In this talk, John Levitt, General Manager of Parse.ly Analytics, will walk through how Parse.ly clients have identified and achieved their strategic goals using data. The top three goals we'll focus on, when looking to 2019, are personalization, audience segmentation, and using engaged time as the company wide KPI.

1. Setting (and achieving) data driven
goals in 2019

2. Website: parse.ly
Blog: blog.parse.ly
Audience attention is precious.
Parse.ly makes it transparent.
Our research: @parsely
Our podcast: @attnpod
Follow me: @johnmlevitt

3. For the last seven years, media companies have used Parse.ly's
analytics dashboards.
Page views Visitors Engaged timeSocial shares
Audience loyalty DevicesVideo
Authors Sections Tags
Referrers
Campaigns Publish dates
Articles
Channels

4. We help you see a clear picture of audience engagement in a
dashboard anyone can use.

5. So understanding audience attention doesn’t have to feel like an
overwhelming project.
•Spend less time pulling data and more
time acting on it.
•Get a bird’s eye view of how your site’s
content has changed over time.
•Build your content strategy on a solid
understanding of what your audience
actually wants to read.

6. “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to
fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

7. BRANDSENTERTAINMENT PARTNERSPUBLISHERS
Parse.ly’s network of thousands of high-traffic,
premium content sites

8. Audience attention is
precious.

9. Engaged Time
Time = Opportunity

10. What is Engaged Time?

11. Engaged Time is…
a precise measure of the amount of time
readers / viewers actually spend with your
content.
highly correlated with long term loyalty and
conversion outcomes.
a metric that advertisers have increasing
interest in.
Engaged Time is not…
time spent.
the “silver bullet metric.”
unlimited. We all have a finite amount of time
in the day to engage with digital media.

12. Slate: Using engaged time to increase reader loyalty and
grow subscriptions
Slate wanted to lower their dependence on
platforms like Facebook and monetize their
incredibly loyal audience.
To get there, Slate gradually replaced unique
visitors with a new way to measure loyalty: the
amount of time a visitor actively reads or
watches a piece of content (engaged time).
Slate was able to establish a loyalty metric
that every team drives toward while growing
their paid membership program to 35,000
subscribers.
“When we chose total engaged minutes, we had made a
decision as a company that we wanted a driving metric
that would help emphasize the loyal audience.”
—Julia Turner, Editor-in-Chief

13. The Intercept: Using engaged time for content distributed
on social media
The Intercept wanted to know which
distribution efforts were working.
If the goal is to refer quality site visits from
another channel, such as social media,
engaged time can reveal what posts held
readers’ attention.
Another plus side to understanding engaged
time for content distributed on social media:
On Facebook, more engaging posts are more
likely to be surfaced in the algorithm.
“The amount of time that somebody is spending within an
article is one of the most important factors in terms of how
many people will end up seeing your content on Facebook.”
—Rubina Madan Fillion, Director of Audience Engagement

14. Content personalization
Give the reader what they want

15. The New Yorker: Different audiences want to see different
stories
The New Yorker wanted to know what article
type resonates most with college-educated
millennials passionate about race, social justice,
and civil liberties.
The answer: Top posts by social referrals. They
found these readers are interested in what’s being
shared. They valued personalization tailored to
stories that are relevant in conversations with
peers.
Follow up: What content type on
newyorker.com makes a reader convert to a
subscriber?

16. Audience Segmentation
Identify and program for your most important audiences

17. Bloomberg: Global growth by paying attention to local
audiences
“Geo-segments help us make
sure we’re not over-indexing on
local stories if we know readers
in one location are generally
reading the biggest global stories
we have.
Equally, if something is really
resonating locally, it might be
ready for a wider stage.”
—Adam Blenford, Bloomberg’s Managing
Editor of Digital in Europe

18. The Wall Street Journal: Focus on subscriber attention
“Seeing how subscriber behavior
differs from that of our overall
audience is critical for our team
to ensure we keep our
subscribers invested in our
journalism.
This view helps us fine-tune our
real-time tactics in order to meet
the audience’s evolving digital
needs.”
—Carla Zanoni, Global Audience & Analytics
Editor at The Wall Street Journal

19. Currents
“When you understand what makes people pay attention,
you’re better equipped to anticipate their behavior based on
their motivations and interests.”

20. • Get a front row seat to the
online attention of over 1
billion people per month and
150 million people per day.
Shows the attention of over 1 billion people each month and
1 million viewed articles each day (and growing)
• Categories include: news,
entertainment, finance,
politics, sports, opinion,
culture, and more.
• Modern machine learning
and natural language
processing techniques
make it possible to access
audience attention.

21. Currents: categories, topics
• When an article goes up in
the Parse.ly network, we use
NLP technology to assign at
least one category based on
it’s full-text content
• Machine learning also
determines topics based on
entities it extracts from an
article

22. Currents: geographical location and traffic sources

23. Currents: traffic from all sources (direct, social, search, and
internal)

24. Website: parse.ly
Blog: blog.parse.ly
Audience attention is precious.
Parse.ly makes it transparent.
Our research: @parsely
Our podcast: @attnpod
Follow me: @johnmlevitt