Audience Development: meeting your audience where they live

Audience development and growth teams are stars at understanding what kinds of content resonate on different platforms. Understanding overall traffic flow can help identify what works consistently, as well as new opportunities for audience acquisition.

Try digging deeper into each referring domain to find what makes these audiences unique.

• What kinds of topics attract audiences from these sources? Does that change how you promote stories there?
• How much time are you investing in the topic of the day versus evergreen content? How does interest in your topics compare over time.
• How diverse is your social reach? If a platform changes their algorithm, will your other distribution channels still hold you steady?
• Do you see the same influencers time and time again? Is there an opportunity for follow-up or partnership?
• How efficient are your posts? Does the amount of content generated by each author, section, or tag correlate to its success on a platform, or is some content more effective at attracting an audience?

Related documentation

We offer many tools to help you with growth and audience development. Here are a few to consider:

Referrers: see how we categorize some of the most popular referrers as Social, Search, and Other.

Dynamic tracking: this is something your developers would work on. But you should be aware that dynamic tracking can greatly boost the number of internal referrers. This usually happens when your readers enjoy reading new content in infinite scroll.

Campaign tracking: is a great tool to see what’s happening with much of your Direct traffic.

Recirculation rate: once you grab the attention of a new visitor, find out if your post delivered by reviewing it’s recirculation rate.

Audience Segmentation: a great way to cater to specific audiences like “Members” and “Subscribers”.