Participants reported that the most useful area of this section was the “How people are reading and finding it” on the detailed article view. They said that it helped them explain to the newsroom “how well an article did,” especially in relationship to a meaningful baseline. This page also provided links that helped IEs record which sites or accounts had picked up or were linking to the original article. Similarly, the full tweet list helped participants create events that they would have missed without a recipe set up to catch them in the Approval River.
Understanding traffic sources was also a main takeaway from the Facebook and Twitter time-series charts. As one IE put it:
When there’s a spike in traffic for any story, it’s super handy to be able to quickly see a list of where traffic is coming from. For example, I noticed we had a story that was getting crazy traffic and NewsLynx said it was coming from Facebook. I could then find the origin post quickly.
This finding was encouraging since Facebook is particularly opaque in seeing specific activity. Knowing that our novel metric of Facebook shares over time can provide useful insight is an important takeaway.
One key feature was data export. IEs reported that it saved them a great deal of time in preparing their grant reports, as they no longer had to navigate through their analytics platform to copy and paste various numbers. The organizations’ existing data-collection workflows also lacked comparison metrics, which made NewsLynx data more understandable for higher-level stakeholders.