As a publisher, you already measure reader engagement on social networks but what about the activity that happens on your site? Pageviews and time on site are a good start, but it doesn't tell the entire story. Today, we're excited to provide an early look at the next generation of engagement analytics on Disqus.
Available as a preview to all publishers until March, the reimagined Analytics dashboard provides insights into the engagement you're capturing through Disqus. Get started now by visiting the Analytics dashboard for your site.
What's new?
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Top-line metrics of your audience on Disqus including total reads and engagements
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Top published stories that generated the most comments, votes, commenters
Your audience on Disqus, at-a-glance
Starting with new top-line metrics, you can get a snapshot of the overall engagement on your site. They include:
- Article Reads: The number of times people view an article where Disqus is installed.
- Comment Reads: The number of times people read the comments section.
- Total Engagements: Total number of comments and votes by readers.
As your audience grows, track these metrics to identify how you’re performing over time. Are more people reading the comments compared to the previous month? Keep up the momentum by adding the comment count to your home page.
Where do you have Disqus installed, on all article pages or just some topic categories? This would impact the total number of Article Reads every month. Disqus is now your go-to place for uncovering these insights about your readers.
Do you know what days of the week your readers are most active? Using the Traffic Overview graph, you can quickly spot trends including when readers visit the most often.
Hover over a specific day to see the exact top-line metrics for that day. Over on Batman News recently, they noticed a spike in engagement when a story went viral on Facebook. As a result, this provided a crucial feedback loop to better inform their editorial decisions on what topics interest their readers.
Find the top stories that generated the most engagement
Head over to the Content Analysis section to see the latest articles published on your site ranked by their total engagement.
You can now find a list of the top articles with the most engagement activity including total comments, votes, and commenters. Remember that harrowing rescue tale of a lost kitten you published last week? Over 200 readers commented a thousand times on that story.
Use the date picker to narrow your view to a specific date range, or try the shortcut links to quickly toggle the last 7 days or last 90 days. By default, stories are sorted by Total Engagements but you can also sort by other categories including the publish date, comments, and commenters.
Here are tips on how to use Content Analysis to power your content strategy:
- Identify the topics that attract the most engagement: Pageviews alone don't tell the whole story behind a reader’s visit to your site. You want to know whether they actually engage with the content because that means you’ve captured their attention.
- Highlight/curate most engaging stories: Curation is a vital way for how you tell stories. It’s why we introduced the ability to embed comments on Disqus and publishers like The Washington Post are expanding efforts in curating user generated content. With Content Analysis, it’s now easier to curate content to create more compelling stories.
Available to preview until March 2017
The new Disqus Analytics is now available as an early preview of the analytic offerings in the upcoming Disqus Pro plan. Every site will have the opportunity to visit the dashboard until March with data on a rolling 30-day basis. At the conclusion of the trial period, you will have the option to upgrade to continue accessing new data.
How does analytics support your audience development efforts? What insights would you like to obtain about your readers that engage on Disqus?