KNIGHT CENTERD i g i t a l M e t r i c s R e p o r t

Bobby Hammelman, Brian Meller, Cameron White, Qing YeDigital Metrics, Gene Kincaid

REPORT CONTENTS

Site Audit 3

ZMOT Analysis 8

Google Analytics Foundational Reports 9

Key Metrics 14

Insights and Recommendations 17

Website Mock-Up 19

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SITE AUDIT

DIGITAL DESIGN BRIEF What is the site’s personality? Describe the Content-to-Entertainment spectrum.

The site has a special interest with a purpose providing information about a professional training and outreach program for journalists in Latin America and the Caribbean. The site also serves to offer content about journalism for readers via the blog. The blog content serves as the majority of information provided.

Who are you trying to reach with a Home Page? Describe the target audience.The site is trying to reach people who are interested in the field of journalism in the Americas, specifically journalists in Central and South America. The target audience wants more training and resources for becoming effective journalists in their communities.

Why & when will these people visit the site? Explain how the Internet adds value.The site offers a variety of information from journalism training, blog on news in the Latin Americas and Caribbean, local news about the Knight Center and Austin Forum. Most people visit the site during the day probably to read the blog on the Latin Americas and Caribbean. Users may also visit to download the books and manuals offered or to sign up for the online class. Visitors will come to the site when they want more information on news around the world, especially Central and South America, via the blog. Additionally, visitors may come to the site to register for a class and download the books when registration for the class opens.

What are the hard/soft objectives of this project? Briefly describe the results we’re after.Hard: 1. Create content on the site in order to train journalists in the Americas. 2. Submit stories in three primary languages used in North and South America to attract and keep journalists/aspiring journalists on the site.

Soft: Offer online courses for anyone interested, and provide a newsletter. How must the site compare to competitor’s? Don’t sell; just tell pros & cons.

Pros: The site offers free online resources (ebooks,video courses) to wire journalists. Cons: The site lacks an integration of the channels of their existing resources (MOOC, Vimeo videos & Digital Library)

Readability?There is too much important content below the scroll line.

Where else is the communication going to run? Discuss media integration.Communication also takes place on all social media sites, such as their Facebook, Twitter and Vimeo accounts and Rosental’s personal Twitter account.

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What Web sites will you promote to or negotiate cross links with? Spell out Web relations.Link to other partner websites from Knight Foundation (www.knightfoundation.org) which performs good when searching for “journalism training” and “journalism education”International Symposium on Online Journalism (online symposium conference) Open Society Foundations

SITE ROADMAP

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VISUAL HISTORY

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SITE EVOLUTION

Site launched February 22, 2003.

Site redesigned in March 2005. Navigation moved upward. Site enhanced with feature story pictures shown on the home page.

Current site Enhanced with Image slideshows and social media connection

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COMPETITIVE BRACKET

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ZMOT

ZMOT, or Zero Moment of Truth, is the moment of time when a target audience researches for a product or service before taking action. FortThe Knight Center, the ZMOT moment takes place when journalists or aspiring journalists search online for international journalism resources. Evaluating the Knight Center’s ZMOT is important because it provides insight on how target site visitors search for the site. The figure below indicates how to evaluate a ZMOT. Since, there are not a significant amount of reviews for the Knight Center, the ZMOT analysis below focuses on brand results and best in category results.

1. [KNIGHT CENTER]

2. BEST [JOURNALISM TRAINING]Knight Foundation appeared in the top two organic search results, but Knight Center only appeared in the first three pages.

