EARLY ACCESS: If you're interested in using this feature and you're on the Enterprise plan, please reach out to your success manager, who will activate this for you.
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Get actionable insights from your online publications which help you better understand the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and your audience through Publitas analytics dashboards.
In this article:
- Accessing the publication dashboard
- What should you look for?
- Definitions
- Exporting a PDF
- Publitas Dashboard vs. Google Analytics
Accessing the publication dashboard
To access the dashboard, click on the graph icon in the publication overview or select Publication Dashboard listed as one of the additional options (•••).
Accessing the Publication Dashboard:
What should you look for?
To measure performance it is key to know what success looks like. Any online publication aims to reach as many people as possible, have them engage with all or the majority of the content and generate high quality traffic to your store. These are the key performance indicators that the dashboard focuses on.
For example, if your aim is to create as much exposure as possible for your new collection, increasing brand awareness, the number of Opens and Page Views are important metrics to look at. The pages graph will help identify what pages were most popular. Additionally to views per page, you'll find the click-through rate and the average engagement per page.
On top of that, you will learn about the most popular products (in case your publication uses Product hotspots) and what links generated the most traffic to your online store. You can see on what page they are on, but if they are more than one page, all views are counted for but only the first page number will be shown in the table.
To improve the design of your online publications, it helps to know what kind of screen they are viewed most often. If the majority of your audience browses your publications on a mobile device, you can both adapt the reader as well as the design of the publications to this.
💡 Did you know we can help you optimize your publication for mobile audiences?
Contact your Success Manager for more information.
Success Metrics
- Opens = The number of times the publication is opened. If the publication is refreshed, a new open is recorded. If the embedded publication is enlarged, it counts as part of the same open.
- Avg. Engagement Time = Average of the total Engagement Time per publication visit (i.e. Opens). Engagement Time is based on the time your publication was viewed. Engagement Time stops recording as soon as the user exits the page (e.g. selects a different browser window or closes the one that hosts the publication).
- Bounce rate = The percentage of publication opens that have no additional interactions associated with them.
- Click-through rate = The total number of link clicks divided by the number of publication opens.
- Click-through rate per page = The total number of link clicks on that page divided by the total number of page views on that page.
- Pages Viewed = A page view is recorded each time a user navigates to a different page of the publication. Two-page views are recorded whenever a spread is loaded (booklet publications only).
- Avg. Engagement time per page = the average engagement time per page shows how long each page was viewed on average.
- Products Overlay Viewed = A product view is recorded whenever product details are loaded through a Product hotspot. Product hotspots with more than one product listed can generate multiple product views. No product views are recorded when Product hotspots are configured to open the Webshow URL on click.
- Product Clicks = The number of events the product recorded that sent traffic to the customer's website.
- Product Clicks Rate = The number of events the product clicks over the number of product overlay views.
- Products added to favorites or to the shopping list = When using the Favorites feature or the Shopping List feature, the table with Product details will also include the number of times each product was added to either of these lists.
- Links Clicked = Actions that take the user to a location outside the publication. Link clicks include Link hotspots, the Product hotspot's call to action button (or Product hotspots clicks when configured to open the Webshop URL on click), the Home button, and the external link assigned to the Promotional banner.
- Funnel view = Understand to what level users engage with your content. See how many of the total opens also lead to further interactions (i.e. opens including interactions) and how many of those interactions involved link clicks (i.e. opens including link clicks).
- Device Overview = Publication opens per platform (mobile, desktop, and tablet).
- Purchases = The product SKUs that were viewed in the publication that were also purchased on the e-commerce site and their value. (This is displayed only if you have e-commerce tracking in place).
- Add-to-cart = The products viewed that are added to the e-commerce website cart.
(This is displayed only if you have e-commerce tracking in place, and it then replaces Product Clicks).
💡 Data is updated daily, around 05:00 AM UTC time.
Exporting a PDF
You can export the view you are on in a PDF format.
First, select the date range and device filter values - these criteria will be reflected in the exported data. The export button is located on the top right corner of the dashboard, next to the mentioned filters.
The PDF export is a snapshot without the interactivity of what you see on the dashboard.
We will be looking at CSV export soon.
Publitas Dashboard vs. Google Analytics
If you are also using Google Analytics to track your online publications, you are bound to run into some discrepancies when comparing the results with the Publication Dashboard. The details below will help you understand what differences you can expect and why some metrics can be different.
Where Google Analytics is meant to track a large variety of sites and apps, Publitas specifically designed the dashboards to track online publications. This does lead to different outcomes when looking at the metrics in Google Analytics versus what Publitas reports.
| Opens vs. Sessions |
The amount of Opens reported in Publitas is expected to be greater than the amount of Sessions reported in Google Analytics. Google Analytics relies on cookies to track data, which means it won't be able to track if cookies are blocked by the browser. Publitas does not rely on cookies which means it is less likely to be blocked. Also, Google Analytics can record multiple publications in a single session, where Publitas records an Open-event every time a publication loads. |
| Pageviews |
Publitas is expected to record twice the number of pageviews for booklet publications, compared to the pageviews recorded by Google Analytics. This is because Publitas records a pageview for each page that makes up a spread, where Google records a single pageview per spread.
There can be exceptions. Google Analytics also a pageview for any popup, loaded in the Reader (e.g. product and video hotspots). When the popup is closed, returning to the page behind it counts as another pageview. These additional pageviews can close the gap with Publitas' pageview count to some degree. Note: Publitas does not support tracking unique pageviews. |
| Links clicked Products viewed Device category ratio |
Both Publitas and Google Analytics record Link clicks, Product views and device categories in a similar way. Discrepancy occurs when tracking gets blocked by the browser. This happens more often for Google Analytics tracking which is why it is expected that Publitas reports a different device ratio and higher numbers on link clicks and product views. |
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Bounce rate |
It is expected that Publitas shows a higher bounce rate than Google Analytics does. Publitas records a bounce whenever a user opens any publication and closes it without having interacted with it. For Google Analytics to record a bounce, the initiated session needs to end on the first page, before any interactions were recorded. This means that, when multiple publications are viewed within a single session, only the first publication has the potential to bounce. Since Google Analytics is only able to record data whenever cookies are allowed, it is possible that the average bounce rate of the recorded sessions is larger than the average bounce rate of the blocked sessions. This can lead to a higher bounce rate in Google Analytics' reports. For example, if publications are embedded on your site and they do not use a custom domain, Google Analytics tracking will be blocked by most browsers these days. This means the reports do not represent the main use case, but rather the average of other use cases. |
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Engagement time |
In general, Publitas uses a very similar method to capture the engagement time as Google Analytics. |