Weekly Data Digest
How press releases impact local user engagement
4 MINUTE READ
ROLE
UX Design Intern
TIMEFRAME
1 week
May 2023
1 month internship
TEAM
Solo project, reporting to Creative Director and Creative Ops + UX Manager
TOOLS
Heap, Google Analytics 4, Zoom, Canva
PROBLEM
The company's creative team needs to keep their managing partners and C-level executives informed of web traffic metrics so that they have clear expectations regarding the public facing website's audience.
SOLUTION
Identifying a small number of key metrics that are important to the managing partners and C-level executives and presenting them in a simple, straightforward way that can be interpreted quickly.
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I do not identify the company in this case study. However, I did obtain permission to share all data included below.
OVERVIEW
Increasing visibility while maintaining exclusivity
The company is a highly exclusive global membership group for ultra-high-net-worth people and their families. Due to the extraordinary requirements that must be met for membership, their audience is very niche.
The public facing website is important for their sales pipeline to continue growing membership. The creative team already tracks a wide variety of metrics for the website, but I needed to identify which of those would matter most to busy executives.
KEY METRICS
Tailoring research to my audience
I was tasked with creating a weekly data digest that would be emailed to the managing partners. While it was important to track whether the company's website was reaching more people overall, it was crucial to make sure the people they're reaching were actively engaging with the website so that the company could maximize the number of prospective members.
I chose to highlight metrics such as the number of weekly visitors and the amount of engagement for the Contact Us page, measured by contact form submissions and clicks on the company's email address. The contact page was especially important because those were the visitors who actually acted on their interest in the company, which could include prospective members.
I also decided to include a bar chart showing the cities with the highest concentrations of visitors that week, with comparisons to the previous week. While the creative team was already tracking which countries users were located in, I had noticed that they weren't yet tracking specific cities.
While exploring the website's data in Google Analytics and Heap, I had noticed that when there were unusual spikes of new visitors, those visitors were usually concentrated in specific cities. After finding out that the unusual spikes were caused by press releases, I noticed a correlation between the news outlets and the cities that they impacted the most.
I realized executives might be interested in seeing this in the weekly reports- in a way, it validated the company's marketing by demonstrating the immediate impact of each press release.
PRESENTATION PLANNING
What data matters to the C-suite?
Knowing that I might eventually present my research to the company's Chief Operating Officer or Chief Marketing Officer, I decided to demonstrate the kind of feedback the weekly data digest could offer.
Two months earlier, the company had two online press releases- one through a publication based in London, and one based in New York City. For each press release, I used Heap to look up the change in the number of website visitors overall as well as the change in the number of visitors in specific cities.
For both press releases, the cities where the publications were based had the highest concentrations of visitors. I realized that this weekly data digest could easily be modified to analyze specific press releases and even compare how much of an impact they have on their respective markets.
MARKET IMPACT
Comparing local engagement through press release impact
When I compared the change in website visitors in the seven days following each of the press releases, it showed that while the New York press release had a greater impact on total visitors, the London press release had a larger impact within its own market.
When preparing my presentation, I made sure to include a word of caution that looking at the change in visitors is just one aspect of how we can analyze this data. One of my goals with setting up the weekly data digest is to make it easier to analyze events like press releases, so this is just scratching the surface.
And while the local press release impact is the focus of this particular case study, my additional research projects for this internship —and the additional material included in my presentations to executives —included detailed analyses of other key metrics such as average engagement time and pages per session.
NEXT STEPS
Using the weekly data digest to test new membership markets
When I presented all of this to the Chief Operating Officer, he was excited and pointed out that this would be helpful in gauging interest in newer markets by partnering with local publications.
While my internship with the company has ended, I'm confident the weekly data digest will provide insights as the creative team continues to expand the reach of their website and grow global membership.
