Advice from Politico Europe for using audience data to build new products

Credit: Image from Pixabay.com

Politico arrived in Europe in April 2015 with big ambitions: to become Brussels' and Europe’s go-to source for politics and policy stories.

The outlet’s advantage was launching with a clear idea of the audience it was trying to reach: “people with a professional need to know, not the mass market”, said Kate Day, editorial director, growth, at Politico Europe, speaking at the International News Media Association’s (INMA) World Congress in London today (23 May).

“In a news context, data is difficult,” she added. “There are so many variables that can determine why one story flies and another flops.”

Politico Europe’s business model is not solely dependent on advertising – it is a mix of revenue derived from subscriptions, events and sponsored content, so “we’re more interested in who is reading than in increasing the number of eyeballs in general”.

Day said some newsroom conversations, whether they focus on reporting or building new products, are backwards and only focus on how and what to measure about the project after it’s been launched, rather than the other way around.

But data should be one of the starting points, she explained. Publishers should ask themselves the following three questions before investing time in new initiatives:

• what problem am I trying to solve?

• how can I tell if my solution is working?

• what would I like to know about my audience to do my job better?

“Building a flashy interactive is the solution, not the problem.

“The problem started before you built that, so going back and reexamining the problem is crucial in order to answer the second question.”

Newsrooms have different approaches to analytics – some make looking and analysing data a part of everyone’s job, to some extent, while others have dedicated audience development teams tasked with feeding back the relevant information to editorial.

But Day said that while these teams definitely have a wealth of knowledge about the audience, they need to be asked specific questions in order to provide data relevant for taking action.

“We knew that if we want to dominate the conversation in Brussels, we would have to produce content that people want to talk about.”

An example of this is an article Politico Europe published last week, a list of the 40 MEPs who actually matter.

“Because we don’t depend on ad impressions, I wouldn’t normally track page views, I would look at the number of visits and unique visitors.

“But this piece was designed to engage an audience we were already reaching rather than new readers, so page views became the important metric here.”

Politico Europe also recently launched a new morning newsletter, and the team's challenge was figuring out the adequate time for publishing it.

Although the outlet had a vague idea of the audience they were trying to reach, from having launched similar products in the past, the newsletter was targeting a different group of people.

“We realised that while we didn’t have any data about this audience, we were already meeting a lot of the people we actually wanted to target in person, at events.

“So we asked ourselves ‘what time of the morning do they have their first meeting’ to decide what time the newsletter should go out.

"In the end we still wonder whether a product or story is any good or not, so it's about turning these conversations around to make data really mean something in the development process," said Day.

Free daily newsletter

If you like our news and feature articles, you can sign up to receive our free daily (Mon-Fri) email newsletter (mobile friendly).