1. KNIGHT CENTER
Digital Metrics Report
Bobby Hammelman, Brian Meller, Cameron White, Qing Ye
Digital Metrics, Gene Kincaid

2. REPORT CONTENTS
Site Audit 3
ZMOT Analysis 8
Google Analytics Foundational Reports 9
Key Metrics 14
Insights and Recommendations 17
Website Mock-Up 19
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3. SITE AUDIT
DIGITAL DESIGN BRIEF
What is the site’s personality? Describe the Content-to-Entertainment spectrum.
The site has a special interest with a purpose providing information about a
professional training and outreach program for journalists in Latin America
and the Caribbean. The site also serves to offer content about journalism for
readers via the blog. The blog content serves as the majority of information
provided.
Who are you trying to reach with a Home Page? Describe the target audience.
The site is trying to reach people who are interested in the field of journalism
in the Americas, specifically journalists in Central and South America. The
target audience wants more training and resources for becoming effective
journalists in their communities.
Why & when will these people visit the site? Explain how the Internet adds value.
The site offers a variety of information from journalism training, blog on news
in the Latin Americas and Caribbean, local news about the Knight Center and
Austin Forum. Most people visit the site during the day probably to read the
blog on the Latin Americas and Caribbean. Users may also visit to download
the books and manuals offered or to sign up for the online class.
Visitors will come to the site when they want more information on news
around the world, especially Central and South America, via the blog.
Additionally, visitors may come to the site to register for a class and download
the books when registration for the class opens.
What are the hard/soft objectives of this project? Briefly describe the results we’re
after.
Hard: 1. Create content on the site in order to train journalists in the
Americas. 2. Submit stories in three primary languages used in North and
South America to attract and keep journalists/aspiring journalists on the site.
Soft: Offer online courses for anyone interested, and provide a newsletter.
How must the site compare to competitor’s? Don’t sell; just tell pros & cons.
Pros: The site offers free online resources (ebooks,video courses) to wire
journalists.
Cons: The site lacks an integration of the channels of their existing resources
(MOOC, Vimeo videos & Digital Library)
Readability?
There is too much important content below the scroll line.
Where else is the communication going to run? Discuss media integration.
Communication also takes place on all social media sites, such as their
Facebook, Twitter and Vimeo accounts and Rosental’s personal Twitter
account.
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4. What Web sites will you promote to or negotiate cross links with? Spell out Web
relations.
Link to other partner websites from Knight Foundation
(www.knightfoundation.org) which performs good when searching for
“journalism training” and “journalism education”
International Symposium on Online Journalism (online symposium
conference) Open Society Foundations
SITE ROADMAP
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5. VISUAL HISTORY
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6. SITE EVOLUTION
Site launched February 22, 2003.
Site redesigned in March 2005. Navigation moved upward. Site enhanced with
feature story pictures shown on the home page.
Current site Enhanced with Image slideshows and social media connection
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7. COMPETITIVE BRACKET
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8. ZMOT
ZMOT, or Zero Moment of Truth, is the moment of time when a target audience researches
for a product or service before taking action. FortThe Knight Center, the ZMOT moment
takes place when journalists or aspiring journalists search online for international
journalism resources. Evaluating the Knight Center’s ZMOT is important because it
provides insight on how target site visitors search for the site. The figure below indicates
how to evaluate a ZMOT. Since, there are not a significant amount of reviews for the Knight
Center, the ZMOT analysis below focuses on brand results and best in category results.
1. [KNIGHT CENTER]
2. BEST [JOURNALISM TRAINING]
Knight Foundation appeared in the top two organic search results, but Knight
Center only appeared in the first three pages.
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9. GOOGLE ANALYTICS
FOUNDATIONAL REPORTS
1. How many visitors are coming to the site?
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10. 2. Where are visitors coming from?
o Referring URLs
o Search keywords and key phrases
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11. 3. What does the Knight Center want visitors to do on the site?
