Analytics is undercounting engagement of your users

Versión en español aquí.

The two most important traffic measurements for news entrepreneurs are NOT unique visitors and page views. Those numbers can mislead you. They count people who arrive at your website by accident or search, glance at a page and leave.

As Ken Doctor has so eloquently put it:

"Unique visitors are a great dumb count. As I’ve noted, it’s as if in the print world we counted the everyday subscriber — consuming 5 hours a month of a news publication — the same as someone who, standing on a Midtown corner on a windy day, happened to catch a sheet of flying newsprint as she held up her hand to hail a cab."

By contrast, the two measures that should really matter to you are:

• engagement -- how long a visitor is on your site per visit and how many pages they view
• loyalty -- how many times they return per day, week or month

Brian Stelter shows personal brands rival media brands

Versión en español aquí.

For several years I have been using Brian Stelter, the media columnist and TV commentator, as an example to students of how a young journalist can build a personal brand. 

He did not attend a famous university and had no special family connections. Yet he quickly made a name for himself online by creating a blog that thrived on timely, high-quality journalism.

I always include a slide showing the number of his Twitter followers (lately, 200,000) and pose the question: "How much longer will Brian Stelter need the New York Times?"

As it turned out, not very long. Stelter was just hired away from the Times by CNN to host "Reliable Sources" and be their media reporter.

It's "digital first" from here on in news biz

The digital publishing industry will hit a significant milestone this year when for the first time it will book more ad revenue than all print newspapers and magazines.

The really bad news for print media, even those with robust web operations, is that most of the revenue is going to non-print publishers such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others.

Total users and pageviews are misleading measures of web traffic

Versión en español aquí.

When web entrepreneurs take a deeper look at their traffic in Google Analytics, they might be surprised and alarmed to learn that most of the visits probably last no more than an eyeblink, 10 seconds or less.

(This is not the bounce rate, but we will get to that in a minute.)

The dirty little secret among web publishers is that visitors to most websites have little or no interest in the content and are either browsing or lost. They arrive through referrals or search engines, don´t like what they see and leave.