How well is your local independent news website doing? That's hard to say unless you can compare it to the performance of similar local news sites. A new tool being developed at Northwestern University may help local news publishers find new opportunities to grow their audience and deepen engagement.

For the past few years, teams of journalism students in Rich Gordon's class at the Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, have been studying the websites of independent local news publishers and making tailored recommendations for networked audience development strategies. To do this, the publishers grant the students access to Google Analytics for their sites. So far over 30 local news sites (mostly members of LION Publishers) have participated in this project.

In a separate class that Gordon co-teaches with Larry Birnbaum, journalism and computer science students team up to develop prototypes of tools to support journalism and media. One of the projects featured at the demo day for the Spring semester of this class was VizAnalytics: a publisher benchmarking system that draws on Google Analytics.

The VizAnalytics prototype allows publishers to log in and benchmark their performance compared to their peers: other local independent news publishers from around the country. It allows publishers to view their own analytics data in context with comparative info from their peers (without showing other publishers' actual site analytics data). These sites tend to have small staffs, without much available time to analyze metrics. While they are peers with much in common, they aren't generally in direct local competition with each other -- which provides incentive to add their data to this project.

"There is so much data in Google Analytics, for most local publishers it's overwhelming," said Gordon. "Even if you could figure out which metrics are most important to track, how can you make that data actionable? How do you know if you're doing well compared to your peers? That is a motivator, frankly. If I'm a publisher and I see my bounce rate is higher than my peers, I'm probably going to want to do something about that."

Bill Smith, publisher of Evanston Now, saw the demo of VizAnalytics and is intrigued by the possibilities. "It would be useful to have comparative data. For independent publishers, the two primary sources of traffic data are Google Analytics and QuantCast. However, Quantcast only includes data from sites that sign up for their service -- so the coverage of sites that might be like mine is pretty spotty."

VizAnalytics streamlines the information available from Google Analytics, providing a simpler dashboard focused on the most relevant metrics for local publishers, such as pages per session. For instance, it displays statistics for referrals to the publisher's site only for search, social media, and direct traffic -- not for ad campaigns, etc.

A specialized dashboard tool like VizAnalytics can compensate for the assumptions underlying Google Analytics. Gordon noted that Google Analytics is designed mostly to measure direct marketing conversions, such as e-mail newsletter signups. But publishers are more interested in engagement. Are they they're getting more visitors? Are visitors viewing more pages, or coming back more often? "Google Analytics has that information, but not front and center," said Gordon.

The bounce rate(single-page visits) displayed in VizAnaltyics takes into account the amount of site traffic that comes from social media -- since a temporary spike in social media traffic can appear to inflate your average bounce rate. The platform also compares bounce rates for desktop, smartphone and tablet visitors.

VizAnalytics has a special take on the standard pages/session metric. Gordon notes that hyperlocal sites tend to have a higher percentage of sessions that start on the home page -- not the majority of visits, but more than for most other types of sites. The expected pages/sessionbenchmark is calculated based on the percentage of home page traffic.

VizAnalytics also includes some custom metrics inferred from Google Analytics, such as loyal visitors(the percentage of visitors who return to your site at least once a week or four times per month).

So far, the prototype of VizAnalytics includes only data from eight hyperlocal publishers -- but more will be added as this tool is developed beyond proof-of-concept.

Since Google keeps changing the interface for Google Analytics, a simplified, specialized dashboard like VizAnalytics could save publishers time, effort, and confusion from having to keep re-learning how to find the metrics they need.

Conceivably, VizAnalytics could be applied to any group of similar sites, not just local publishers. For instance, websites that target a similar niche or demographic might have their own VizAnalytics interface and dataset. Or community foundations might use this tool to track the performance of grantee websites, in order to target grantees in need of help.

Currently a select group of local publishers are testing VizAnalytics and providing feedback for how this tool might be improved. A beta version of the tool will be offered later in the development process.

Smith noted the challenge of using metrics to make better decisions about online publishing and social media. "Growing your local news site is difficult. People talk up different strategies, but very often they don't have metrics to say how effective those strategies are. If I get 500 more Facebook likes, what does that really get me? It's hard to figure out the right balance in all of these different strategies. Anything that would help us successfully sort this out would be great."