Chartbeat Blog

Mastering the Audience Development Game

Audience development is about the long game – it’s a marathon, not a sprint. It’s about how the day-to-day successes of individual stories can replicate on a site- or publisher-level, and this can’t be done without first benchmarking team performance against bigger, organizational goals like audience engagement, reach, or revenue.

It’s not just about clicks, or engagement, or concurrent spikes. It’s about optimizing every step of the growth funnel: going from acquiring clicks to converting a new visitor. That’s where editorial analytics come in.

With Chartbeat Publishing, audience analysts can:

Take Control of Your Data Logs

Chartbeat Report Builder, our customizable historical reporting tool, enables audience analysts to really dig into the long-term audience behavior trends. Create flexible, custom historical reports according to the criteria and metrics of your choosing.

Benchmark Performance Like a Champ

Historical data is the evidence you need to validate or disprove assumptions you might be making about your audience. If you think your site works a particular way, does it actually? Use Report Builder to look back over a week, a month, even a year, and put those assumptions to the test. Mining your historical data with Report Builder can show you whether the little actions taken in real time are summing into larger change.

By subscribing to specific reports, you can have reports sent straight to your inbox automatically on a recurring basis. This gives you a much better sense of week-to-week, month-to-month, or even quarter-to-quarter performance.

Build a Collaborative Newsroom Workflow

Report Builder gives you the opportunity to easily share reports with anyone else on your team with just the touch of a button. The days of manually emailing spreadsheets out are gone. Report Builder also helps you inform the rest of the team about what’s working, and more importantly, what isn’t. By being the gate-keeper for historical data, it’s up to you to help the rest of the team create, adapt, and improve ongoing strategies. Align your team around meaningful audience development goals and give everyone the data they need to succeed.

When your whole team is aligned around common tools and meaningful metrics, performance management isn’t just tisking and tasking. It’s about uniting everyone in the newsroom within purposes larger than themselves.


Want to see how other team members can put Chartbeat tools to work? Check out the stories for content creators, producerssection editorshomepage editorsmobile editorsvideo editors, and social media managers.

For more information on how Chartbeat Publishing helps Audience Development teams make it big, reach out to productoutreach@chartbeat.com.