Welcome to Power Users — a feature highlighting Chartbeat users who rely on our product in their daily work, and have unique insights or tips to share. This month, we have a guest post from Juan Pablo De Santis, head of audience development at Clarín.com, who weighs in on why his data-savvy newsroom welcomed Chartbeat’s release of an Android offering.
In the months leading up to 2018, Clarín decided to deepen its culture of metrics within the newsroom. If every journalist and content creator were aware of the impact of their work, then we could further expand data-driven decision-making by the team.
One of the first measures we took, between Nov 2017 and Jan 2018, was to expand access to Chartbeat in order to show more of our writers and editors the real-time flow of traffic to their content. During those months, daily users jumped from 18 to 70; nowadays, there are 110.
Every day at 12:30 pm, Clarín’s newsroom meets to plan the rest of the day and determine how to handle our site’s peak traffic (which always crests at 2:00 pm). Everyone looks at the analytics summaries and debates the best ways to improve traffic acquisition on Google, Facebook and other sources, as well as optimize the behavior of Clarín’s direct users on mobile devices.
In January, one of our editors asked how to follow engagement in real time on his smartphone. Like 70% of Chartbeat users in our newsroom, he had an Android device — and like most of the team, he liked to monitor the performance of our coverage while on the metro. That’s why I wrote to John, Chartbeat’s CEO, on Twitter:
Chartbeat’s Android app was released last week (given my appeal, I was the first to be notified!) and we spread the news across the newsroom.
It was a really important new leap. Public-facing screens [like the Big Board] are useful, but there’s nothing like being able to follow the impact of your work even when you’re on the move. Having that immediate access is even more valuable in settings like our daily 12:30 meeting, where we discuss how best to cover fast-evolving topics.
In deepening our metrics-focused culture, our main goals were to have a more sophisticated way to choose news focus, deeper knowledge about metrics, and a quicker response overall to breaking news.
To my peers: open up the data about reader behaviour to key people in your newsroom — and just like our team, you’ll see the results!
— Juan Pablo De Santis