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GOOGLE ANALYTICS FOUNDATIONAL REPORTS

1. How many visitors are coming to the site?

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2. Where are visitors coming from?o Referring URLs

o Search keywords and key phrases

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3. What does the Knight Center want visitors to do on the site? Why does the website exist?

o Train journalistso Encourage journalists to join or create their own organizations and

operate on their owno Provide people information/viewership of conferenceso Inform visitors on important news stories via the blog posts

What are the top three strategies to bring visitors to the site?o The free online course – MOOCo Google news: Journalismo Blog content

What do you think should be happening on the site?o Joining the MOOCo Reading articles/blog postso Subscribing to their weekly newslettero Info/links/viewings of online conferenceso Obtaining information of the Austin Forumo Downloading e-books & subscribing to social media

4. What are visitors actually doing? Top entry pages

o #1 is the English homepageo Four others in the top ten were popular blog postso Three others in the top ten are non-English, including one of e-book

download page

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Traffic Sourceo 64% are from search engines: Google 49%, Yahoo 9.9% and

Bing 5.6%o 22% are from direct (home page)o 14% are from referring sites

Site overlay (click density) of the site's top 10  most viewed pages

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Abandonment Rateo Four of the most abandoned pages are blog postso 44.15% left from the English homepage

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KEY METRICS

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INSIGHTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Insights The purpose of the Knight Center is to provide resources and content to

journalists in the Americas. The site intends to train journalists and encourage them to form their own journalistic communities and to operate on their own.

Google Analytics indicates that the highest percentage of site visitors are English-speaking and are from the United States. The next highest percentage are Spanish and Portuguese-speaking visitors from Brazil, Mexico and other South American countries like Argentina, Colombia and Peru. From this information, we concluded that the consumers of site content are not the primary target of the Knight Center.

The site produces and pushes a lot of text and content via the blog, which is connected to the higher bounce rate from the home page and the blog pages.

A very low rate of visitors scroll past the first fault line, which eliminates the opportunity for visitors to sign up for the newsletter.

Recommendations Testing

We recommend that the Knight Center conducts A/B testing on the site to trial run new page elements. These tests are intended to optimize the user experience.

o Home page redesign: There is too much content on the home page, and this overwhelms visitors and increases a higher bounce rate. Please reference our home page mock-up at the end of the document.

Remove blog posts from the home page, and instead just keep the link to direct visitors to the blog.

Move the e-newsletter sign-up box higher up to avoid missed opportunities of viewers missing the newsletter sign-up because it’s not in the top portion of the home page.

Instead of “Headlines from Our Blog,” change the sidebar title to “Top Trending Stories.” This will add an element of social media by using reader input from Twitter re-Tweets and Facebook posts.

Place a live Twitter feed box in the top right corner of the home page.

Link to more sponsors, such as the Knight Center in Miami and other Knight Centers.

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o Blog: The blog features stories from years past and results in tens of thousands of pages on the website. We are proposing the Knight Center categorizes the posts by subject matter and date.

The subject matter could be represented by a word cloud on the sidebar of the blog.

The date categories would allow visitors to search stories chronologically.

o Video: The purpose or mission of the site is unclear to new visitors, which may be attributed to a higher bounce rate among new visitors. We suggest producing a short video that highlights the mission of the Knight Center and its resources in under one minute.

This video can be placed on the revolving display on the home page and on the Vimeo channel.

The video can be created by a video production intern. Implement CrazyEgg on the Website

CrazyEgg tracks the user’s mouse and click locations, and then the program displays this information in heat maps. This program will allow the Knight Center to see which links receive the most clicks, how far visitors scroll down and what elements of the page are viewed most.

o Before redesigning the web page, using this program may be useful to see what is working or what is not working for the website.

o CrazyEgg offers their program for a 30 day trial, which will allow enough time for Knight Center to evaluate the site.

Social Media StrategyThe Facebook and Twitter feeds are currently pushing the same content when they should be differentiating the content. Additionally, there is minimal interaction on both Twitter and Facebook because the posts are merely pushing content instead of creating an interactive relationship with readers.

o Push less blog content via the Facebook and Twitter feeds.o Diversify content by posting pictures and videos.o Create more interactive posts that will elicit responses from followers.

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Website Mock-up

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