Why does the website exist?
o Train journalists
o Encourage journalists to join or create their own organizations and
operate on their own
o Provide people information/viewership of conferences
o Inform visitors on important news stories via the blog posts
What are the top three strategies to bring visitors to the site?
o The free online course – MOOC
o Google news: Journalism
o Blog content
What do you think should be happening on the site?
o Joining the MOOC
o Reading articles/blog posts
o Subscribing to their weekly newsletter
o Info/links/viewings of online conferences
o Obtaining information of the Austin Forum
o Downloading e-books & subscribing to social media
4. What are visitors actually doing?
Top entry pages
o #1 is the English homepage
o Four others in the top ten were popular blog posts
o Three others in the top ten are non-English, including one of e-book
download page
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12. Traffic Source
o 64% are from search engines: Google 49%, Yahoo 9.9% and
Bing 5.6%
o 22% are from direct (home page)
o 14% are from referring sites
Site overlay (click density) of the site's top 10 most viewed pages
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13. Abandonment Rate
o Four of the most abandoned pages are blog posts
o 44.15% left from the English homepage
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14. KEY METRICS
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17. INSIGHTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Insights
The purpose of the Knight Center is to provide resources and content to
journalists in the Americas. The site intends to train journalists and
encourage them to form their own journalistic communities and to operate
on their own.
Google Analytics indicates that the highest percentage of site visitors are
English-speaking and are from the United States. The next highest percentage
are Spanish and Portuguese-speaking visitors from Brazil, Mexico and other
South American countries like Argentina, Colombia and Peru. From this
information, we concluded that the consumers of site content are not the
primary target of the Knight Center.
The site produces and pushes a lot of text and content via the blog, which is
connected to the higher bounce rate from the home page and the blog pages.
A very low rate of visitors scroll past the first fault line, which eliminates the
opportunity for visitors to sign up for the newsletter.
Recommendations
Testing
We recommend that the Knight Center conducts A/B testing on the site to trial
run new page elements. These tests are intended to optimize the user
experience.
o Home page redesign: There is too much content on the home page,
and this overwhelms visitors and increases a higher bounce rate.
Please reference our home page mock-up at the end of the document.
 Remove blog posts from the home page, and instead just keep
the link to direct visitors to the blog.
 Move the e-newsletter sign-up box higher up to avoid missed
opportunities of viewers missing the newsletter sign-up
because it’s not in the top portion of the home page.
 Instead of “Headlines from Our Blog,” change the sidebar title
to “Top Trending Stories.” This will add an element of social
media by using reader input from Twitter re-Tweets and
Facebook posts.
 Place a live Twitter feed box in the top right corner of the home
page.
 Link to more sponsors, such as the Knight Center in Miami and
other Knight Centers.
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18. o Blog: The blog features stories from years past and results in tens of
thousands of pages on the website. We are proposing the Knight
Center categorizes the posts by subject matter and date.
 The subject matter could be represented by a word cloud on
the sidebar of the blog.
 The date categories would allow visitors to search stories
chronologically.
o Video: The purpose or mission of the site is unclear to new visitors,
which may be attributed to a higher bounce rate among new visitors.
We suggest producing a short video that highlights the mission of the
Knight Center and its resources in under one minute.
 This video can be placed on the revolving display on the home
page and on the Vimeo channel.
 The video can be created by a video production intern.
Implement CrazyEgg on the Website
CrazyEgg tracks the user’s mouse and click locations, and then the program
displays this information in heat maps. This program will allow the Knight
Center to see which links receive the most clicks, how far visitors scroll down
and what elements of the page are viewed most.
o Before redesigning the web page, using this program may be useful to
see what is working or what is not working for the website.
o CrazyEgg offers their program for a 30 day trial, which will allow
enough time for Knight Center to evaluate the site.
Social Media Strategy
The Facebook and Twitter feeds are currently pushing the same content when
they should be differentiating the content. Additionally, there is minimal
interaction on both Twitter and Facebook because the posts are merely
pushing content instead of creating an interactive relationship with readers.
o Push less blog content via the Facebook and Twitter feeds.
o Diversify content by posting pictures and videos.
o Create more interactive posts that will elicit responses from followers.
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19. Website Mock-up
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