Google Updates Its Analytics Tools for Newsrooms

Google has introduced two journalism-focused products that sit on top of Google Analytics — News Consumer Insights, which is designed to help publishers grow their audiences and become more profitable, as well as Realtime Content Insights, which is supposed to help newsrooms see what’s trending at any given moment.

Today, Google is introducing version 2.0 of both News Consumer Insights and Realtime Content Insights, while also adding a new feature called the News Tagging Guide.

NTG is supposed to make it easier for publishers to collect the data they need. That falls into three broad categories — video analytics, user engagement and reader revenue. Publishers will be able to select the category and the specific types of data they want to track, and then Google will give them JavaScript that they can copy and paste onto their website in order to start feeding that data into Google Analytics.

News Consumer Insights product now includes personalized recommendations for the publisher. For example, it might point out that a publisher’s newsletter signups are relatively low, and then it could suggest different ways to improve those signups.

Realtime Content Insights have been expanded to include similar data about video content, as well as historic performance data, so publishers can see which stories performed best in a given period of time. And it’s not simply focused on page views — RCI also tracks things like social sharing and engagement, and it identifies which stories are doing better with casual readers versus loyal readers (who visit more than once a month) versus brand loyalists (who visit at least 15 times a month).