Telegraph employs web analytics to drive audiences’ engagement with the brand

The UK’s best selling quality broadsheet The Daily Telegraph has been established for over 150 years and is published by Telegraph Media Group Limited (TMG). TMG has now expanded the brand to include The Sunday Telegraph, Telegraph.co.uk and The Weekly Telegraph. When it went live in 1994 Telegraph.co.uk was the UK’s first online newspaper, since then it has come to play an increasingly significant role within the portfolio. Telegraph.co.uk now hosts enhanced content including streaming media and is a hub for innovative services including Fantasy Football, an online book shop, dating and more.

Challenges for the Twenty-first century

TMG has the aim of becoming the market-leading multi-platform news and information provider in the UK. To achieve this it needed to upgrade its resources. In 2006 TMG moved from Canary Wharf into high tech new offices, based in the Victoria area of London. The specially designed news centre would better enable the implementation of a digital initiative to improve customer experience of the brand and to build new revenue streams from its publishing operations across old and new media. Two key aims of the group’s digital push were a better integration of print and online services and to enable the editorial and commercial teams to work together more closely.

Web analytics offer a solution

In September 2005, Telegraph Media Group upgraded its analytics solution to Visual Sciences’ HBX Analytics, a highly scalable platform that delivers intelligence about the usage and performance of large and complex internet sites, properties, portals, services and systems.

HBX Analytics offers an on-demand web analytics solution that is able to deliver expanded e-commerce–related capabilities, including the ability to actively segment data and analyse metrics from multiple sources within one account. TMG found it valuable for its custom reporting and ad-hoc analysis which enables it to provide a wide range of reporting for different internal teams. HBX makes analytics accessible through its highly visual front end and by offering light or in-depth analysis interfaces dictated by the demands of each team. By using HBX Analytics, TMG is able to manage measure and optimise all of its online presence.

The adaptability and speed of HBX Analytics ensures the right information can be brought to the right internal audience regardless of whether this be senior management, editorial or commercial teams. HBX Analytics places digital media at the centre of TMG’s business in terms of being able to analyse both standard key metrics – how many visitors, how long did they spend on the site – and more sophisticated indicators, to gain more intelligence about the site’s audiences. One key factor in TMG’s uptake of HBX Analytics was the facility it offered to expand the dimensions of analysis beyond tracking just the web site to take in the tracking of Web 2.0 technologies and content, such as streaming video and audio, RSS feeds and podcasts. All of these elements are of increasing importance to TMG’s expanding digital services and needed to be measured to gain a representative understanding of audience interaction with the brand.

“With HBX Analytics we are now able to ask any ‘what if?’ question as it arises,” said Matthew Dodd, Research and Strategy Director, Telegraph Media Group. “This gives us the flexibility to track our audience’s preferences on an extremely granular level”

Deploying Visual Sciences’ HBX Analytics has enabled the TMG team to gain much deeper insights into reader segmentation and by understanding how readers engage with the brand and online content, it has given staff the ability to more quickly identify new business opportunities and tailor content, services and promotions accordingly.

The customer is always right

The power of customer preferences is most apparent on the news floor where it’s imperative that news editors are able to respond to reader behaviour by knowing in real-time and being able to react to which stories are generating the most interest online. This enables the online team to focus on the most popular items in order to retain the site’s “stickiness” and also dictates which stories might be worth further developing and give prominence to in the print edition.

The busy news team also needed to be able to respond quickly to customer interest and interaction with editorial content and that data needed to be brought directly to them rather than forcing them to search for it on the system. To meet these demands, Visual Sciences partnered with UK multimedia developer World Archipelago to provide constantly updating displays to show key data in a highly graphical interface. The aim was to provide editorial and business teams with up to the minute knowledge about what content is proving popular.  Applying this concept to the consumer, this information is also available on the Telegraph.co.uk site to encourage visitors to explore other content and increase usage.

“The way that people are consuming media, news and information today is completely different to how it was just three or four years ago,” continued Dodd. “Today’s consumers access and are actively engaged with sites from all around the world. They have increasingly varied interests and views, and choose to access media in a variety of formats according to their needs and preferences. With podcasts, RSS and video on the web becoming commonplace, knowing how our audience is reacting to these things plays a key role in driving the way that our online and offline media is put together.”

TMG’s news centre in Victoria was designed with news feeds in mind and live content from rolling global news providers is displayed alongside the audience information extracted from Visual Sciences’ HBX Analytics solution on a high visibility 10 by 100 foot video wall that dominates the news room.

Dodd concluded: “We are committed to placing digital media at the centre of our business to ensure Telegraph Media Group is recognised in the industry as pushing the technology further than any of our competitors. Our partnership with Visual Sciences has enabled us to create a bespoke set-up that illustrates how a forward looking media company can incorporate analytics to successfully drive revenue on a company wide scale.”