I can remember when the ratings would come out, and word would quickly make its way down the hallway: “The book is here.”
Sure enough, management was behind closed doors with a “do not disturb” sign going through the numbers. How did mornings do? What happened in middays? Who gained? Who lost? Did that promotion make a difference? A lot of what we did next could be influenced by what they found in those numbers.
We have something similar for our websites today, although I’m not sure many radio stations treat it with anywhere near the same importance.
Google Analytics can tell us whether people are actually using the things we put on our websites. The problem is that opening Google Analytics for the first time feels a little like getting the ratings book without anyone explaining how to read it. There are reports, charts, percentages and terminology everywhere. It’s easy to decide you’ll come back to it later.
You really don’t need most of it. For a radio station, I think there are a handful of questions worth answering regularly.
How are people finding us?
Are they coming from Google, Facebook, email, another website or simply typing in the station’s address? This can tell you quite a bit about where your efforts are paying off.
Maybe that local news story is getting most of its traffic from Google days after you posted it. Maybe Facebook is sending lots of people to the website, but they leave almost immediately. Maybe your newsletter sends fewer visitors, but those people stick around and visit several pages.
That’s useful information when deciding where to spend your time.
What are people actually looking at?
We spend a lot of time deciding what goes on a radio station website. Analytics lets the audience vote.
Look at your most visited pages. Is it local news? Contests? School closings? High school sports? Events? Personality pages? Obituaries? Something you barely thought about when you posted it?
Don’t just look at the homepage. In fact, many visitors may never see it. Someone searching Google for information about a local event might enter through that story, read it and leave without ever visiting your homepage.
Those individual pages can tell you a lot about what your audience wants from the station online.
What makes someone listen?
This is one of the measurements I want every station to have.
If someone clicks the Listen Live button or starts the stream, where were they when they did it?
Maybe they came to read a local news story and then started listening. Maybe your morning show page sends a surprising number of people to the stream. Maybe a contest gets thousands of visits but almost nobody goes anywhere else afterward.
Knowing what leads someone from website visitor to listener is incredibly valuable for a radio station.
What makes someone do something else?
Listening isn’t the only action worth measuring. Newsletter signups, contest entries, podcast plays, advertiser clicks and other actions can tell you whether visitors are doing more than simply looking at a page. This is where analytics becomes much more useful than counting pageviews.
Suppose 2,000 people visit a contest page and 600 enter. Or 500 people read a local story and 75 start the stream. Those numbers begin telling you what the website is actually accomplishing rather than simply how much traffic it received.
What can we show an advertiser?
This may be the most overlooked opportunity. If you sell a digital promotion that includes a page on your website, you should be able to tell the advertiser more than “we put it on the website.”
How many people visited it? How long did they stay? Did they click through to the advertiser? Did they submit a form, download something or take whatever action the campaign was designed to produce?
Google Analytics cannot tell you everything that happened because of an advertising campaign, and we shouldn’t pretend that it can. But it can give salespeople real numbers showing what happened on the digital side of the promotion.
None of this requires someone at the station to become a Google Analytics expert. It requires someone to look at the numbers regularly and connect them with what was happening at the station.
A traffic spike might make perfect sense when you realize schools were closed that morning. A story suddenly getting hundreds of visitors from Google tells you people are searching for that subject. A contest getting plenty of traffic but very few entries tells you something may be wrong with the offer or the page. That’s where the value is.
We used to wait for the book to tell us whether what we were doing on the air was connecting. Today, we don’t have to wait months to learn what’s connecting on our websites. The numbers are sitting there right now. We just have to start looking at them.
Pic generated by ChatGPT.
Jim Sherwood is a radio veteran turned digital strategist dedicated to helping radio stations thrive online through engaging websites and mobile apps. As the founder of Skyrocket Radio and host of the Better Radio Websites podcast, he shares best practices to help stations grow audiences and revenue in the digital space. With decades of experience in radio and a passion for connecting content with listeners, Jim ensures that every station—no matter its size—can make a lasting impact online.