Sydney Clark

CNS #Election2020 Coverage Metrics Report

For the Fall 2020 semester (Sep. 1 - Dec. 6, 2020), I analyzed CNS’s presidential election-related
stories and their performance on both the web and social media. Between September and early
December 2020, CNS reporters published roughly 38 stories, mostly articles and a few CNS TV
videos, on the CNS website. Please click ​HERE​ to access the Google Spreadsheet.

Format/Layout of the Google Spreadsheet: ​I decided to create a spreadsheet to track all of the
CNS election-related stories. I made two tabs: WEB and SOCIAL.

For the WEB tab, I had the following columns: Story Name, Story Link, Publication Date,
Author(s), Page Views, Story Tags, Average Time Spent, Link to Parse.ly Page and Key
Notes/Analytics.

For the SOCIAL tab, I included the following columns: Story Name, Story Link, Facebook,
Twitter, Instagram and Reddit.

WEB

One of my first observations was that the majority of the CNS stories were consistent with
including relevant tags, such as 2020 election and/or 2020 presidential election. This was really
helpful with locating the stories and building out my list of election-related content for the
spreadsheet. This is also helpful to users who go to the CNS election coverage section:
https://cnsmaryland.org/election-2020/​. They are able to see a compilation of election stories in
one place.

A few stories, however, I had to track down because they didn’t include 2020 election or 2020
presidential election tags. One story, ​“State voter ID laws counter Trump’s ballot fraud claims,”
included tags “hero” and “politics.” Another story, “​Biden readies sweeping policy shifts on
COVID, economy, immigration and more,”​ included tags “hero,” joe biden” and “washington.”

The top CNS story was ​“Maryland ballot drop box locations,”​ a data story written by Sean
McGoey and Ben Gonzales. The story was posted on Sept. 22, 2020. The story received 26k
page views, 0:53 average reading time and 20k visitors to the site (​90.9% were new visitors ​-
18k). For the device breakdown, 65.9% of users used a desktop. For referrers, internal saw
54.5%, and the top internal domain was cnsmaryland.org.
Overall, CNS’ web stories received high percentages of new visitors, which I thought was
fantastic. A lot of stories had between 70-90% new visitors, and some of the lower percentages
were between 50 and 60% new visitors. I think this spike in new visitors to the website partially
resulted in users wanting to see what type of election content was out there since this was a
historic election. Since CNS has an advantage being based in Maryland, that places us above
another news competitor who may be across the country. Users may be more likely to visit our
site versus a competitor’s due to geographic location.

The data stories performed fairly well on the website. On the spreadsheet, you will see some
rows highlighted in yellow, meaning that those are the stories that stood out analytically. If you
look at the story tag column, a few of the yellow rows included “data stories” as a tag.

The second-highest-ranking story was a data story written by Sean McGoey and Amina Lampkin
titled ​“Maryland’s political battle lines continue to harden in 2020.”​ It was published Nov. 6 and
received 1.5k page views. Roughly 92% of the visitors were new, and for referrers, roughly 64%
were direct.

I also observed a trend with the device breakdown. There were a few spikes in percentages of
mobile users, ranging from 60 to 80%+ at times. Other times, there were a few spikes in
percentages of desktop users, ranging from 50 to 70% +.

The average time spent for the election-related CNS stories was 0:43. The MIN average time
spent was 0:06. The story associated with it is ​“Maryland officials encourage drop box use,
confirm security,”​ which was published Oct. 30. The MAX average time spent was 1:45, and it
belonged to this story: ​“Maryland mail-in ballots at historic levels before Election Day,”
published Oct. 29.

Here are CNS’ top 12 best web stories election-related stories from Parse.ly (tagged 2020
presidential election, ranked by Total Engaged Minutes)
Breakdown:​ For the top 12 posts tagged 2020 presidential election: 1.8k minutes total were
spent, 3.3k visitors and the average time spent was 0:33.

