If readership lifts the veil on how earned media performed, Memo’s new Details Pages explain the why.
By surfacing article-level engagement data, Details Pages answer retrospective questions like how readers discovered an article and provide clarity on forward-looking decisions like which content to amplify.
Detail Pages provide Google Analytics-like insight into earned coverage
Just as marketers can use Google Analytics to monitor engagement with a landing page – how many people visited, how long they spent on the page, what device type they were on, and where they were referred from – PR & Comms teams can now track all the same metrics for select articles on Memo.
Details Page article data include:
- Readership: the number of unique visitors to the article
- Page views: the total number of article views across those readers
- Average engaged time: the average time spent on the article
- MRV: The dollar value of the article’s earned readership in paid-media terms, displayed for customers subscribed to MRV (Memo Readership Value) reporting
- Time-series trends: these engagement metrics over time
- Referring domains: the top 10 referring domains (e.g. facebook.com) for readership, page views, and MRV
- Referral types: referring domains rolled up to high-level referral types: Search, Social, Direct (traffic that arrived on the article by typing/pasting the URL into a browser or, more often, via email/newsletter), Internal (traffic from within the publication’s site), and Other (traffic from external websites and news aggregators)
- Device types: engagement data broken out by the device the reader was on (desktop, mobile, tablet)
This data answers your burning questions about article performance
While Memo’s insights are powered by macro trends from aggregated readership tracking, sometimes our customers have pressing questions about an individual article.
Why was an article so successful? Referring domains reveal the major traffic sources, helping identify contributors to high readership (e.g. virality on Reddit, high SEO in Google search, strong placement on Flipboard, etc). Traffic over time further indicates if the story is sustaining interest.
On the flip side, engagement data can guide next steps if you believe a placement underperformed. For example, take a glowing writeup of a brand with relatively low readership but high engaged time from the people who do read the article. The message is resonating, so it’s just a matter of amplifying the story on owned or paid channels (and using referring domains to track the results).
And in the case of a crisis event, readership over time can answer whether a story is picking up steam or dying down – crucial information in determining whether to issue a spokesperson response.
Details Pages also provide further evidence on the value of a great article
Zooming in on an individual article’s performance can offer compelling proof points to its value beyond readership or qualitative factors like message pull through.
An article’s average engaged time (90 seconds on average) drives home the power of editorial content to hold a reader’s attention far longer than other media.
Another example: For an article reviewing a product, high traffic from search indicates the placement reached a higher-intent audience. People considering a product likely googled it and looked for a review from a trusted publication.
And a third example: readership over time can signal when an article is sustaining interest, usually through strong SEO visibility. Being able to show off the long shelf-life of earned coverage – especially when juxtaposed with flash-in-the-pan ads – can further boost your stakeholders’ appreciation for the PR & Comms function. (For more on this theme, see PRWeek’s “Brands benefit from the long reach of a great story.”)
Access Details Pages from your Memo dashboard
Article Details Pages are available from publications that have given Memo full engagement-data access. An article has its own Details Page if there is an average engaged time indicator, which links out to a full Detail Page view.
Adding Article Details Pages to Memo’s platform furthers our mission to help brands harness the new possibilities of bringing data to the art of Communications. We look forward to seeing everything our clients do with it.