Local newsrooms have the same demands as their national counterparts: to increase engagement, connect with their audiences and thrive in a tricky market. But they’re doing it with much, much smaller operating budgets. Here’s how Blog Preston successfully leveraged smartocto’s editorial analytics to improve and iterate.

The newsroom

Blog Preston is a community interest company (CIC) founded 16 years ago by Ed Walker. It serves as a vital local news source for Preston, UK, attracting approximately 140,000 readers and 800k-900k page views per month. The organisation operates with a lean team, equivalent to 2.8 full-time employees, including co-editors and freelance writers. As a CIC, Blog Preston is committed to reinvesting its earnings into community reporting and maintaining a free-to-air model, supplemented by advertising and a recently introduced membership program.

The challenge

Like other newsrooms serving a small geographic area and operating on a budget that’s on the more modest end of the spectrum, there’s a tension between investing in technology to help analyse and

Prior to implementing a dedicated editorial analytics system, Blog Preston relied on Google Analytics for top-line metrics and social media platforms' native insights tools. This approach presented several challenges:

  • Limited granularity: Google Analytics provided basic page view data but lacked the depth to understand audience engagement beyond surface-level numbers.
  • Data silos: Engagement data was fragmented across various platforms, making it cumbersome to consolidate and analyse effectively.
  • Difficulty in articulating impact: Blog Preston struggled to quantitatively demonstrate the impact of its stories on the community, relying primarily on anecdotal evidence.

Content strategy: With a constrained geographic focus, the team needed a way to identify content topics that would drive meaningful engagement rather than just high traffic.

The solution: CPI

Blog Preston adopted smartocto, our very own editorial analytics system, in April 2024, with a primary focus on its Content Performance Indicator (CPI) metric. CPI is a blended metric that considers views, read depth, and sharing/exposure, providing a holistic view of content engagement.

Blog Preston uses the Content Performance Indicator (CPI) in several ways to inform their editorial strategy:

  • Daily performance monitoring: Co-editors receive a daily report that ranks stories by CPI, allowing them to quickly identify high-performing content and topics that resonate with their audience.
  • Strategic follow-up: CPI data helps the team prioritise follow-up stories and identify the kinds of stories which generate high engagement.
  • "You Might Have Missed" section: CPI powers a dedicated section on their website to showcase engaged stories that might otherwise disappear quickly from the homepage.
  • Newsletter curation: The bi-weekly email newsletter uses CPI to select the most engaged stories, prioritising quality reads and loyalty over simple view counts.
  • Team recognition and content strategy: Monthly, the team celebrates the top 15 most engaged stories based on CPI, which helps identify "under-the-radar" successes and informs strategic thinking about trending topics.
  • Membership integration: CPI is being used to understand how high-CPI stories drive new member sign-ups, with plans for deeper integration and promotion of membership within high-performing content*.
  • Platform-specific distribution: CPI insights guide the tactical re-posting of high-performing stories on social media platforms, leading to higher engagement.
learn about CPI here

*A note on membership

The Blog Preston team takes its CIC status very seriously. As their mission is to inform Prestonians, they feel strongly that access to information is more important than putting certain content behind a paywall. Accordingly, they opted to create a membership option rather than a subscription.

The results

  1. Daily Performance Monitoring: Co-editors receive a daily report ranking stories by CPI. This allows them to quickly identify high-performing content and topics that resonate most with their audience.
  2. Strategic Follow-Up: CPI data informs editorial decisions, helping the team prioritise follow-up stories, schedule court dates for ongoing news, and identify celebratory community stories that generate high engagement despite potentially lower initial views.
  3. "You Might Have Missed" Section: CPI powers a dedicated section on Blog Preston's redesigned website, showcasing engaged stories that might have quickly disappeared from the homepage due to high publishing volume. This ensures valuable content has a longer shelf life and continues to reach readers.
  4. Membership Integration: Blog Preston's new membership and contributions option is closely tied to CPI. The goal is to understand how high-CPI stories drive new member sign-ups, allowing for deeper integration and promotion of membership within high-performing content.
  5. Platform-Specific Distribution: CPI helps Blog Preston tactically re-post high-performing stories on platforms like Facebook as native content (video/photos without direct links). This strategy, driven by CPI insights, has resulted in significantly higher engagement for these re-posts compared to initial link shares.
  6. Overall Audience Growth: Despite industry-wide challenges in audience acquisition from search and social platforms, Blog Preston has observed an upward trajectory in overall audience growth, directly attributed to their consistent use of the CPI metric and a deeper understanding of reader preferences.

The following topics and types of stories consistently show high CPI for Blog Preston:

  • Food reviews: These are always in the top 15 most engaged stories, regardless of the specific restaurant or dish reviewed.
  • Celebratory local stories: An example given is a dance group fundraising to go to Las Vegas, which generated very high engagement and shares.
  • Redevelopment: This topic has been observed to get really high CPI.
  • Nostalgia content: This type of content also consistently performs well.

Future considerations

As the membership model evolves, Blog Preston plans to explore tweaking CPI settings to potentially focus more on loyalty metrics. They also envision developing "two different CPIs" – one for free-to-air content and another for membership-driven content – to further optimise their strategy.

Final thoughts

Blog Preston's strategic adoption and consistent application of editorial analytics, particularly the CPI metric, have been instrumental in its continued success as a community-focused news organisation. By moving beyond basic traffic numbers, they have gained a deeper understanding of audience engagement, informed their content strategy, optimised distribution, and fostered a sustainable model for local journalism.