The RAYOS Platform Enables Data-Driven Content Strategies

Data-driven tools and management strategies have transformed how businesses make decisions. Insights gained from data can help you identify trends, measure progress, and capitalize on opportunities to ultimately improve your bottom line. At GTxcel, we strive to make data-driven decisions and empower our broadcast customers to make them, too.

What ‘Data-Driven’ Means

Data-driven means making decisions based on data. This type of approach has been used in a wide variety of fields in different ways. In many industries, it’s been most effective to use data as a way to augment human judgement and expertise. In some industries, companies have taken it further by automating decision-making through artificial intelligence and machine learning.

At GTxcel, we make data-driven decisions when we develop features for our RAYOS platform. For new features, our experiments usually consist of releasing a small version of a feature so that we can keep track of how it’s used and analyze the data. This is often referred to as releasing an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). Each time we iterate on the feature we can use qualitative and quantitative data to drive our decision-making.

For example, data is the reason we continue to improve the RAYOS platform’s photo gallery and lightbox functionality. Our data shows that when broadcasters leverage our interactive photo capabilities in articles, they can see content views and ad impressions increase by five times. We observed that some galleries included just two or three images, and our slideshow templates were not optimized for that, so we created a template that would look great for articles with small galleries.

This data-driven approach works great for SaaS (Software as a Service) providers like GTxcel, but it can also be an effective approach for broadcasters.

How Broadcasters Can Make Data-Driven Decisions

Broadcasters who partner with GTxcel have access to meaningful and actionable data via the GTxcel Analytics Dashboard. There are a lot of ways broadcasters can leverage that data to make data-driven content decisions. Stations can:

• Flag traffic trends to capitalize on popular topics and make newsroom decisions
• Compare categories such as weather or crime to increase traffic to sections that are important to sponsors and advertisers
• See what types of media do the best (video, images, galleries) and do more of what already works
• Use detailed alerts reporting to learn the most effective time of day to send alerts and which types of alerts are most effective

What’s Next

It takes time and effort to become data-driven, but it’s worth it.

GTxcel customers have a big advantage because we provide a wealth of data through our analytics reports and reporting tools. We look forward to continuing the conversation with our customers to iterate on our analytics reporting to provide you the data needed for your most important business decisions. We’ll also share any actionable insights that we can generalize across broadcasters.