Shorthand Analytics helps you understand how readers engage with your published stories.
Shorthand provides views of your story data for single stories and to compare multiple stories (workspace analytics).
Single story analytics
If Shorthand Analytics is enabled for your workspace, your dashboard will display a view count on the cards of published stories. The view count represents the number of times the story has been loaded. It is updated every few minutes and increases for each load or reload of the published story.
Click the view count, or open the story card menu and select Analytics, to open the story’s analytics panel.
The analytics panel
After clicking the view count or the Analytics option in the card menu, the dashboard will show an analytics panel for the story you chose.
Use the date fields at the top of the panel to choose the period to analyse. By default, the panel shows today and the previous 30 days.
The selected date range applies to all four analytics areas: Overview, Content, Audience and Traffic.
Dates and times use the timezone reported by your browser. Colleagues working in different timezones may therefore see slightly different results around the beginning or end of a date range.
Overview
The Overview area provides a summary of the story’s performance during the selected date range:
Views: The number of times the published story was loaded.
Desktop and Mobile: The percentage of views on wide and narrow browser windows.
Completions: The percentage of views that reached the end of the story.
Average time: The average time the story was open in the active tab of a browser that had focus.
The Reader engagement chart shows how story views and engagement changed throughout the selected period. Hover over a date in the chart to see that day’s values.
If analytics export is enabled for your workspace, select Download to export the displayed data as a CSV file.
Content
The Content area helps you understand engagement with the sections and videos in your story.
Video engagement
For stories containing video, the panel can show:
The number of video plays.
The number of videos watched to the end.
The overall video completion percentage.
Plays, finishes and completion for each video source.
Video engagement appears only when the selected date range contains video-play data.
The Content view of the analytics panel
Section engagement
Section engagement follows the current structure of the story. Switch between Desktop and Mobile to see engagement with the sections presented to each audience.
For each section, Shorthand reports:
Views: The number and percentage of story views that reached the section.
Drop-off rate: The percentage of views that reached the section but did not continue beyond it.
Median time: The typical amount of time spent in the section. This does not include the time taken to reach the section from the beginning of the story.
A section may show No data when there is not enough information to calculate a metric.
Audience
The Audience area provides information about the environments in which the story was viewed. Depending on the available data, this may include:
Browser: Browser use separated into Desktop and Mobile views.
Viewport: Common Desktop browser widths and Mobile browser heights.
Time on page: Average time on the story for Desktop and Mobile views.
Language: Language preferences reported by readers’ browsers.
Only analytics cards with relevant data are displayed.
The Audience view of the panel
Traffic
The Traffic area helps you understand how people reached the story and which outbound links they selected.
Top referrers shows the websites or sources that sent views to the story.
Links clicked ranks outbound links by recorded clicks and shows each link’s share of all recorded outbound clicks.
The percentage beside a link is its share of recorded clicks. It is not a click-through rate calculated from total story views.
The Traffic view of the panel
When analytics data is unavailable
Analytics are collected for published stories. If a published story has not yet received tracked views, the panel displays an empty state while it waits for events.
Some areas may remain empty when the story has views but no corresponding video, audience, referrer or outbound-click data for the selected date range. Cards that have no relevant data are not displayed.
Note: The analytics panel is available for stories only. Project analytics data is collected and included in the workspace analytics report.
Workspace analytics
A representation of the analytics of multiple stories viewed together allows for easy comparisson. This feature is available only on selected plans. Contact us if you'd like the feature enabled for your workspace.
Select Analytics from the left-hand menu on the dashboard:
The page shows analytics for the stories you can access. Any member of the workspace can open it, and each person sees the stories in the teams they belong to. Workspace owners and administrators see every team.
The Explore performance panel at the top of the page controls what the rest of the page shows. Use it to specify:
Date range: by default, the page shows the last 30 days, including today. Choose any period of 1 to 92 days. Dates use the timezone reported by your browser.
Filters: narrow the shown stories by Team, Project and Tags. Project becomes available once you select a team. If you only belong to one team, your team is shown and cannot be changed.
Rank by: choose Views, Completion rate or Median scroll depth. This decides which stories are compared by default and which metric the comparison chart shows.
Clear: resets the filters and ranking. Your date range is kept.
Thee Aggregate overview panel shows totals for every story that matches your filters:
Matching stories: the number of stories meeting the search criteria that were marked as 'published' at any point during the selected date range.
Views: the number of times those stories were loaded during the date range. Previews are not counted.
Completion rate: the percentage of views where the reader scrolled past 90% of the story.
