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Analytics: Count your audience, not your pageviews

Executive Summary

If you create content, you might get excited about a growing number of pageviews. But do those views matter? It’s important to know your real audience, and even more importantly, what audience analytics matter most to your site’s business goals.

Here, we dive in to “the problem with pageviews” and talk about how to set an audience analytics strategy that fits your business monetization model.

Details, Tips, Recommendations & Takeaways

Analytics are both a blessing and a curse. Free services like Google Analytics are powerful tools that can be wielded on the side of good, or be raised in celebration of evil.

Well, mostly they can either be “useful” or not, but you can guess which of those options falls closer to the “evil” category.

Everyone likes to see numbers go up. This is especially true in the news industry, which has had its share of downturns. Both Dan and Joan worked on newspaper websites for several years (more than a decade, in Joan’s case), and both saw a constant problem of people not knowing what their analytics were actually saying.

“Look, we got more pageviews!” executives would cheer. (“Oh, but wait, they’re from Lower Slombovia, and our ads are for local pizza shops,” said no one in management ever, but they should have.)

Analytics are great – when they’re the right analytics.

Starting in the early to mid-2000s, the business model for most newspaper websites was based on ads: More pageviews = more ad views. The people in charge of content thus thought that their mission was

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