SOCIAL

It was interesting to compare the web metrics to the social metrics. A trend that I observed was if
a story did well on the web, that performance is reflected on social too. Below, you will see the
story that performed best on social (it was pretty cool to look into).

As I mentioned above near the top of this document, the SOCIAL tab on the spreadsheet has the
following columns/details:
● Story Name
● Story Link
● Facebook; includes the number of times posted/interactions/engagements (likes, shares,
emoji responses and comments)
● Twitter; includes the number of impressions and engagements
 ● Instagram; includes the number of likes and percentage of engagement; ​DISCLAIMER
ABOUT IG IS FURTHER DOWN.
● Reddit; includes the number of times posted/interactions/the top subreddit

Crowdtangle, the Google Chrome extension, was used to pull social metrics from each of the
CNS website links included in the Google Spreadsheet with the tab labeled “SOCIAL.”
Similarly, with the WEB tab in the spreadsheet, I highlighted rows in yellow that stood out
analytically in the SOCIAL tab.

The three social media platforms that had the most engagement for CNS election-related stories
were Facebook, Reddit and Twitter. The CNS story that performed best on social media was
“Maryland ballot drop box locations​,” written by Sean McGoey and Ben Gonzales and posted
Sep. 22.

Social platform breakdown:

- Facebook:​ 6 times posted; 837 interactions; 1,608 engagements (285 shares, 424
comments and 899 emoji reactions)
- Reddit:​ 5 times posted; 357 interactions; top subreddit "Charm City" (150 interactions).
- Twitter:​ 3,025 impressions; 74 engagements

*​NOTES:​ A limitation with using Crowdtangle to pull data from Twitter was that the extension
can only track analytics 7 days from when the Tweet was originally posted. To address this issue
and include Twitter, I went to Twitter’s analytics feature and pulled metrics from the top Tweets
for September, October, November and December that included election-related CNS stories.
Examples are shown below.

Another Crowdtangle limitation was gathering metrics from Instagram. No metrics were pulled
from Crowdtangle because all of the story links are on our Linkin.bio page on Later.com and not
on the physical posts. To address this issue, I used the analytics feature on Later to see how our
election-related CNS stories did. I ran into another issue, however. Using the analytics feature, I
can only see post performance for the last 30 posts.

The most recent post I was able to pull from the analytics feature was this, which I included
in the Google Spreadsheet. There were 14 likes and 2% engagement.
 Highlights from Twitter and Instagram

This is the top Tweet from November 2020 (12.1k impressions); Reference link ​HERE​.
This is the top media Tweet from October 2020 (VP debates); Reference link ​HERE​.
This is the top media Tweet from November 2020 (Joe Biden wins); Reference link ​HERE​.
This post received 21 likes on ​Instagram​.
 Social takeaways:

I think that overall, the CNS election-related stories that were posted performed pretty decently
for the amount of content we were able to produce. Several of the data stories had a lot of
traction, as we saw with the data stories from the web. We were consistent with relevant hashtags
on social media #Election2020, for example. We did a good job of tagging/including the
author(s) of the articles.

I was pleased with our activity on Reddit, and I think that Reddit was a good platform for us to
post content due to its audience and algorithm. We were able to find relevant subreddits, and I
think that matters significantly. That’s the hard part for me. For our Reddit strategy going
forward, I think we should continue to emphasize the importance of finding relevant subreddits,
and potentially, develop a list/spreadsheet of the subreddits we feel perform/have performed well
and put them next to the appropriate topic/issue. It could be a good reference/resource tool for
future Reddit editors. I’m excited to see CNS use Reddit more for future content. Some content
just tends to perform well on that platform, and I think politics is definitely up there.
 Conclusion

This 2020 election season was hectic and stressful, but I think CNS was able to produce some
great, quality content that people are going to go back and peep. The numbers and metrics are
always fluctuating. I really appreciate that I was able to dive into these stories from a metrics and
analytics perspective. I learned a lot of useful material that I will bring wherever I end up for my
job after graduation.