👋 Ned,

Thanks for the reply — appreciated!

Yes, I gave the explorer a try on my own site (not a lot of traffic!) and I believe the concept of “actionable reports” is a great one.

Similar to your experience, for the last big newsroom analytics project I worked on we identified three KPIs that the team cared about. In that case it was:

• Number of weekly readers (13+ visits)
• Total visits from weekly readers
• Membership/donation conversation rate from weekly readers
• Source(s) of weekly readers

We eventually added a second group: bi-weekly readers (6+ visits in a 14-day window) and their visits and conversions, as well as sources of new readers (haven’t visited in the last 18 months).

And, as you suggest, we came up with hypotheses to test and goals to work toward. The numbers we had suggested that weekly readers were the most likely to convert to member/donor, so the question was “How might we create new weekly readers.” The hypothesis was that X would lead to more weekly readers, and that the result would be more overall conversions to member/donor (where X would be the specific intervention being tested).

I guess you could say that the newsroom decided that “weekly readers” was the leading indicator (or “north star metric”) for other important metrics like membership/donation, but also article engagement, social sharing, and so on.

What I found helpful about the exercise was that there was only one custom report/dashboard created for this, and it was easy to bring that to the weekly strategy meeting and see how we were doing, and what was/wasn’t working.

All that to say, I believe you’re correct that the one-size-fits-all approach is probably not the right way to go. However, I do wonder if perhaps a short survey or assessment might help a publisher decide which report to prioritize, or worksheet for how to bring various teams to agreement on their “north start metric” to track.

Three cents, :)

Phillip.