Tell me about yourself and On3?

On3 is a college sports digital media, data and marketing company for fans, media, coaches, and athletes. On3 combines fan sites (24 currently and growing) as well as an industry leading database and a national team of writers and editors. As for me, I’m the senior director of the national news desk at On3. I manage a team of 15 writers and four managing editors operating from 7am to 12am, seven days a week. I have 22 years of experience in the sports digital media.

What did you do before using Spiny?

Before Spiny, I relied primarily on Google Analytics, tracking sessions and page views across referrers daily, monthly, and annually, but the primary usage for me was the live view to see which stories were moving the most traffic and which referrer/social distribution channel was pushing the rise in traffic.

How did you find setting up and using Spiny?

I’ve found Spiny to be incredibly easy to use. The live page of the app offers all of the essential data that I need in real-time. I can see the top referrers, top performing stories, projected revenue, eCPM breakdown by distribution channel and referrer, articles written by author, and more on one page. Unlike Google Analytics, Spiny’s UI is intuitive and while feature-packed, it offers key data in a simple interface that tells a more complete story than GA without having to navigate to multiple pages to piece it all together.

What Spiny feature(s) do you find most useful?

I use the live page of the app more than anything, watching the top stories and making editorial decisions based on the velocity of those stories. That said, I also utilize the editorial dashboard to track articles written by our writers but also the revenue that each writer drives. It’s an invaluable tool as a manager to dig into the revenue data by writer.

Would you say Spiny has helped to grow the business?

Spiny has helped grow the business. Circling back to the previous question, we have tweaked our publishing scheduling and staffing schedule based on revenue returns compared to page views. Spiny’s ability to get granular in the view of eCPMs both in real time as well daily/monthly/quarterly/year to date, has improved how and when we publish as well as when we send content to our various distribution channels.

Would you say Spiny has made your life easier?

Without question Spiny has made life easier as a publisher. The ability to get all the key data needed on one page in real-time has been invaluable.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

The addition I’d most like to see on Spiny is the ability to compare data historically, whether that’s today vs. the same day last week, month, year. Or week-over-week, month-over-month, year-over-year, primarily in the area of page views, sessions, pages per session, but also the eCPM data.