Google’s Roshni Dutt Introduces a New Audience Insights Tool for Publishers

Roshni Dutt, an 8 year Google veteran, talked to the BlogHer Creators Summit audience about Google’s new audience insights tool, News Consumer Insights. Although the tool framework began as a way for News publishers to better understand their audience, Google quickly realized that it’s applicable to publishers of all different niches. We have recapped her session here on BlogHer U, but you can watch the full video at the bottom of the recap.

It’s challenging to know exactly which metrics of all the metrics matter most for your website. Especially in today’s world of data in every direction. And once you do figure out which matters most, it’s difficult to know what to do with that data. News Consumer Insights (NCI) is a dashboard that highlights the value of the audience and provides concrete recommendations on how to best serve those groups.

News Consumer Insights (NCI) has taken the data and broken the users into three main buckets

1. Casual Readers – These are people who have visited your website at least once.

2. Loyal Readers – These people have visited your site multiple times, in the range of at least five times over the last month.

3. Brand Lovers – These people have shown a key interest in your brand. They have been to your site at least 15 times in last 30 days.

Of these three groups, it is most important to focus on your return users. This is the Loyal Readers group and the Brand Lovers group. Google’s traffic data supports what is commonly know as the 80/20 rule. Roshni said that on average, 8-% of a website’s pageviews comes from 36% of the users. This means that the people who are continually returning to your site are of the most value to your brand.

One benefit of NCI is that the dashboard data they share combines both your own site data with benchmark data for similar niches as your own. Engagement metrics are very valuable. Metrics like pages per session, time on page, bounce rate and session duration give strong user experience signals to Google.

what to do If your users are less engaged than the benchmark data

If the data displayed on NCI for your website shows a less engaged audience than the benchmark data, it’s time to optimize your site for page depth.

Roshni shared several tips with the audience.

1. Improve the internal content recirculation strategy. Make it easy for your users to click to the next piece of related content. Add links between paragraphs or a content widget on the site that houses your other content.

2. Prioritize internal links over external links. Instead of potentially sending users off your site to another, add links to other valuable content on your own site.

3. Implement push notifications. These are like modern day RSS feed signups. Push notifications will notify your users every time you publish a new piece of content.

4. Focus on your e-mail acquisition strategy. Your e-mail audience is very loyal, typically these users fall into the Brand Lover category. Make sure your e-mail signup is one-click and easy to find on your site.

Roshni talked about how important it is to survey your audience, to allow them a chance to share their experience with you. NCI offers free surveys directly through their framework. You can insert these surveys in between content on your site or as pop ups at the bottom of your webpages. Whether it’s Google’s survey platform or another third party vendor, surveys can be useful tools to ask them about user experience, product process, content feedback and more.

User Experience tips for each audience type

Casual Readers –

• Make sure you’re giving an exceptional first impression. Most important, make sure your page speed is FAST!

• Prioritize content messages over marketing messages. You don’t want this group to be bombarded with messages about your brand at this point.

Loyal Readers –

• This group is somewhere in between a casual reader and a brand lover! It’s important to help push them into the Brand Lover bucket.

• Call to actions should be light, pushing for a newsletter sign-up is a good one!

• Focus on your content recirculation, give them more content!

Brand Lovers –

• Prioritize this group of users above all others.

• They love your brand, feel comfortable messaging them for conversion. Whether it’s a product purchase, a subscription or a video view, these people love your brand and are likely to engage.

• Make it super easy for them to find the content they love!!

• Focus on giving them an incredible landing page experience – great content, useful design, fast loading and clear call to actions.

Thanks, Roshni for a great Google BlogHer conference session!

Download Google’s presentation: Understanding the Value of Your User

And click HERE to start using Google’s News Consumer Insights to better understand YOUR audience.   

You can watch Roshni’s entire BlogHer Creators Summit presentation in the video below!