Portal 3.0 usage data reveals what PR, content, and comms teams need now: recency-first reporting, Sparks AI insights, and analytics that make earned media tangible.
Across PR, content, and comms teams, budgets are stagnant while expectations mount. According to a new study from Meltwater and WE Communications, only about 2 in 5 company leaders fully understand their PR team's work.
This disconnect isn’t new, but now we have the product technology on-hand to help leadership understand more about the potentials of earned media.
Portal 3.0, launched last year, and since then, we’ve been tracking how users have interacted with the new functionalities to guide next steps for features so the technology continues to meet our users where they need it most.
We gathered data on client behavior, feedback, and opportunities from early usage of the portal. Our top takeaways underlined the continuing importance of recency in reporting and the value of actionable insights and analytics.
Users spend more time looking at their most recent stories rather than those they distributed six months to a year ago.
This finding tracks with what we already understood from account managers who take in-depth questions from our clients about story performance while keeping pace on ambitious editorial calendars, and quickly moving into planning mode for their next story.
Our newest page in the Stacker Portal, which provides relevant AI-generated story ideas, was where our users spent the most time, according to our research. Users spent 7 minutes on average on the Insights page, and 90% reached the bottom of the page — overshooting the standard for web platforms of 50-60%.
We found that the leaderboards showing recent top performing stories had the most engagement.
Here, brands can explore top stories across the newswire, find inspiration for their next story based on what’s trending, and consider: “What would this story look like if we tried to write it?”
Users plugged into Stacker's newswire network benefit more from each other than they would alone. Brands that leverage our story performance data across our network of 3,000+ publishers make more informed decisions on what angles to focus on because they can see what publishers want, and usually perform better as a result.
While recency is important for users, we also delivered features to help them glean insights from their own historical data so they can use performance patterns to inform their future content strategy.
Many users spent a lot of time on our map feature that shows pickups geographically. We would have assumed users of Stacker Local, our product that builds local versions of a national story and distributes those local angles, would be interested in this viz; however, we found most users wanted to understand the geographical breadth of their stories, whether they were local or not.
Users seem to appreciate the ability to understand their impact across the newswire visually, rather than just seeing the number of pickups on a screen.
Pick-ups feel more tangible when users can understand that distributing on Stacker’s Newswire is more than digital PR or link-building. Users can see where they’re reaching real newsrooms in real physical locations. Plus, seeing the geographical impact of a story can help marketing teams understand what markets might already be aware of their brand, so they can continue to build trust in those targeted areas and reach new ones.
As we focus on what we’re building next, there are a few specifics that we have our attention, with many other projects on-hand, namely:
We’re working on efficient ways to continue to track growing numbers of pickups across thousands of publisher sites on the web, while delivering performance data sooner after distribution.
Along with earlier reporting, we're also planning to give users more control over the notifications they receive and add high value communications via the portal; for instance, when key performance milestones are reached, early pickup highlights, and more.
Users are leveraging our Sparks story insights to make better earned media strategies. Portal 3.0 personalizes suggestions for relevant stories and headlines. Based on the clicking behavior and feedback we looked at, users want more guidance on how to best adapt the ideas to inspire compelling, performance-driven stories.
We’re focused on how users are thinking about their work and how we can continue building the portal to do more of that work for our users with clear results.
We’re looking for patterns that emerge across users over time and repeated points of confusion or hesitation as signals of where design changes are needed.
This research helps guide inevitable trade-offs, project priorities, solution brainstorming, what to simplify, and what to leave out so the product empowers teams to earn impactful media attention and citations with salient results.
👉 Explore our Portal 3.0 and see for yourself how it’s meeting the moment in media today
Sam Kaye is a Product Manager at Stacker. He holds a BA in Journalism from San Diego State University and has a background in audience development, local journalism and SEO.
Photo Illustration by Stacker // Canva
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