Median scroll depth: how far through a story a typical reader scrolled.
Views by device: views split between Desktop and Mobile, with each one's share of the total.
Comparing stories
The Story comparison chart shows the performance of up to five stories meeting your criteria, day by day across the selected date range, using the metric selected in Rank by.
By default, your top five stories for that metric are shown. As in the image below, the page shows a thumbnail image and title of the five stories, followed by a graph of their views. Below the graph is a table of all the stories meeting your criteria.
To show and compare a different set of stories:
If there are already 5 stories showing, uncheck one or more currently-selected boxes in the COMPARE column of the Stories table.
Check the box next to any story (up to 5) to add it to the graph
Changing your filters or Rank by returns the chart to the top five stories. Changing only the date range keeps your selection.
Hover over the chart, or use the arrow keys, to see each story's value on a given day.
The Stories table
The Stories table lists every story that matches your filters, with these columns:
First published: the date the story was first published.
Views, Completion rate and Median scroll depth: for the selected date range.
Views (all time): every view since the story was first published.
Select a column heading to sort by it, and select it again to reverse the order. The table loads 100 stories at a time; select Load 100 more stories to see more. The last row shows totals for all matching stories.
Each story has two actions:
Preview opens the story in a new tab.
Inspect opens the story's analytics panel, starting from the same date range.
Which stories are included
Workspace Analytics includes stories that have been published at least once, including stories that have since been unpublished. Draft stories that have never been published are not included.
You will only see stories you have access to, so colleagues in different teams may see different totals.
Workspace Analytics can show up to 2,000 stories at a time. If more stories match, narrow your filters.
Downloading workspace analytics
Workspace owners and administrators can download their Shorthand Analytics data as a CSV file.
To access this option, select Settings from the left-hand menu on the dashboard, then select Analytics from the Workspace Settings section of the menu. Under Workspace Analytics, adjust the report date range as needed, and click Generate Report. This will queue your report to be generated.
This report will include all published stories, even if the stories were published outside of the given date range, although the page view data will only correspond to views within the date range (for example, if a story was published after the end date, it will still show on the report but there will be no page view data for it).
Once ready, you'll receive an email letting you know the report can be downloaded, and a link to the file will appear beneath where the report was queued.
By default, a workspace can generate up to 10 workspace reports in a 24-hour period. Some workspaces have a different limit.
The data that Shorthand collects
To provide story analytics, Shorthand collects anonymised data from the browsers of your readers. You may need to consider whether this impacts your requirements to disclose to your readers the collection or use of data. The data we collect includes:
URL used to access the story
Referrer URL
Date and time of access
Times of progress through the story (scroll and section events)
Device type (for example, iPhone, Pixel)
Operating system and version
Browser and version
Browser window size and orientation
Language (for example, en-US)
Click events on the story
Outgoing links clicked from the page
Key differences to other analytics services
Shorthand Analytics has been designed to work without setting cookies in the browser of your readers. This removes the need to manage cookie consent, but introduces several important differences to services like Google Analytics:
Shorthand Analytics (by design) cannot identify new versus return visitors. Each hit on the story, whether new or repeat, generates an additional view. If a reader reloads the story, they will generate multiple views.
Shorthand Analytics does not track user sessions across multiple pages or stories. The time on story metric is tracked in isolation for each story.
Shorthand Analytics does not currently support exclusion of bot traffic in the same way as more fully-featured analytics platforms, so you should expect view counts to be somewhat higher.
Limitations
Shorthand Analytics is currently a Beta feature, so it's important to be aware that some functionality remains to be implemented. This includes:
Comparative or combined analytics for multiple stories.
Pulling data into reports in third-party tools such as Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio).
Setting conversion goals or actions.
If these things are important to you, we would be happy to advise on how you can best integrate fully-featured third-party analytics tools — or see below for our recommended complementary analytics tools.
Note: Shorthand Analytics has not been enabled for all workspaces. If you don't have access to this feature but would like it turned on, please contact us.
Using complementary analytics services
For most customers who are looking for advanced reporting and engagement metrics, we recommend using Shorthand Analytics in together with a third-party analytics platform to gain a well-rounded picture of engagement. Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager provide good complementary solutions for customers who aren't already using other analytics providers.
We recommend installing a Google Tag Manager container into your Shorthand stories and then managing a Google Analytics installation through the container — see Adding Google Tag Manager and Adding Google Analytics for the options on your plan.
For the Google side, see Google Analytics 4 installation instructions, and how to add conversion and engagement events via Google Tag Manager.