Heads Up Display (HUD) - Analytics

Publish Story's HUD brings content analytics directly to your web pages, saving time by eliminating the need to switch between dashboards.

Here's how you can use Heads-Up Display:
A detailed explanation of Scroll Depth can be found here. The information encapsulated in the HUD box is explained below.

• Toggle button: To switch ON and OFF both the Performance numbers and Headline A/B Testing.
• Concurrent Users: Number of unique users on the web page in a 1-minute window (the window duration is one minute, from the last 2-to-1 minute) . Please note that the window is delayed by one minute to allow for data collection. Hence, the Concurrents are near real-time. The concurrent numbers are refreshed every 30 seconds.
• Visitors by Platform: This provides information on the platform from where the concurrent users are visiting the page.
• Scroll Depth: Tracks scrolling behaviour to reveal engagement levels.

Once the HUD toggle is switched ON, the page is overlaid with HUD bubbles. The bubbles come in different colours and encapsulate several pieces of information as described below. The bubbles are generated only for those links that contain at least 5 words to limit overcrowding of the page with bubbles on those links that do not represent any content, such as section tags.

• Number: The number in a bubble refers to the story rank, ie, the rank of the story vis-a-vis others on the page. The rank is calculated based on the unique CPM (clicks per minute) on all the stories on the page. Unique CPM refers to CPM generated by unique sessions, i.e., unique visitors. In case two or more stories have the same unique CPM, or a story has not received any unique click in the 1-minute window, then QC (Quality Clicks) is the tie-breaker and is used as a tie-breaker. If QC is also the same between more than one story, then Engagement time is the tie-breaker.

Sometimes instead of a number, a '-' is shown in the bubble. This is because no click, or engagement, would have been recorded on that headline from that page in the 2-to-1 minute window. The colour of such a bubble would always be default Blue and it'd not contain chevrons. In case no unique click is recorded but engagement is recorded, then rank would be generated.

• Colour: The bubble colour denotes the current story's unique CPM wrt. the positional CPM (i.e., weighted unique CPM of all previous stories at that position). If the current day is a weekday, then the positional CPM looks at the last 40 weekdays, if the current day is a weekend, then the positional CPM takes into account the last 16 weekends (last 2 months approx.). Hence, the bubble colour gives an idea about the performance of the story at this position wrt other stories at the same position in the past.
• Red CPM: CPM is less than 0.6 times the positional CPM. The story is doing worse than others in the past at this position.
• Blue colour: CPM is between 0.6 and 1.3 times the positional CPM. The story is performing about the same compared to others in the past at this position.
• Green colour: CPM is greater than 1.3 times the positional CPM. The story is doing better than others in the past at this position.

• Chevrons (Arrows): The degree (or slope) of change in total (not unique) CPM the last 2 hours is represented by the arrows. It gives the CPM trend over the last 2 hours. No chevrons means the rate of change (slope) is between -2 and 2 degrees (not much change in trend over the last 2 hours).

To illustrate, a story with a down arrow but green colour represents: its performance trend is going down if looked at a duration of last 2 hours, but still it is receiving more unique visitors for that position compared to other stories on that position in the last 2 months.
If we hover the mouse pointer over any bubble, some more information about that headline is revealed:

• Rank: Same as explained above.
• Engaged Time: The average amount of time (Total engagement time divided by total clicks) spent on the content by unique visitors by clicks generated from this page.
• CPM/PCPM: Unique Clicks-per-minute as explained above. PCPM is predicted total (not unique) clicks-per-minute. Based on the last 2 hour trend, HUD outputs its best guess of the total clicks that will be generated in the next one minute. This is basically an extrapolation of the trend.
• Quality Clicks (QC): This gives the number of unique visitors who have spent at least 15 seconds on the resulting page after clicking on a link.

Clicking on a bubble further opens a pop-up with two tabs:

• Performance tab: The numbers in this tab are the same as explained above. This, however, has another component, which is a line trend chart of total CPM, over a 20-minute duration (last 21-to-1 minute). It is based on this trend that the extrapolation for PCPM is done.
• Headline Testing: This is used to conduct Headline A/B Tests over the headlines.