Google News Initiative, the search-engine giant’s program to work with publishers in the media industry, released a new free insights tool, Realtime Content Insights, in order to help newsrooms make “quick, data-driven decisions on content creation and distribution.”
Realtime Content Insights joins News Consumer Insights, which was introduced last year as a report built on top of Google Analytics to help news organizations understand and segment their audiences with subscription strategies in mind.
Google director of global partnerships solutions, news and publishing Ben Monnie said in a blog post that thousands of news organizations used News Consumer Insights, including BuzzFeed News, Business Insider, Condé Nast and Village Media.
Monnie said of Realtime Content Insights, which is available to all publishers using Google Analytics, “Journalists will be able to identify which articles are the most popular across their audience and what broader topics are trending in their regions. RCI also helps newsrooms visualize their data with a full screen display mode.”
He also provided an update on the Propensity to Subscribe signal within Google Ad Manager.
Propensity to Subscribe debuted last year, and it is currently in a closed beta-test with 11 partners, including The Washington Post and McClatchy.
Monnie wrote, “Publishers can use this signal to present potential subscribers with the right offer at the right time. We’re making progress on our propensity modeling: Early tests from our model suggest that readers in the top 20 percent of likely subscribers are 50 times more likely to subscribe than readers in the bottom 20 percent.”
Google News Initiative teamed up with the Local Media Association to create the GNI Data Lab, which will enable six selected news publishers to participate in a 12-week program that will help them understand and improve their underlying data capabilities. Best practices will then be shared.
GNI Data Lab participants will receive support in building and testing digital advertising strategies including: serving the most relevant ads to readers, based on context and reader behavior; optimizing ad pricing based on the behavior of different audience segments; and optimizing their mix across direct sales, private marketplaces and open auctions.
Finally, Google News Initiative teamed up with Deloitte to create a Data Maturity Benchmarking Tool, which will let publishers assess the maturity of their data, compare themselves with other news organizations and determine where they can improve.
