To know whether their strategies are working, online news sites need to track their online engagement. But while social media activity was identified as their top engagement tool, social media monitors are a secondary indicator for measuring engagement.
Instead, most respondents said they focus on monitoring website activity. More than nine in 10 (91%) focused on unique visitors and the same percentage focused on page views. Eight in 10 (79%) monitor commenting activity. That was closely followed by tracking average time on the website (76%).
As for social media measurements, about eight in 10 of the sites (79%) monitor the number of the Facebook fans and 65% track such Facebook interactions as likes, shares or comments. Nearly 74% monitor the number of Twitter followers; only 53% tracked Twitter activity.
However, when asked to select the three most important tracking tools for their organization, respondents overwhelmingly focused on two: unique visitors (66%) and website page views (55%). Fewer than one-third said social media interactions were among their most important trackers. Only 37% of those responding said they measured click-throughs to advertisers.
