Monday, July 13, 2009

July 2009 PMM Report Now Posted

A Year Later: Stations are Moving UP

Our intention in creating PMM was always to provide, “comparative performance measures” that is, a service that provides context for evaluating the performance of individual station and program sites. It also would give web directors some sense of their own success relative to activity at other comparable sites.

Over the last eighteen months, we have usually done this by analyzing a single feature or element of a site, such as news pages, pledge pages, etc. across a range of sites. In the July edition of PMM, we take a different approach, looking at broad stroke growth, including year-to-year growth in visits and some deeper analysis of three individual
sites, KQED.org, thirteen.org, and northcountrypublicradio.org, to see where those visitors went.

This is a view we were not able to provide previously, because we just didn’t have the basic data.

The two questions I took up were: Are our websites growing as a group? And if they are, what is fueling the growth?

The answer to the first question is clear. Using visits as the basic metric, the trend from May 2008 to May 2009 is up, and at some sites up dramatically. Traffic measured by total visits increased substantially between May 2008 and May 2009. Year-over-year growth shows 7.479 million visits in May ‘09 vs. 6.350 million visits in May ‘08—an increase of 1.128 million visits or +17.8%. Total, collective visits to all properties we studied increased by at least one million visits every month from September 2008 through May 2009, peaking at just over 9 million visits in March 2009.

I chose visits as the primary metric to reinforce a theme stressed in past issues:
the key to online success is loyalty, and loyalty is reflected in repeat visits, finding an audience and then bringing them back over and over.

As you will see in the cases I studied for our subscribers, about two-thirds of the sites we measure are clearly generating more visits. That's the good news. The bad news is that none of the selected examples has significantly increased loyalty. Each example site continues to have relative low repeat traffic, with a monthly rate of visits per visitor ratio under two.

What is fueling the growth? The simple answer is content.

In the three cases selected for analysis, growth is driven by adding or enhancing online content, especially programming features with strong on-air/online cross-promotion and interactivity. Examples include:

• Growth in use of the “Reel13” features on WNET/thirteen.org, along with increased traffic to WNET’s teacher-oriented, online educational features.
• Food-related features developed at kqed.org, especially those developedaround world-famous chef Jacques Pepin, combined with local food features and restaurant reviews.
• North Country Public Radio’s case is different. Here, growth came from improvements in the news area combined with the launch of individual and group blogs. at ncpr.org

Subscribers can read the full case reviews a the full report on the Documents and Downloads page.