Carebot Metrics

Introduction

Seeking more meaningful ways to assess success in journalism has led us to explore different metrics and approaches to understanding how people come to care about stories they encounter.

This document captures what these metrics are and their definitions, used as references for all Carebot outputs. We would be remiss if we didn’t make it explicitly clear the distinctions we are making between Metrics, Measures and Indicators and why—these assumptions drive our framing for the definitions below.

Definitions

Measures

  • Attempted Graphic Interaction is a measure used to count how many times a user tried to interact with a graphic by clicking, tapping or dragging.

  • Graphic On-screen Visibility is a measure used to count how much time a graphic is displayed on their browser’s viewport while the page is visible to the user.

  • Pageview is a measure used to count each time a page for a corresponding URL was loaded on the user’s browser.

  • Story Scroll Depth is a measure used to track how far down a one-page story a user has scrolled before leaving.

  • Story Rebirth is a measure used to track how many users returned to a story and completed reading it after having abandoned a tab open after loading the story.

Indicators

  • Graphic Linger Rate is an indicator used to calculate the median visibility of a graphic across all users who viewed it.

  • Never Seen (Graphic) is an indicator used to calculate the number of potential readers of a story who never saw the graphic in that story.

  • Veni, Vidi, Relīquī (I came, I saw, I abandoned) is an indicator used to calculate the number of times users loaded the page for a corresponding URL then promptly abandoned it.

  • Engaged Completion Rate is an indicator used to calculate the proportion of people who started and completed the story.

  • Relative Facebook Sharing is an indicator used to calculate the relative impact of Facebook Shares for every 1000 user sessions a story receives.

Other

Neither measures nor indicators, but related considerations:

  • The Care Question is a Y/N question presented to users at the end of a story to assess if it satisfied their needs. Live tests have shown that having this question present at the end of a story significantly increased users likellyhood to take a subsequent action (share, like, contribute, etc)