Press Club of Long Island

By Timothy Robertson

Guest Writer

In a talk sponsored by the Press Club of Long Island Thursday at Newsday, Dominick Miserandino, founder and executive editor of TheCelebrityCafe.com, discussed Google Analytics and how to use it to measure site traffic.

Miserandino stressed the importance of  understanding why a visitor lands on a page. He advised paying attention to keywords, where traffic originates from and either bringing up lagging sources or play to the ones that are driving traffic.

Perhaps one of the most important points he made during the two-hour discussion, which was attended by a combination of about 30 journalists and marketers, was for news outlets to understand that a news story may drive traffic for a day or two, but then that traffic will die off. The goal of a news site, in part, is to produce stories that will keep traffic at a steady rate each day, he said.

As I’ve seen with Nassau News Live and our use of Google Analytics over Sminethe past year, the average time on the site is 1-2 minutes. Prior to tonight, I didn’t know if that was high or low. According to Miserandino, that is about average for one news story. That pits the word count at 150-300 words. Writing a 2,000-word piece? Forget about it.

With that in mind, I’m going to end this post.

Timothy Robertson is working on his master’s degree in journalism at Hofstra University. He is the managing editor and co-founder of NassauNewsLive.com, a hyperlocal student-run news site based at Hofstra. He also freelances for Newsday and News12.com, and produces a regular blog on various online journalism topics.