Analytics at Insider

📊 Insights & Analytics Editor at Insider

Building Tools and Dashboards

Using Google Analytics, Google Looker and Google Sheets, I have built and now maintain many tools and dashboards that make performance metrics accessible to editors and reporters throughout the newsroom. Some tools I've built include:

• a suite of team and author stats dashboards, which allows the entire newsroom to access daily story and site performance data, broken down by editorial team and reporter
• a monthly source report, an interactive dashboard that updates daily and breaks down our MoM traffic by source and displays historical traffic and top stories by source
• a stories traffic sources dashboard, an interactive Looker dashboard that allows reporters, editors, and audience producers to drill down into source peformance for individual stories
• a special projects series tracker, an interactive tracker that displays the overall performance of high-lift, sponsored editorial series
• a newsroom control panel, which is a one-stop dashboard that consolidates newsroom traffic and production data, allows leadership to quickly identify anomalies and allocate resources more effectively, and noticeably reduces the time my team spends resolving misunderstandings

Ideating and Implementing a Social UTM System

My time working with Insider's social team allowed me to identify a key gap in our newsroom's ability to gauge performance: We had no way to track what social traffic was a product of the social team’s work and what social traffic was simply organic. I created a plan to introduce UTMs to the social team's workflows, communicating with that team's leaders as well as the data engineering team to implement a new system from the ground up. Now, we have almost a year of reliable data that the social team and I use to assess and guide strategy on different platforms.

Story Suggestions and Coverage Plans

I use historical traffic and publishing metrics to craft coverage plans for tentpole events, like the Met Gala or the Masters. For example, in February 2023, I created coverage plans for the Grammys, Valentine’s Day and the Super Bowl. The newsroom updated and/or wrote more than 100 of the stories I recommended across the three events, bringing in a total of 14.6 million pageviews.

I also work closely with editors and reporters across the newsroom, monitoring search and social trends in order to flag potential stories that could resonate with our readers. I've trained several people in this process, and we now have a team of 5+ people suggesting stories to the newsroom. Story ideas we've flagged via this process have brought in at least 117M pageviews in the first year!

Of course, this is just some of what I do! Feel free to contact me if you have questions about what my work on this team.