Transform Your Newsroom with Behavioral Analytics: Top Tools for Small Teams
To gain a deeper understanding of readers' behavior when navigating a website, newsrooms can leverage user behavior analytics. These tools enable newsrooms to glean valuable insights into the distinctive patterns exhibited by their readers, offering a diverse set of features such as heatmaps, session recordings, and funnel analyses, among others, that provide actionable data.
By utilizing these tools, newsrooms can enhance their comprehension of reader engagement and make informed decisions to optimize their online content.
MIXPANEL
Mixpanel is an innovative product analytics software that enables businesses to gain valuable insights into their customers’ behavior and interactions on their websites, leading to enhanced customer conversion and retention. Unlike traditional session and pageview reports, Mixpanel focuses on event-based tracking, providing a self-serve approach to behavior analytics.
With Mixpanel, you can easily set up your events, properties, and user characteristics to analyze various aspects of your product usage. The software helps you answer critical questions, such as:
What is the drop-off rate at each stage of the conversion funnel?
Which user cohorts exhibit the highest conversion rates?
How do users navigate through your product?
The software’s free plan caters to up to 100K monthly tracked users, and its pricing starts from $25 per month.
SMARTLOOK
With more extensive features than typical session recording and heatmap tools, Smartlook has become especially popular with e-commerce platforms. However, newsrooms can also benefit from using Smartlook to gain valuable insights into the behavior of their users, as it allows for a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis.
You can use Smartlook to examine your readers' journeys on your website and identify any potential roadblocks. You'll be able to view everything you find in a customizable dashboard, so different teams can set their key performance indicators and create their personalized reports. Compared to other analytics apps, which require a large user base to conduct A/B testing or measure the impact of app changes, Smartlook provides meaningful insights even with just a single user. Smartlook is an excellent solution for contactless user behavior analysis and testing, offering a quick return on investment even with just one user recording.
Smartlook is an affordable option for businesses seeking to capture data on larger applications and interfaces.
The basic version of Smartlook is free and allows up to 1,500 sessions per month along with access to three heatmaps. The business plan, on the other hand, provides even more robust features starting at a modest $111/month and allows for up to 15,000 sessions per month.
HEAP
Heap markets itself as “the only digital insights platform that gives you complete understanding of your customers’ digital journeys, so you can quickly improve conversion, retention, and customer delight.”
Heap is an all-in-one digital analysis tool that enables businesses to gain insights into their users' and customers' online behavior. Heap has an effortless setup that only requires a single code snippet. You don't need technical know-how to start collecting data and drawing insights from it. Moreover, Heap has a user-friendly dashboard that offers valuable information on potential problem areas on your site's UX, allowing you to make necessary improvements.
Heap's free plan is a great way to get started with data collection and analysis. You can access some basic features that help you understand your users' behavior without any cost.
HOTJAR
Hotjar stands out as a platform that provides a panoramic view of user behavior over time. Its exceptional features include heatmaps that showcase how website visitors interact with your online content.
The heatmap functionality is particularly noteworthy, using a color scale ranging from red to blue to visualize the most frequented (hot) and the least popular (cold) elements of a webpage. Hotjar's heatmaps reveal precisely where readers click, how far they scroll down, and which components they focus on or overlook. These maps are incredibly valuable for identifying issues and assessing the effectiveness of new features.
Hotjar's pricing options include a basic plan that is free and provides access to unlimited heatmaps and up to 1,050 user session recordings per month. The business plan is available for US$80 per month and includes 500 daily session recordings. Notably, Hotjar also offers this plan for free to nonprofits.
MICROSOFT CLARITY
Microsoft Clarity is a user behavior analytics software that presents immediate heatmaps and session recordings. It is also equipped to synchronize with Google Analytics to furnish more comprehensive insights by means of the imported data.
For example, suppose you observe on Google Analytics that users are not spending enough time on a specific page. In that case, you can use Clarity's session recordings to inspect why this is occurring. The software reveals data on user frustration, including rage clicks, excessive scrolling, and dead clicks.
While Clarity is a remarkable tool available at no cost, its data report is not as advanced as Hotjar's. This tool comes at no cost.
Alan Herrera is the Editorial Supervisor for the Association of Foreign Press Correspondents (AFPC-USA), where he oversees the organization’s media platform, foreignpress.org. He previously served as AFPC-USA’s General Secretary from 2019 to 2021 and as its Treasurer until early 2022.
Alan is an editor and reporter who has worked on interviews with such individuals as former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci; Maria Fernanda Espinosa, the former President of the United Nations General Assembly; and Mariangela Zappia, the former Permanent Representative to Italy for the U.N. and current Italian Ambassador to the United States.
Alan has spent his career managing teams as well as commissioning, writing, and editing pieces on subjects like sustainable trade, financial markets, climate change, artificial intelligence, threats to the global information environment, and domestic and international politics. Alan began his career writing film criticism for fun and later worked as the Editor on the content team for Star Trek actor and activist George Takei, where he oversaw the writing team and championed progressive policy initatives, with a particular focus on LGBTQ+ rights advocacy.