feature: Quadrant model

Article performance, cleverly visualised

The Quadrant Model is a visualisation of page performance as shown in smartocto Insights. It gives editors an overview of what works for their audience - and what doesn't.

It also provides the ultimate insight: the stories which perform so poorly that you might consider skipping making them altogether.

How it works

On one axis we might put reach and on the other engagement. With that, you’ll see the distribution of topics (or even stories) that have an impact on your audience (top right) or the ones that don’t (bottom left).

Why's this significant?

1. While article in the top right quadrant obviously perform well, our research has found that articles in the top right of that subsection convert 20 times more people than the average.
2. Good niche articles need to get more distribution.
3. Reach champions need enrichment.
4. And, as already mentioned, stop publishing articles which cover topics that always land in the bottom left.

The Quadrant Model in action

Belgian-Dutch publisher DPG Media uses a variant of the Quadrant Model for strategic reasons. Their goal is to convert more visitors to a premium membership. We at smartocto were inspired by the joint collaboration on this subject and created a more generic version of the Quadrant Model.

• There’s a sliding scale to enable you to include fewer or more articles in the analysis. So, you might elect to see just 10 in each quadrant, or hundreds. As to how these are selected, it’s done by most extreme to highlight outliers. Necessarily the further down this list you go, the more likely you are to see dots appearing in the middle of the quadrant.
• The size of the balls on the diagram mean degree of loyalty. That’s the 1.0 version. This might change in the future. You could also arrange it so the size of the balls represents the number of articles of that type (be it organised by user need or topic etc).
• You can see which authors bring the reach, who brings the loyalty.
• You can click on a dot and drill down to see how that individual article is performing - and how it has performed.
• You can filter on user needs, as seen below.