Case Study: The Eyeopener
The Eyeopener, the most award-winning Canadian student newspaper, re-designed their online presence in January 2007 to grow their community beyond the Ryerson University campus.
The eyeopener website after launch
Challenge:
The Eyeopener needed online advertising to help finance the costs of maintenance and operations for the website. In order to sell their ad space, they needed to know exactly how their visitors were using the site in order to effectively sell advertising space on their web site.
Analytics were put in place to help evaluate how the site was used
Solution:
In order to find out how the site was being used we employed several strategies: A full-featured user commenting system was added for each article so direct feedback on content could be received. Page counts were added so the top destinations could easy be determined and evaluated for success. A full analytics system was integrated so that staff could see exactly who was using the site, where they were coming from, what they were looking at, and what type of computer and browser they were using, to name just a few of the things the Eyeopener was looking at. Finally, a heat map overlay was added to the site so that the Eyeopener staff could visually see what elements of a page were receiving the most attention.
All of these features let the Eyeopener to know exactly what type of visitors they have coming to their site and how those visitors are using the site, which in turn makes it easier to sell ad space to the advertisers.
A heat map displays the most clicked regions of the site