Do user needs-focused articles perform better ?

Fundamentally, the user needs concept is there to ensure the audience is put at the heart of the newsroom’s output. And, whether you’re aware of it or not, when you’re commissioning articles, you have two choices: to pull focus around a single user need - or to not.

Your decision will probably come down to a simple question of investment and return: do articles with a clear user needs focus perform better? It’s not any more complicated than this, really.

• To get the answer, we undertook a large-scale data analysis of articles published by titles at Ringier Media International
• We observed that focused articles consistently perform better across multiple metrics, all of which were statistically significant - and some of which showed impressive differences
• Loyalty scores in particular were much stronger among focused articles

The conclusion? Editors, it’s worth your time to commission focused articles.

THE DATA STUDY: Do user needs focused articles perform better?

Conveniently, Ringier Media International CEO and user needs’ most vocal evangelist, Dmitry Shishkin, was equally keen to answer this question. So we asked our data scientists to dive into the data to find out.

METHODOLOGY

Common sense dictates that a ‘focused article’ will have more than a 51% focus on its dominant user need driver (fact-driven, context-driven, emotion-driven or action-driven). For the purposes of this study (and to ensure that remove any ambiguity), we defined ‘focused’ to mean articles reading more than 60% in our User Needs Playground. Anything scoring less than 60% was deemed to be non-focused.

We classified the 16 021 articles published at Ringier Media International brands* between November 1, 2024 and January 10, 2025 into two different categories.

• User need-focused articles
• Non-focused articles

This resulted in 4 445 articles that scored at least 60% on one of the four axes. In order to make a statistically correct analysis we randomly picked the same size of non-focused articles from the remaining batch of 11 576 articles.

RESULTS

Focused articles performed better. That’s it, in a nutshell. Our analysis looked at performance from multiple angles, and at this more nuanced level you can see that sometimes the margin of improvement was very impressive, and sometimes it was more modest. The findings from this study support what we have long said: that the user needs framework is not NOT about covering the news. It’s about covering the news from a more relevant perspective - and that this approach pays dividends.

You can download the full deck of results here, but here are three key takeaways from this data study.

1. Articles which have a clear focus get more readers

We count an article read only when a reader opens a page and sticks around for at least 10 seconds, so it’s much more indicative than a simple ‘page view’, which is fundamentally just a browser event. These findings show that it’s not just that focused articles get more readers - those readers stick around to read more and for longer.

Focused articles are obvious from the headline: the reader knows what they’re going to get, so they’re much less likely to feel that they’ve been misled once they start reading

2. The reader experience is deeper

Page depth - the metric which tells us how many additional pages were opened after that first one - is significantly higher for focused articles.

• By working in a more focused, more targeted way, there’s an obvious invitation to ‘chain’ stories together: to create and link related articles from different perspectives. So your initial fact-driven article about the California wildfires might invite a click onto a page explaining the science behind it, the people at the cutting edge of environmental and forestry research, or information about how and where to seek help. Where signposting is obvious, reader pathways are easier to navigate and people are happy to wander.
• The other takeaway from this is a simple one: the best thing you can do to build a loyal audience is to create outstanding content.

3. User needs focus fosters loyalty

Loyalty is important for newsrooms. Loyal users read more, read more often, and read more deeply. They’re the ones more likely to convert to subscribers or to take out a membership. In short, this is a demographic worth nurturing. So it’s encouraging - though not surprising - to see that they respond much more positively to focused articles.

Let’s explain Loyalty. At smartocto we define it slightly differently - and that’s important

Loyalty, in the world of smartocto insights, means something very specific. We define loyal users as those who are ‘habitually highly engaged’. This means that they don’t just consume a lot of content, and they don’t just read regularly - it means that in any rolling fifteen day period, the loyal user will have visited your site at least eight times. What this highlights, then, are users who really have connected to your brand and value the way you produce news. And the metric itself is significant because it can - uniquely - measure a human event, not just a browser one.

What do you consider to be more valuable:

1. A visitor who returns to your site three times (giving you 3 pageviews)
2. Three visitors who come to your page only once? (also giving you 3 pageviews)

(Read more about that here - there’s a lot to think about)

It’s not hard to understand why this demographic is of such importance to publishers.

• Building a subscription or membership base? Loyalty & engagement is everything
• Knowing how to get those newsletter readers returning time and time again? Loyalty and engagement matter
• Encouraging any kind of brand-specific news habit? Studying loyalty is key

The link with user needs is obvious: both put the audience (humans) front and centre. In approaching commissioning from a user needs point of view, you’re striving first to understand what you stand for - and what your audience wants and needs. In measuring loyalty, you’re seeing how your loyal segment of the audience responds - and once you understand what your ideal reader does, it’s much easier to reverse engineer your successes.

Our findings show that metrics that relate to loyalty and loyal behaviour all score higher with focused articles, than they do with unfocused articles

Cheeky question: aren’t these margins a bit… marginal?

Not cheeky at all. Great question, actually.

The improvements might seem slight, but there are several things to remember here:

1. Many of these results are statistically significant. If, like us, you had to get a quick refresh about what this means, it’s this: results which are consistent and strong enough that its statisticians are confident they form a rule, not an anomaly.
2. We’re in the business of looking for marginal gains. Slow and steady really does win the race, and making small improvements and tweaks where you can both put you on the right trajectory, but also strengthens a growth mindset.
3. While we’re talking iteration, no one thing is going to the bolt of lightning. Success and improvement will come from ensuring that you embrace change across the board, not just in one corner.
4. Finally, a return to the first point and a word about our methodology. In setting the bar for ‘focused articles’ at 60% and not 50%, we were ensuring that the ‘focus’ we are talking about is completely unambiguous.

Adopting a user-needs focused approach to content commissioning and production isn’t going to be the only thing that will make a difference. It’s one of several tools or insights at your disposal - and you should absolutely be looking to deploy as many as you can. Quality of writing, judicious use of headlines and image, and paying close attention to platform, format, timing and article length are all vital. Together, they’ll be greater than the sum of their parts.

T O P T I P :

So that’s it. Want some extra reading?

• Refresh your user needs knowledge here
• Download the user needs playbook
• Watch the user needs masterclass webinar

Other questions? Contact us - we’re here to help