Reach journalists from Latin America, provide them with tools to accompany the digital transformation of the media and measure the traffic of their sites. These are the objectives of the monthly training via streaming of the Google News Initiative, Google’s global program to strengthen cross-platform journalism.
The last training developed two programs of high interest for journalists and publishers: Real Time Content Insights, a tool designed so that in the newsrooms you can see and measure the information of the content published in real time and Google Trends, which shows the search terms which reached a greater number of clicks in different regions and allows comparing them with those made at different times.
The first part of the training was in charge of Connie Niebuhr, Online partnership, who on this occasion explained the operation of Real Time Content Insights whose objective is to obtain information on what content users are seeing more and what is the format with which more interact With this data we can produce content related to the interests of the audience in our region or give greater visibility to a certain topic. The tool is free but you must have a Google Analitycs account to access.
Which articles have more interaction with users? Which one generates more views or more shares? The program shows the most visited articles in the last 30 minutes and is updated every 180 seconds.
In the graph on the left we see the average daily visits on the site and the percentage reached at the moment. If that number reaches 100%, it is because we exceed the average number of regular users.
Traffic sources
On this screen you can see from which country they are visiting the page (left) and through which traffic sources they are entering (right).
Likewise, you can also analyze what information users are looking for, what topics they are interested in and, with that data, make decisions regarding the focus of the articles or videos we produce.
Google Trends
The second part of the training was given by Juan Manuel Lucero, the News Lab coordinator, who explained what Google Trends is and how it is used: a tool that allows you to analyze and compare Google searches by year, region and topic.
The database is anonymous, it also measures users who browse in incognito mode and what it reflects is only the search interest; No number of clicks or user ages are saved, but it shows what was searched, where it was searched and at what time.
Entering trends.google.com you can see the topics that have had an excessive growth in the last 24 hours. For example, in Mexico this information was sought:
Analyzing this screen helps us understand the volume. If 50 thousand people are looking for information on the new 200 pesos bill and in the medium in which we work we do not have that data, we miss the possibility of getting new readers or loyalty to our audience by providing information that they are looking for and that, of not develop it, go to find another site.
Google Trends measures daily search trends and trends in real time and as the data is updated every three minutes, it is very faithful information that provides regarding user behavior.
Another option of the program is that it allows us to explore a specific topic and compare it with up to five different terms, in different regions and in different periods of time. With the data by region we can embed the map or the visualization that shows the increasing trend of the search in an article. For that you have to click on the “embed” symbol and copy the HTML code provided by the program.
After just over an hour, Lucero said goodbye to the users who were actively participating in the training; colleagues from Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Suriname, Argentina, Chile, Peru and Uruguay.