Introduction
Analytics are incredibly important for a digital newspaper. They can help inform how successful we are and help us refine the content we produce and share.
Currently, analytics are not used effectively at The Daily. This is a huge missed opportunity! This page outlines some resources for analytics.
Google Analytics
Link: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/#/report-home/a192950269w266742555p239895695
Google analytics is our main analytics tool. It is probably used by every news organization in at least some fashion. It’s connected to our site under the Google SiteKit plugin.
Google Analytics allows us to track our pageviews, clicks, users, user behavior, among other things.
Note: we are currently using an older version of Google Analytics. Newspack should migrate us to GA4 by early 2023.
Who has access?
The Big 3, Business, and Web MOEs + anyone they share it with. For the future, we’ll work on creating a custom analytics dashboard that will be accessible to all Daily staff. tmdwebsystem@gmail.com has admin access to this account, since it is a google account.
Jetpack Analytics
Link: https://www.michigandaily.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=stats
Jetpack is a mandatory plugin on our WordPress site that is provided for free by Newspack. They have a dashboard that presents simple stats on page views for our site. Unfortunately, it is rather basic, so we should try to use Google Analytics instead.
Who has access?
Anyone with admin access to the Wordpress website.
Google Search Console Insights
Search Console Insights provides a quick, easy to digest dashboard with some basic data about our website. It isn’t very customizable, but it makes it easy to monitor how our site and articles are doing in Google’s search results and to monitor referrals. By clicking on an article, you can take a deeper dive to help figure out why an article may be popular for example.
Who has access?
tmdwebsystem@gmail.com -- but this should likely be expanded to include the DME
Note: this feature is in Beta according to Google. Also, this is different from Google Search Console
Newspack Analytics
Newspack provides additional ways to configure analytics! Read the documentation here. In addition, you can track Campaign Analytics!
Newspack Data Dashboard
Link: https://newspack.pub/benchmarking
This is a new project by Newspack and in active development (as of 2022). It allows us to compare our site with other sites Newspack works with!
Who has access?
tmdwebsystem@gmail.com and anyone the dashboard is shared with (should be Big 3 + business manager)