2026-10-29

News site analytics: see which articles people really read

Picture your front page at eight in the morning. Hundreds of readers arrive.

Where do they go next?

Some open the top political story. Some jump straight to the weather. Some read one article and leave.

A user journey shows you exactly that. It is one of the most visual tools in news site analytics. Below you will find a demo similar to our journeys report.

The tabs above the diagram are clickable. Switch between User Journeys, Performance, Funnels and Error Monitor to see each report.

(Open this page on a laptop for the best view. The journey diagram needs a wide screen to show every column.)

Follow your readers from the front page to the weather report

A user journey shows the paths readers take through your site. Each column is one step. Each band is a group of readers who moved from one page to the next.

The width of a band tells you how many readers took that path. One look shows you where readers go next and where they leave.

You can use this to improve your click-through rates with a better visual hierarchy. That brings more page views.

Click a branch to dig deeper

In your real dashboard the diagram is clickable too. Curious about one branch? Click the page in it.

That page becomes the new starting point. The diagram redraws from there and every other filter stays in place.

Combine filters in one or two clicks

You can filter your readers by many things:

• country and city
• device and browser
• pages they saw
• scroll depth
• traffic source and campaign

You can combine them in any way you like. A few questions you can answer this way:

• How did mobile readers behave after they opened one specific story?
• You can check readers arriving from Google and clicking a story on the front page. Did they visit the weather report afterwards?

For the second question, filter for Google as the source. Then click the front page in the diagram. Now follow the band from the story and see whether the weather page shows up in the next column.

Built for GDPR from day one

Your readers are protected by the GDPR.

StatJolt was designed for this from the start:

• No cookies. Nothing is stored on the reader's device.
• No personal data. Each visitor's data becomes a code. Nobody knows who they are and the code changes daily.
• Servers in the EU. Your data stays in the EU.

That means you do not have to use a consent banner for your analytics. Your readers get to the story right away. More engagement, happier visitors.

It also fixes your numbers. A reader who would click "reject" on a banner never shows up in cookie based analytics. Here they are counted. If you want the legal background, read Google Analytics and GDPR.

Core Web Vitals: is your site fast enough for readers?

Core Web Vitals are speed and stability scores. Google uses them when it ranks your pages.

StatJolt measures them in real life, not in a simulated environment like Lighthouse does. You get five values:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): how fast the main content appears. On a news page this is often the lead photo.
• INP (Interaction to Next Paint): how fast the page reacts to a tap. Think of the menu or a photo gallery.
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): whether the text jumps while ads or embeds load.
• FCP (First Contentful Paint): when the first thing appears on the screen.
• TTFB (Time to First Byte): how fast your server answers.

How a newsroom can use them

The Performance report lists your best and worst pages for each value. Here is what you can do with that:

• Find the heavy pages. A story with a slow LCP often has a huge, unoptimized photo or a heavy embed.
• Check your phone readers. You might be surprised by how those devices load a page.
• Catch jumping text. A high CLS often points to an ad slot or a video player without a fixed size.
• Test a redesign. Compare the weeks before and after the change.

Tracking scripts are a common cause of slow pages. Here is how to find the scripts behind a bad score.

Still with me? The most useful part for editors comes now.

Scroll depth: the articles people actually finish

Page views count clicks. They do not tell you what your readers finished.

In 2014 Chartbeat studied 2 billion visits across the web over one month. 55% of visitors spent fewer than 15 seconds actively on a page.

"We confuse what people have clicked on for what they've read."

Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat, TIME, 9 March 2014

StatJolt notes when a reader passes 25%, 50%, 75% and 100% of a page. You can use scroll depth as a filter, the same way as country or device.

Which articles did readers finish?

Add the scroll depth filter at 75% or 100%. The Pages report now lists the most-read (scrolled) stories.

A story with many clicks can drop far down this list. A quiet analysis piece can climb up. That tells you which topics really hold attention. Both help your SEO and show you what your readers care about most.

Where do your most engaged visitors come from?

Filter for one story. Then add scroll depth at 25% or more.

Now look at the traffic sources. You see whether your most careful readers came from Google, your newsletter or social media.

Maybe social sends many clicks but few readers reach the end. Maybe the newsletter sends fewer people but they read everything. Now you know where your effort pays off.

We exclude bots automatically

With multiple security layers you do not have to worry about fake Google bots, bot farms and other malicious actors. These won't screw up your numbers.

In a few words

In our user-friendly dashboard you can see your real-time visitors, reader paths, Core Web Vitals and scroll depth.

Your editors get numbers they can trust and your readers get their story without annoying pop-ups.

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