The Wardman Wire

For some time there has been conversation about the need to look at the Quality and Engagement of audiences for media websites.

This article looks at one of the data items available via the Quantcast.com service, which segments your audience by loyalty. The free service can also identify which organisations and businesses are sending visitors to a website.

I look at the data for national newspapers, and also for this site and journalism.co.uk.

The Quantcast Service

At present comparative data can be hard to come by, however one service that does publish data is Quantcast.com.

A note about the quality of the data first. Quantcast run different levels of service. They publish estimated data about many websites, including the data about the US audiences of British Media websites mentioned here. When a site is bigger, the estimates are more reliable.

They also have a service where a snippet of Javascript is added to each page on a website, which gives better data. The data for journalism.co.uk uses this service.

The graph I’m presenting divides the audience into addicts (30+ visits per month), regulars (1+ visits per month) and “passers-by” (i.e., once only in a month) visitors, and looks at how much traffic (% of visits) derives from each segment.

Here’s the graph for the Journalism.co.uk, which is a profile of all traffic to the site (link to Journalism.co.uk data):

Sites using Estimated Data

These figures sites are on US traffic - i.e., one segment of the overseas audience for the site. There is much more detailed data available by following the link.

Daily Mail

Data link for Daily Mail.

Independent

Data Link for Independent.

Telegraph

Data Link for Telegraph

Guardian

Data Link for Guardian

Times Online

Times Data Link

BBC (for comparison)

BBC Data Link

Comment

The raw data does not tell you which site is “best”, but needs interpretation in the circumstances. As ever, context and knowing what is happening in the background with your site is important. For example, a large “addicts” figure might indicate a loyal core readership, but it could also indicate a site which is not reaching out to new audiences. Equally a high “passers-by” figure could indicate success in breaking particular stories and thereby obtaining a new influx of visitors. If a site runs full content in the RSS feed, many regular readers may never visit the site itself, as there is no need to.

If you compare the data for Journalism.co.uk (reproduced again below):

(link to Journalism.co.uk data)

with that for the Wardman Wire,

(link to Wardman Wire data)

you can see that currently this site is showing a comparatively core audience and more “passers-by”. The site has a broad audience profile anyway due to the content mix and our deliberate strategy to cover niches beyond politics - but at present that is even more pronounced than usual since we have had a recent surge in new visitors. These figures are from Google Analytics.

The spike in the last couple of days is due to a Wikipedia link from their BNP article.

But you can see that we need to work hard at making the site “sticky” and encouraging visitors to return.

Why don’t Bloggers Use the Quantcast Service?

The version of the service I use is free, and gives me easy access to information such as which organisations have been accessing my website. I can get the same information other ways (e.g., by spending several hours analysing log files), but this is easy. Here are a couple of sample screen-snippets, which I think I am can display with no risk of causing problems for anyone.

This is filtered by “British”.

And this is some of the “Medium Sized Businesses” currently shown.

You can see the Wardman Wire data here (but not the detailed business breakdown).

Wrapping Up

As ever with these services, you need to read the “terms” and “privacy policy” first, but I like the service from Quantcast. It should work with Blogspot blogs, but not with Wordpress.com blogs which do not permit Javascript.

And a final note - I am planning to use the blog poliblogs.co.uk as a forum for talking more about useful tips and tricks for political blogs, so it would be worth keeping an eye on that site. The RSS for poliblogs.co.uk is http://www.poliblogs.co.uk/blog/feed/

The RSS feed for the Wardman Wire itself is http://www.poliblogs.co.uk/blog/feed/ .