check details or explore other elements on the page
• When a visitor clicks “play” on an embedded video
• When a visitor clicks on an infographic or other rich media element

Measuring engaged time at intervals of a few seconds goes way beyond metrics like session time or “dwell time,” because it shows that audiences are immersed and actively getting value from the stories you’re publishing.

By benchmarking engaged time on your top-performing articles, you can then think about what to do with stories that fall flat. Instead of simply tweaking the headline, you may need to add more depth to the coverage you’re providing. Perhaps the story needs to be broken up into more navigable chunks or become part of a larger story package with video and live chat sessions.

Engaged time also provides insight into how to refresh older content from your archives and improve the related content you recommend to loyal audience members. Measuring the engaged time for returning visitors, as well as keeping an eye on your recirculation rate, can tell you whether the steps you take are having an impact on audience loyalty. 

4. Set audience engagement and loyalty goals

Before editorial analytics capabilities became available, newsrooms had little choice but to publish stories with a “let’s see what happens” mentality. Experienced editors and reporters often have great instincts about what will resonate with audiences, but analytics lets them and others across a media company plan and optimize more consistently and with greater confidence.

This should become as integral to publishing workflows as the traditional editorial meeting. As reporters spot potential scoops and pitch ideas, bring in benchmark data on related content that sets the baseline expectation for how a story might perform.

Next, use engaged time to think through the audience journey—how can you showcase the breadth and depth of your company’s entire portfolio to convert them into subscribers? What other data could assist your ability to optimize for increased loyalty?

Even if you don’t achieve greater loyalty right away, this will open up a host of learnings that could transform the way newsrooms and other departments operate and collaborate.

5. Use journalistic storytelling to enhance analytics reporting

Becoming a data-driven, audience-first publisher will only happen if everyone understands how content is currently performing and improving. This means sharing reports on what you’re seeing from your analytics tools and encouraging others to take time to look at them in detail.

Some people are inevitably put off by analytics reports that appear to require specialized skill sets or are too dense to absorb at a glance. This is where the traditional strengths of the best journalists should be applied.

Think about how to summarize the key takeaways from your analysis in the way a reporter would pack essential facts into a lede. Create visuals that complement the data. Add sidebars that bring out the need-to-know contextual details. Provide internal links to additional reports that encourage team members to explore further.

This may not seem as exciting as a story that suddenly goes viral, but it’s actually better. Instead of a happy accident, you’re taking deliberate steps to grow an audience that sticks around for the long haul.